Fleetwood Mac in the 80s with a soup kitchen

For the second straight installment of 80s videos, we turn to another band that made its reputation in the 70s. This time the band is Fleetwood Mac, whose Rumors album was mandatory for every suburban American household in 1977.

The band reunited in 1981 after a short break and recorded the album Mirage in a villa in France. One of the songs, Gypsy, had been written by lead singer Stevie Nicks a couple of years earlier. According to the lengthy Wikipedia entry on the song, it was a reminiscence of her salad days with an added tribute to her best friend, Robin Snyder Anderson.

None of that is apparent in the music video, which taps into the haunting harmonies to suggest a connection with a Depression-era waif, complete with soup kitchen footage. Russell Mulcahy directed what was then the highest-budget music video ever produced. When MTV aired it in 1982, it was the network’s first “World Premiere Video”.


The video includes the other members of the band, including dancing partner and ex-boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham. “If you watch the video, you’ll see I wasn’t happy,” Nicks said later. “And he wasn’t a very good dancer.”