However gossip, it would seem, has some ‘useful’ functions. It can:
• normalise and reinforce moral boundaries in a speech-community
• foster and build a sense of community with shared interests and information
• build structures of social accountability
• further mutual social grooming (like many other uses of language, only more so)
• provide a mating tool that allows (for example) women to mutually identify socially desirable men and compare notes on which men are better than others.
• be used as a form of passive aggression, as a tool to isolate and harm others
• provide a peer-to-peer mechanism for disseminating information in organizations
Rumour, according to Wikipedia, 'is often viewed as an unverified account or explanation of events circulating from person to person and pertaining to an object, event, or issue in public concern.However, a review of the research on rumor conducted by Pendleton in 1998 found that research across sociology, psychology, and communication studies had widely varying definitions of rumor.Thus, rumor is a concept that lacks a particular definition in the social sciences. But most theories agree that rumor involves some kind of a statement whose veracity is not quickly or ever confirmed. In addition, some scholars have identified rumor as a subset of propaganda, the latter another notoriously difficult concept to define. A pioneer of propaganda studies, Harold Lasswell defined propaganda in 1927 as referring "solely to the control of opinion by significant symbols, or, to speak more concretely and less accurately, by stories, rumors, reports, pictures, and other forms of social communication". Rumors are also often discussed with regard to "misinformation" and "disinformation" (the former often seen as simply false and the latter seen as deliberately false, though usually from a government source given to the media or a foreign government). Rumors thus have often been viewed as particular forms of other communication concepts.'
For the last few months there have been some rumours circulating about Steven Gerrard and this must be very difficult for him and his family. I never thought that I would feel any sympathy for an England footballer but the rumours in circulation about him are particularly nasty. And it is not only Gerrard, both David Beckham and Wayne Rooney have had some awful rumours spread about them over the last few weeks. Someone even spread the rumour that the England team could actually play good football. Thankfully few of us fell for that one and the England team soon put that rumour to bed. The dangerous thing about most gossip and rumour is that there will always be someone who says ‘no smoke without fire’ and sometimes rumours can be very difficult to disprove.
Having just got back for an evening out and chatting with a young guy who was playing guitar for the live band that were playing a set later in the evening he said that the band was formed simply so they could use the name, 'Liquid Pigeon'. This name was dreamt up one drunken evening and they decided there and then they had to perform under that name. My friend whispered in my ear that her sons band, 'The Drummers Got A Gun', had much the same idea. On the drive home, mind reeling from all the rumours that were discussed this evening,(discussed NOT gossiped about), I wondered why Fleetwood Mac decided to call their second album ‘Rumours’.
Wikipedia:
In July 1975, Fleetwood Mac's second eponymous album was released to great commercial success, eventually selling over four million copies. The record's hit single "Rhiannon" gave the band extensive radio exposure. At the time, Fleetwood Mac's line-up consisted of guitarist and vocalist Lindsey Buckingham, drummer Mick Fleetwood, keyboardist and vocalist Christine McVie, bassist John McVie, and vocalist Stevie Nicks. After six months of non-stop touring, the McVies divorced, ending nearly eight years of marriage. The couple stopped talking to each other socially and discussed only musical matters. Buckingham and Nicks—who had joined the band before 1975's Fleetwood Mac and after guitarist Bob Welch had left—were having an on/off relationship that led them to fight often. The duo's arguments stopped only when they worked on songs together. Fleetwood faced domestic problems of his own after discovering that his wife Jenny, mother of his two children, had an affair with his best friend.
