Rumours is the sound of a band falling apart and refusing to stop the tape. By 1976 both marriages and partnerships inside Fleetwood Mac were ending: Nicks and Buckingham, the McVies, all of it at once. They booked a studio in Sausalito and made a record about exactly that, each writing about the others, then standing in the same room to sing harmonies on songs aimed at them.

It should have been a mess. Instead it became one of the best-selling albums ever made, eleven tracks of clean, bright, almost suspiciously pleasant pop holding some genuinely difficult feelings just under the surface. The smoothness is the trick; the hurt is the content.

It is also the album that finally gave Fleetwood Mac a song at the very top of the American chart, a first in a career that by then was nearly a decade old. The polish hid the wound. Most people heard the polish.