It is currently at No 29 in its 926th week on the UK album chart вЂ“ up five places from the week before вЂ“ while in the US, Rumours sold 6,000 vinyl copies in the last week of January, reaching No 1 on the vinyl albums chart. According to the UKвЂ™s Official Charts Company, Rumours sold 34,593 vinyl copies in 2021, third only to new albums by Adele and Abba, and besting new records by Ed Sheeran and Lana Del Rey. WhatвЂ™s truly remarkable, though, is how it continues to sell new physical copies, despite being available to stream and in secondhand form in every high-street charity shop. It won album of the year at the Grammys, went 20 times platinum in the US alone, and sits alongside Kind of Blue and The Rite of Spring in the Library of CongressвЂ™s registry of historically significant recordings.

If there's a sense of power dynamics in the image, wherein the haughty-looking Fleetwood looks unimpressed at the beguiling antics of Nicks as she attempts to weave her spell over him, that isn't a million miles away from what was happening in the band itself.F orty-five years ago this month, Fleetwood Mac released Rumours, an album that combined gauzy soft pop, manicured folk and stormy rock with a soap-operatic level of intra-band strife. And the balls? While the fertility symbolism is so obvious it's verging on crass, they were a lucky charm for the drummer, who had appropriated them from a lavatory chain in a bar during the band's early days, and had them hanging from his drumkit at every show.

Meanwhile, Nicks is said to be in character as the Celtic witch Rhiannon, whom she had brought to life in the earlier FM song of the same name. It was a future, curiously enough, in which the two flirtatious protagonists of the image would embark on a chaotic love affair a few months after the album's release. What were we to make of all this? The crystal ball (which also featured on a similarly intriguing cover for 1975's self-titled album and remains a recurring band motif) appears to represent foreseeing the future. Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham pictured on the sleeve of Buckingham Nicks, the only album the couple released as a duo Meanwhile, a woman in a cape, like some supernatural nymph, has one leg draped across his knee, and both appear to be peering into a crystal ball that Fleetwood holds in the palm of his hand.

A pair of small wooden balls dangle from the front of his trousers. A tall, well-groomed gentleman with a ponytail stands in tight trousers and waistcoat, like the proverbial dandy highwayman, with one foot on a small stool. There's something olde worlde about the cover image, as if drummer Mick Fleetwood and singer Stevie Nicks are posing for a renaissance painting. And the personal turmoil that informed its songs seems to have only enhanced their emotional resonance. Sonically, it was a state-of-the-art affair despite the troubled nature of its recording sessions. Yet just as punk rock was supposedly sweeping away the airbrushed soft-rock and indulgent prog that dominated the musical landscape in the mid '70s, this was one of the albums that would prove that the death of traditional rock had been greatly exaggerated. But if the image that adorned Fleetwood Mac's 1977 album Rumours was among the more perverse and baffling, that might have been because the band that made it had been driven to the edge of sanity while doing so. The '70s had no shortage of puzzling LP sleeve imagery. Johnny Sharp on the creation of the artwork for Fleetwood Mac's pivotal late '70s album Rumours

Photos of fleetwood mac albums