Press intrusions into the band members' lives led to inaccurate stories. Christine McVie was reported to be in hospital with a serious illness, while Buckingham and Nicks were declared the parents of Fleetwood's daughter Lucy after being photographed with her. The press also wrote about a rumoured return of original Fleetwood Mac members Peter Green, Danny Kirwan, and Jeremy Spencer for a 10th anniversary tour. Despite false reports, the band did not change line-up, although its members had no time to come to terms with the separations before recording for a new album began. Fleetwood has noted the "tremendous emotional sacrifices" made by everyone just to attend studio work. In early 1976, Fleetwood Mac crafted some new tracks in Florida. Founding members Fleetwood and John McVie chose to dispense with the services of their previous producer, Keith Olsen, because he favoured a lower emphasis on the rhythm section. The duo formed a company called Seedy Management to represent the band's interests. In February 1976, Fleetwood Mac convened at the Record Plant in Sausalito, California, with hired engineers Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut. Production duties were shared by the three parties, while the more technically adept Caillat was responsible for most of the engineering; he took a leave of absence from Wally Heider Studios in Los Angeles on the premise that Fleetwood Mac would eventually use their facilities. The set-up in Sausalito included a number of small recording rooms in a large, windowless wooden building. Most band members complained about the studio and wanted to record at their homes, but Fleetwood did not allow any moves. Christine McVie and Nicks decided to live in two condominiums near the city's harbour, while the male contingent stayed at the studio's lodge in the adjacent hills. Recording occurred in a six-by-nine-metre room which included a 3M 24-track tape machine, a range of high-quality microphones, and an API mixing console with 550A equalisers; the latter were used to control frequency differences or a track's timbre. Although Caillat was impressed with the set-up, he felt that the room lacked ambiance because of its "very dead speakers" and large amounts of soundproofing.
The record's working title in Sausalito was Yesterday's Dreams. Buckingham took charge of the studio sessions to make "a pop album". According to Dashut, while most of Fleetwood Mac came from an improvisational blues-rock background, the guitarist understood "the craft of record making". During the formative stages of compositions, Buckingham and Christine McVie played guitar and piano together to create the album's basic structures. The latter was the only classically trained musician in Fleetwood Mac, but both shared a similar sense of musicality. When the band jammed, Fleetwood often played his drum kit outside the studio's partition screen to better gauge Caillat's and Dashut's reactions to the music's groove. Baffles were placed around the drums and around John McVie, who played his bass guitar facing Fleetwood. Buckingham performed close to the rhythm section, while Christine McVie's keyboards were kept away from the drum kit. Caillat and Dashut spent about nine days experimenting with a range of microphones and amplifiers before deciding on the best methodology of recording the band. As the studio sessions progressed, the band members' new intimate relationships, formed after the various separations, started to have a negative effect on Fleetwood Mac. The musicians did not meet or socialise after their daily work at the Record Plant. At the time, the hippie movement still affected Sausalito's culture and drugs were readily available. Open-ended budgets enabled the band and the engineers to become self-indulgent; sleepless nights and the extensive use of cocaine marked much of the album's production. Chris Stone, one of the Record Plant's owners, indicated in 1997 that Fleetwood Mac brought "excess at its most excessive" by taking over the studio for long and extremely expensive sessions; he stated, "The band would come in at 7 at night, have a big feast, party till 1 or 2 in the morning, and then when they were so whacked-out they couldn't do anything, they'd start recording".
"Trauma, Trau-ma. The sessions were like a cocktail party every night—people everywhere. We ended up staying in these weird hospital rooms ... and of course John and me were not exactly the best of friends."
—Christine McVie, on the emotional strain when making Rumours in Sausalito
Nicks has suggested that Fleetwood Mac created the best music when in the worst shape,[ while, according to Buckingham, the tensions between band members informed the recording process and led to "the whole being more than the sum of the parts". The couple's work became "bittersweet" after their final split, although Buckingham still had a skill for taking Nicks' tracks and "making them beautiful". The vocal harmonies between the duo and Christine McVie worked well and were captured using the best microphones available. Nicks' lyrical focus allowed the instrumentals in the songs that she wrote to be looser and more abstract. According to Dashut, all the recordings captured "emotion and feeling without a middle man ... or tempering". John McVie tended to clash with Buckingham about the make-up of songs, but both admit to achieving good outcomes. Christine McVie's "Songbird", which Caillat felt needed a concert hall's ambiance, was recorded during an all-night session at Zellerbach Auditorium, across San Francisco Bay in Berkeley.
