Music Week (UK)
It's nearly 35 years since Fleetwood Mac's seminal 1977 album Rumours reached number one - and to mark the occasion it has been released in expanded and remastered editions, with a triple CD set containing the original album in remastered form, unreleased live recordings from a 1977 tour and previously unissued outtakes.
A deluxe edition of Rumours adds a DVD featuring a 1977 documentary, and a vinyl edition of the album. Helped by the re-screening of the 2009 documentary Don't Stop on BBC2 eight days ago, and group leader Mick Fleetwood's subsequent appearance on BBC1's The One Show, the newly retooled set sold 25,675 copies last week to re-enter the chart at number three. It is its first appearance in the Top 10 since 25 March 1978, though it did reach number 18 in 1997.
Although now one of the UK's 20 biggest selling albums, with sales of 3,437,677, Rumours started slowly. First charting on 26 February 1977 - nearly 36 years ago - it debuted at number 57, then jumped to number seven and reached number one for the first and only time on its 48th appearance in the chart, nearly a year later. Four singles from Rumours made the Top 50 but none made the Top 20, with Dreams providing its highest charting hit by reaching a modest number 24. But the album had massive staying power, and according to OCC its tally of 493 weeks on the chart is the highest of any album.
The chart organisation has marked the occasion by revealing Fleetwood Mac's biggest-selling tracks of the digital era here www.officialcharts.com - which shows five of Rumours' 11 tracks to be among the Top 10. To supplement that list, we present Rumours' tracks ranked in order of their popularity as stand-alone downloads in the context of both the album and Fleetwood Mac's entire catalogue. The first position shown is their Rumours ranking, the second (parenthetical) figure is their overall rank among Fleetwood Mac downloads in the digital era, the third is the track's title and the fourth is a comparative sales ranking :
1 (1) Go Your Own Way
2 (2) The Chain - 78,
3 (5) Dreams - 41,
4 (8) Don't Stop - 21,
5 (10) Songbird - 19,
6 (17) You Make Loving Fun - 9,
7 (18) Never Going Back Again - 9,
8 (22) Second Hand News - 5,
9 (23) Gold Dust Woman - 5,
10 (28) I Don't Want To Know - 4,
11 (30) Oh Daddy - 2.
Stevie Nicks wrote the number three track Dreams but also all of the three least popular. Overall sales of tracks from Rumour passed the 500,000 mark last week.