Fleetwood Mac review – all the hits, with a sour aftertaste | The Guardian


The Guardian
June 22, 2019

Wembley Stadium, London
3/5 Stars

Lindsey Buckingham’s absence casts a pall over a singalong show, despite sterling work from subs Neil Finn and Mike Campbell

‘Brutal calculation’: Fleetwood Mac onstage at Wembley Stadium, and on screen (clockwise from bottom left): Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Stevie Nicks, Neil Finn, Mike Campbell and Christine McVie. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

There is no arguing with the numbers. Wembley Stadium is brimming with fans, even on a wet Tuesday. A dozen people fill the vast stage, reproducing some of the most opulent harmonies and venomous kiss-offs of the late 20th century. On Dreams, a bittersweet classic written by an enduringly swirly Stevie Nicks, a chandelier descends from the rigging. Amusingly, it goes back up afterwards, reappearing and disappearing with every one of her compositions on the final night of Fleetwood Mac’s European tour.

Superfan Harry Styles has brought his mum, Nicks reveals, complimenting her on what a well-brought-up young man he is. Super-producer Jimmy Iovine (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Nicks’s 1981 solo album Bella Donna) has flown over from the States, she says. The Fleetwood Mac setlist – barely varying from Berlin to London – is replete with peak-period hits and refreshed by a couple of deeper cuts. One, the Peter Green-era blues Black Magic Woman, made famous by Carlos Santana, finds Nicks vamping her way through a female reading of the tune as the chandelier glitters darkly. Continue reading Fleetwood Mac review – all the hits, with a sour aftertaste | The Guardian

Review: Fleetwood Mac at Wembley Stadium | The Times (UK)

The Times

With no Lindsey Buckingham, what should have been a celebration of a huge band’s enduring power felt like an empty spectacle

The sound was muddy, Stevie Nicks’s vocals veered towards flatness and the band stomped when they should have swung
MARILYN KINGWILL

★★☆☆☆

And so the soap opera continues. The story of Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 album Rumours is enshrined in soft-rock history: new recruits Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham inject California pizzazz into moribund British blues rockers, their relationship crumbles and the result is the divorce classic of the 1970s, with Buckingham lacerating his former lover on Second Hand News and Go Your Own Way and Nicks offering the gentler Dreams.

Forty million album sales certainly helped the band members to see past their emotional entanglements and keep the show on the road, but it all got too much last year when, according to their manager, Irving Azoff, Buckingham failed to suppress a smirk during a speech by Nicks at an awards ceremony. That was the last straw. After 43 years he got the boot. Now the band were carrying on regardless, with Neil Finn of Crowded House and Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers hired to fill Buckingham’s shoes, and what should have been a celebration of a huge band’s enduring power felt like an empty spectacle.

Unsurprisingly at this Wembley gig there was no Tusk, Buckingham’s experimental masterwork from 1979, and no Never Going Back Again, his folky acoustic moment from Rumours, but also no mention of him at all. Had there been a Rumours-era photograph of Fleetwood Mac shown on the screen with Buckingham cut out and Finn stuck in his place, it wouldn’t have been surprising. Yet the inescapable fact is there was chemistry between Buckingham and Nicks, even if they disliked each other, and no amount of gushing about how wonderful this new line-up was could replace that.

Continue reading Review: Fleetwood Mac at Wembley Stadium | The Times (UK)

Fleetwood Mac’s Mick Fleetwood confirms the ‘tale’ of his seven-mile line of cocaine | The Sun

AS the backbone of rock legends Fleetwood Mac for more than 50 years, Mick Fleetwood has enjoyed more debauchery and hard living than just about anyone else.

Now 71, he became renowned as one of the wildest men in music, and in an exclusive interview during Fleetwood Mac’s world tour he even confirms a long-standing tale about a seven-mile line of cocaine.

Mike Campbell, John McVie, Christine McVie and Mick Fleetwood Credit: AP:Associated Press

Chatting in a dressing room, where his only indulgence is a glass of red wine, drummer Mick says: “We could sit here and I go into some war story about snorting seven miles of cocaine.

“I guess we figured we did X amount a day, and then some goofball got out a calculator and came up with that seven miles figure and said, ‘Isn’t that funny?’ And it sort of is. But not in the context of where I want to end up.

“There was never a conscious decision on my part to stop that lifestyle. I think it naturally just drifted away.

“I speak for myself, although Stevie (Nicks) has been outspoken about some of the choices she made too. Continue reading Fleetwood Mac’s Mick Fleetwood confirms the ‘tale’ of his seven-mile line of cocaine | The Sun

Return of the Mac: Fleetwood Mac’s 20 greatest songs | Belfast Telegraph

Marking the start of the European leg of Fleetwood Mac’s world tour, which kicked off in Dublin this week, Graeme Ross chronicles the legendary band’s 20 greatest songs

Graeme Ross
June 15 2019

Their story has been described as the ultimate rock soap opera. And, following the recent firing of Lindsey Buckingham and with new members Mike Campbell of the Heartbreakers and Neil Finn from Crowded House on board, it’s just one more chapter in the stranger-than-fiction career of Fleetwood Mac.

The band have just crossed the Atlantic to play three gigs as part of their latest world tour, having played the RDS in Dublin on Thursday and with two Wembley gigs tomorrow and Tuesday.

The NME, in a recent feature, concentrated solely on the Buckingham/Stevie Nicks post-1975 years for their greatest 20 Fleetwood Mac songs, as if the band hadn’t existed before, even if it was in a radically different guise.

This compilation goes all the way back to Peter Green’s blues-based Mac in 1967, with a couple of entries from the band’s “lost” years in the first half of the Seventies, reminding us that Fleetwood Mac were successful long before they morphed into laid-back West Coast soft rockers.

20 – Landslide
On joining Fleetwood Mac in 1975, Buckingham and Nicks brought several songs with them, including Landslide, one of Nicks’ most personal songs. When she wrote this emotional and reflective ballad the previous year, the duo’s sole album had bombed and their relationship was failing. Nicks stood at the crossroads of her life and poured all her doubts and fears into one cathartic song. Continue reading Return of the Mac: Fleetwood Mac’s 20 greatest songs | Belfast Telegraph