Following over two months in Sausalito, Fleetwood arranged a ten-day tour to give the band a break and fan feedback. After the concerts, recording resumed at venues in Los Angeles, including Wally Heider Studios. Christine McVie and Nicks did not attend most of the sessions and took time off until they were needed to record any remaining vocals. The rest of Fleetwood Mac, with Caillat and Dashut, struggled to finalise the overdubbing and mixing of Rumours after the Sausalito tapes were damaged by repeated use during recording; the kick and snare drum audio tracks sounded "lifeless" A sell-out autumn tour of the US was cancelled to allow the completion of the album, whose scheduled release date of September 1976 was pushed back. A specialist was hired to rectify the Sausalito tapes using a vari-speed oscillator. Through a pair of headphones which played the damaged tapes in his left ear and the safety master recordings in his right, he converged their respective speeds aided by the timings provided by the snare and hi-hat audio tracks. Fleetwood Mac and their co-producers wanted a "no-filler" final product, in which every track seemed a potential single. After the final mastering stage and hearing the songs back-to-back, the band members sensed they had recorded something "pretty powerful".
In autumn 1976, while still recording, Fleetwood Mac showcased tracks from Rumours at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles. John McVie suggested the album title to the band because he felt the members were writing "journals and diaries" about each other through music. Warner Bros. confirmed the release details to the press in December and chose "Go Your Own Way" as a January 1977 promotional single. The label's aggressive marketing of 1975's Fleetwood Mac, in which links with dozens of FM and AM radio stations were formed across America, aided the promotion of Rumours. At the time, the album's advance order of 800,000 copies was the largest in Warner Bros.' history.
Fleetwood Mac's main writers—Buckingham, Christine McVie and Nicks—worked individually on specific songs, but sometimes shared lyrics with each other. "The Chain" is the only track that all members, including Fleetwood and John McVie, collaborated on. All songs on Rumours concern personal, often troubled, relationships. According to Christine McVie, the fact that the lyricists were extensively focusing on the various separations became apparent to the band only with hindsight. "You Make Loving Fun" is about her boyfriend, Fleetwood Mac's lighting director, after she split from John. Nicks' "Dreams" details a breakup and has a hopeful message, while Buckingham's similar effort in "Go Your Own Way" is more pessimistic. After a short fling with a New England woman, he was inspired to write "Never Going Back Again", a song about the illusion of thinking that sadness will never occur again once feeling content with life. The lines "Been down one time/Been down two times" are in reference to the lyricist's efforts when persuading the woman to give him a chance. "Don't Stop", written by Christine McVie, is a song about optimism. She noted that Buckingham helped her craft the verses because their personal sensibilities overlapped. McVie's next track, "Songbird", features more introspective lyrics about "nobody and everybody" in the form of "a little prayer", while the song "Oh Daddy" is a direct reference to Fleetwood, who the band considered "The Big Daddy". McVie commented that the writing is slightly sarcastic and focuses on the drummer's direction for Fleetwood Mac, which always turned out to be right. Nicks provided the final lines "And I can't walk away from you, baby/If I tried". Her own song, "Gold Dust Woman", is inspired by Los Angeles and the hardship encountered in such a metropolis. After struggling with the rock lifestyle, Nicks became addicted to cocaine and the lyrics address her belief in "keeping going".
The record is included in both The Guardian's "1000 Albums to Hear Before You Die" and the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
Dreams
Now here you go again, you say you want your freedom
Well who am I to keep you down
It's only right that you should play the way you feel it
But listen carefully to the sound
Of your loneliness
Like a heartbeat drives you mad
In the stillness of remembering what you had
And what you lost
Yeah, thunder only happens when it's raining
Players only love you when they're playing
Yeah, women they will come and they will go
When the rain washes you clean you'll know, you'll know...
Now here I go again, I see the crystal visions
I keep my visions to myself
Well It's only me that wants to wrap around your dreams and
Have you any dreams you'd like to sell
Dreams of loneliness
Like a heartbeat drives you mad
In the stillness of remembering what you had
(Drives you mad,) and what you lost, (remember what you had)
Thunder only happens when it's raining
(Thunder only happens when it's...)
Players only love you when they're playing
(Players only love you when they're...)
Yeah, women they will come and they will go, (they will go...)
When the rain washes you clean you'll know...
Yeah, thunder only happens when it's raining
(Thunder only happens when it's...)
Players only love you when they're playing
(Players only love you when they're...)
Yeah, women they will come and they will go, (they will go...)
When the rain washes you clean you'll know...
You'll know, (the heartbeat drives you mad,) you'll know, (remember what you had)
You'll know...
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