By JAY ROBERTS

The Cassette Chronicles is a continuing series of mini reviews and reflections on albums from the 1980’s and 1990’s. The aim of this series is to highlight both known and underappreciated albums from rock, pop and metal genres from this time period through the cassette editions of their releases. Some of the albums I have known about and loved for years, while others are new to me and were music I’ve always wanted to hear. There will be some review analysis and my own personal stories about my connection with various albums. These opinions are strictly my own and do not reflect the views of anyone else at Limelight Magazine.

FLEETWOOD MAC – TANGO IN THE NIGHT (1987)

While Fleetwood Mac is best remembered and classified as a 1970s classic rock band, it seems that a lot of people tend to forget that one of their best-selling albums actually came out in the late 1980s.
And for me, as much as I join in on the love that everyone else has for the Rumours album, the band’s fourteenth studio album Tango in the Night tends to fluctuate with that aforementioned album as my personal favorite from the band.

That said, it’s been a good long while since I’ve listened to the album in full. But as I kick off the tenth year of The Cassette Chronicles, the timing is perfect to listen once again. One of the reasons I decided to write about Tango in the Night is because I’ve recently been hanging out at my friend Roger’s record shop, Purchase Street Records, and I’ve noticed an awful lot of Fleetwood Mac (and associated side project) albums being picked up by the customers. Customers who were perhaps twenty or twenty-five years away from being born when the band was in their 1970s heyday. And yet, I haven’t seen many people picking up Tango in the Night. This seems like a rather dramatic oversight on their part in my opinion.

The production process for the album was long and involved. It originally started as a solo album project for guitarist Lindsey Buckingham that morphed into a full-fledged Fleetwood Mac album. For a quick recap of everything that went into the making the album, you should check out the Wikipedia page for the Tango in the Night album. It’s interesting reading and once again makes you wonder how anything ever got done by the band with all the various distractions and interpersonal issues going on in the band.

But that’s for you to discover for yourself, let’s talk about the music now.

The first thing to note is that six songs of the twelve on the album were released as singles. Four of them became Top 20 hits in the US. Three of those hits are the first three tracks on the album.

So when you hit play on Side One, you get the track “Big Love”. It features Buckingham on lead vocals. There’s a point counterpoint vocal with the alterating “oh-ah” phrase that sounds almost as if a couple is having sex. The funny thing that I never knew until looking up the album online for this article is that all the vocals are Buckingham and not a female (a lot of people thought it was Stevie Nicks apparently).

There’s a cool guitar line running throughout the song and while the track doesn’t totally cut loose in full, the decidedly uptempo pacing made it perfect for the album’s first single. A fact confirmed by the fact the song hit #5 on the singles chart.

While Stevie Nicks wasn’t nearly as involved in the creation of Tango in the Night (for a variety of reasons I’m not going to go into here, read about it on your own), I think she delivered a fantastic contribution with the song “Seven Wonders”. It’s a bit slower in tempo though the chorus does unfurl a more rocking tempo. While Nicks does get a co-writing credit, the song was mainly written by songwriter Sandy Stewart who had worked with Nicks on her The Wild Heart solo album. The song made it to #19 on the singles chart and I love the way the vocal from Nicks comes through in the song. One thing I noted is that while the song’s run time is on par with the rest of the tracks on the album, I got so swept up in this one that it feels somehow shorter, though no less impactful.

For the song “Everywhere” (which peaked at #14 as a single), Christine McVie sang lead on the track which she wrote as well. It’s strange that since her passing back in November 2022, I’ve been becoming more interested in the various material of hers that I hadn’t checked out or at least paid enough attention to over the years. Of course I know the big tracks she was instrumental in bringing forth, including one which I’ll be writing about in this article, but it’s the other stuff that I’ve slowly been checking out. And while a hit single like “Everywhere” doesn’t technically fall into the “other stuff” category, I think as I listened this time around I really got into the song perhaps a bit more than I had before.

I was reading up on the song and apparently when the album came out, “Everywhere” was a track that a lot of critics at the time dubbed as the best song on the album. I can see what they were thinking (though I don’t quite agree). It has a softer delivery, even with a quickened step musically. The weird thing for me is that Stevie Nicks provides the backing vocals to the song but it really doesn’t sound anything like her at all. For the longest time I thought it was someone else in the background. It’s just a pretty damn cool song that I found myself enjoying almost as if it was the first time hearing it.

