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