As I said, those three songs were singles from the first side of the album. But we have three other tracks on Side One to get into and that starts with the song “Caroline”. I think this is an underappreciated song. Written and sung by Lindsey Buckingham, there’s a bit of an atmospheric mood to the song. The main lyrical portions establish that mood with its instrumentation and a slightly restrained feel to the vocal track. For the song’s chorus, there is an amped up delivery in both terms of the tempo and the gang vocal presentation. Embarrassingly, as I listened to the song for research, my own bad singing was part of that gang vocal sound. What can I say, I just really like this song.

The album’s title track is pretty damn cool. I like the way you get kind of a soft pedaled delivery in the song’s main portions. It’s almost as if they are trying to be a spare as possible in the presentation leading up to the chorus. That’s where the song really picks up with an explosively delivered chorus and the instrumental score goes from a bit more sparse to rocking and lush. And the outtro guitar solo is freaking phenomenal!

The Side One closing track is “Mystified” and if there’s a track on here that I like a bit less than all the others it is this one. Written by Buckingham and McVie (who sings lead), I just felt as if this one was too soft and “gauzy” in its delivery. It’s not that it is a bad song, it is just that even amidst all the other “pop” and or “soft” rock, this one was just not one that really hit it off with me.

For Side Two, we get the fourth of the singles released from Tango in the Night that charted right out of the gates in the song “Little Lies”, which hit #4 on the singles chart. For me, this is one of my all-time favorite Fleetwood Mac songs. From that sleek intro to kick off the song, straight through to the end, this is just a damn fine track. With Christine McVie singing lead, and both Buckingham and Stevie Nicks adding in backing vocals, the group’s three singers all make their mark on the song. I love the way McVie’s silky smooth delivery fuels the song. But I like the way Stevie Nicks comes through in the chorus with her starkly different sounding vocal tones. It enhances the overall combined vocal track for me. The song is deceptively uptempo. It doesn’t really feel that way in the main lyrical portions of the song, but the chorus finds the rocking tone amped up to give a nice rise and fall edginess to the track as well.

The other two songs on Tango in the Night that were released as singles were “Family Man” and “Isn’t It Midnight”.

For “Family Man”, it was almost entirely a Lindsey Buckingham creation. He had most of the song set as it was going to be included on that abandoned solo album. He played everything on the song except for the drums (which were of course played by Mick Fleetwood). Other than some backing vocals from Nicks, this was Buckingham’s show. It’s an okay song but I think the most impressive part of the whole thing was the guitar playing on the track. If what I read online is accurate, it is a Spanish guitar playing style and within the framework of the song, it works wonderfully.

For “Isn’t It Midnight”, there’s an uptempo rocking beat and rhythm to the song from the first note. There’s a nice guitar line threaded into the music though it is kind of in the background. You can hear it but it isn’t the focus. Of course, it does get to shine right out loud in the solo and throughout the ending of the track. But what makes me like this song is that it rocks a lot “harder” than a lot of Fleetwood Mac’s material.

The first of two songs that Stevie Nicks wrote on her own is “Welcome to the Room…Sara”. It’s a song about her 1986 stay in rehab. Pretty stark subject matter, no doubt. One thing I noticed is that when Nicks is singing the main lyrics, her voice sounds just a bit different to me, particularly in the first lyrical stanza. I don’t know if it was simply a production choice for her vocal to sound “unadorned” or if her voice was different somehow. In the chorus, her voice sounds more like the classic “Stevie Nicks” sound you might expect. Musically, I like the way the sound surrounds those vocals and lets them guide where the song is taking you.

The second Nicks-written song “When I See You Again” is a straight up ballad. With an spare guitar accompanying her vocal, the song has a sense of immediacy to it. I also liked that it doesn’t change styles through the track. What you hear at the start is how the song carries itself throughout but it works.

The album closes out with the song “You and I, Part II”. There’s a nice little melodic sensibility to the song. I do kind of dig the track a lot. But I’ve always wondered why it is the shortest number on the album. It’s these little questions that pop up that tend to drive me batty. The whys and wherefores of a particular song and what choices went into the finished track. But regardless of where my brain takes me, I still do quite like the song.

What is left to say about the Tango in the Night album? It was the last BIG studio album of the band’s career and it is chock full of great songs. I absolutely love the album and as I said at the start, it is so good that for me it challenges Rumours as the best Fleetwood Mac album. What higher praise can there be than that?

NOTES OF INTEREST: The Tango in the Night album peaked at #7 on the Billboard album chart. It would go on to sell three million copies in the US (fifteen million worldwide) making it the second biggest selling album of the band’s catalog. The album got a deluxe edition reissue in 2017 that included three CDs, the second disc featuring thirteen rare, bonus or outtake tracks.

While Lindsey Buckingham was a major driving force in producing and writing for the Tango in the Night album, he quit Fleetwood Mac before the tour for the album.

The album’s cover art is from a painting that was hanging in Lindsey Buckingham’s house at the time.

By JAY ROBERTS

It’s sad but true, the 9th year of The Cassette Chronicles has come to a close. I’ve continued to have fun writing the series.

There were another 22 new articles produced for the series this year. Some articles were produced just because I wanted to write about a band or an album. At least two pieces came about as tribute to a fallen musical icon.  But whatever the reason I had for picking a particular album, I love getting to discover or re-discover the albums from the viewpoint of here and now, even when I’ve been listening to some of those albums for decades.

Thanks to the continued support of Jay and Katie from Limelight Magazine.com, The Cassette Chronicles will be returning for a 10th year in early 2026. And if fortune smiles upon the production schedule without out real life getting in the way, we may just hit the magic #300 later next year.

I just want to say thank you again to everyone who has taken the time to read these articles whether you come directly to Limelight Magazine.com or you have seen one of the links I’ve posted on various sites across the Internet each time a new piece goes live.

Here’s to another great year in 2026 but until that starts, here’s the ten albums I’ve chosen (in no particular order) to spotlight for 2025.

See you next year!

(Please click on the cassette title to read the article)

#1 – SAVATAGE – STREETS: A ROCK OPERA

#2 – COUNTING CROWS – AUGUST AND EVERYTHING AFTER

#3 – BAD COMPANY – BAD COMPANY

#4  – BILLY IDOL – REBEL YELL

#5 – OZZY OSBOURNE – THE ULTIMATE SIN

#6 – DIAMOND HEAD – BORROWED TIME

#7 – D.A.D. – NO FUEL LEFT FOR THE PILGRIMS

#8 – STONE FURY – LET THEM TALK

#9 – DIO – SACRED HEART

#10 – LOUDNESS – THUNDER IN THE EAST

By JAY ROBERTS

The Cassette Chronicles is a continuing series of mini reviews and reflections on albums from the 1980’s and 1990’s. The aim of this series is to highlight both known and underappreciated albums from rock, pop and metal genres from this time period through the cassette editions of their releases. Some of the albums I have known about and loved for years, while others are new to me and were music I’ve always wanted to hear. There will be some review analysis and my own personal stories about my connection with various albums. These opinions are strictly my own and do not reflect the views of anyone else at Limelight Magazine.

(WRITER’S NOTE: This is the final Cassette Chronicles article for 2025, closing out our ninth year. Next week, there will be a recap piece with links to ten of the pieces that were written this year. It’s a chance to check out some of the album’s spotlighted in 2025 on the off chance you missed reading them the first time around. Thanks for continuing to read the series and I look forward to kicking off our 10th year of The Cassette Chronicles in early 2026.)

ARMORED SAINT – MARCH OF THE SAINT (1984)

March of the Saint, the full-length debut album from Armored Saint, came on the heels of their 1983 self-titled three song EP. While this debut release did yield what is described as a minor MTV hit with the song “Can U Deliver”, the album didn’t exactly set the sales charts on fire. It peaked at #138 on the album chart and so you might think that this album would have faded into some sort of obscurity given that it is now more than four decades old. 

But you’d be wrong. And it isn’t just the metal diehards that likely remember the album either. Armored Saint is still around and turning out great album after great album. And when they tour, songs from March of the Saint still find their way into the set list and get huge crowd reactions.

While it is not the album I turn to regularly enough, besides the title track and “Can U Deliver”, whenever I think of this album, I also eagerly recall the songs “Mad House” and “Mutiny on the World” as well.

Of course, that does mean I need this refresher listen to dig into the other songs all over again.

On Side One of the album, the title track opens things up and I still find that I love the way Armored Saint kind of slow rolls the intro with a kind of pomp and circumstance overture before the full-on metallic roar of the music kicks in full. From that point, it’s a pure driving rocker. If it was the first time anyone heard singer John Bush’s voice, they had to be blown away. He sings straight out with power but when called upon to do so he can kick things up and unveil a metal scream that will rival anyone else’s screaming ability. And the fact that he’s still doing that even now is all that more impressive.

I mentioned the track “Can U Deliver” previously and it follows the title track. There’s no holding back on this one as it delivers a wallop right from the start and doesn’t let up. I can see why it got to be a “minor” hit with the video.

Giving the March of the Saint album a killer trio of songs to open up the album, the song “Mad House” is another frenetically paced rocker. The guitar work is phenemonal and you get a killer vocal take from John Bush. I also liked the way the band constructed the chorus. With Bush singing the regular lyrical content, they added a big backing gang vocal when the song title was sung. It enhanced the chorus and while I’ve loved the song since first hearing it, I found myself with a new appreciation for the track.

I would’ve liked to know who wrote what for the ten songs on the album but all the songs are credited to the band as a whole.

The song “Take a Turn” is pretty interesting. In the main lyrical passages, the music is slow and deliberate but as the track goes into the chorus, the music gets more in-your-face and faster. And the vocals get a more intense delivery.

The first side of the album closes out with the song “Seducer”. Right from the start, the song bursts out of the speakers with a fiery delivery that captures your ear pretty fast. What I noticed most is that along with “Take a Turn”, the track is definitely from the “album track” side of the musical ledger BUT both songs deserve far better than to be written off with that designation. Both are solidly entertaining songs and help shine a light on just how well the band started out with this album. The songwriting is there with every track on the first side and I can’t help but love that Armored Saint seemed to know what they were doing even in their earliest days.

For the album’s second side, the band kicks off with the song “Mutiny On The World”. I don’t know what it is about this song but I really love it! It’s got a killer rhythm to the music and I dug the way the vocals came through. The vocal phrasing in the chorus, particularly when the song title is sung, grabbed my attention each time through.

The remaining four songs on Side Two of March of the Saint are lesser known tracks in comparison to the rest of the band’s catalog but don’t let that fool you into thinking that they are somehow lesser lights.

For example, “Glory Hunter” is a monster track. I think I’d forgotten about this one a bit. With a kicking delivery, the music gets you amped up pretty quickly. This song hit me a lot different and made a bigger impression on me than I remember it having done in the past, which is just a bit strange to me.

Keeping in mind that I’m far from a musical expert, but I have to say that the way drummer Gonzo Sandoval gets to provide the intro for “Stricken By Fate” will really draw you into the song. Once his ear-grabbing intro blends into the full musical score, you can still hear how his drumming ties the rest of the music together. Midway through the song, which is a stomping kind of uptempo number, you get this cool little guitar interplay with Bush’s vocals that had me drawn in all over again.

For “Envy”, there’s a slow burn intro that steadily grows until the music is playing out in full rocking glory. The song is the shortest one on the album but it manages to provide plenty of sonic thunder to keep your heart rate rising throughout.

The album closes out with the song “False Alarm”, another uptempo number. It rocks pretty much from the start and I dug the way Bush performed vocally on this song. I think Side Two is probably very underappreciated by even some Armored Saint fans but I’ll be damned if I didn’t find myself rocking out as if this was the first time I’d heard the song.

A few months back, I was hanging out at the record shop and a discussion of our favorite albums came up. And surprisingly, one of the other customers in the store at the time said that March of the Saint was one of his all-time favorites. I was a little surprised considering that another band is his personal favorite. I figured it would be one of their albums that he mentioned first. But that’s what makes this album still resonate with me all these years later. It’s so good that it still gets chosen as an all-time favorite by those metal fans in the know. Is it any wonder why I am such a fan of both Armored Saint? Does March of the Saint deliver the goods? You bet your ass it does!

NOTES OF INTEREST: The March of the Saint album was reissued on CD in 2006 via Rock Candy Records. That version of the album comes with three bonus tracks which are demo versions of “March of the Saint”, “Seducer” and “Mutiny on the World”.

Reportedly, singer John Bush and bassist Joey Vera do not like how the production and mix of the record came out. They were frustrated with the producer and according to the info listed on the album’s Wikipedia page, they claim to still be in debt over how much the album cost to make. Though I’m not sure how old that particular quote from them might be.