Captured below are the questions that were answered by Lindsey…
Eighteen questions were answered, please scroll through the images below to see the questions and answers.
But even by Mac standards — 18 members, not counting touring adjuncts, over its 51 years — the latest shift is a doozy.
You’d have to be living under a rock to not know that Lindsey Buckingham is out of the group again, due to disagreements over the timing of the upcoming tour and other issues. Joining Fleetwood, bassist John McVie, singer Stevie Nicks and signer-keyboardist Christine McVie now is the eyebrow-raising duo of Split Enz/Crowded House veteran Neil Finn and Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell in his first public endeavor since Tom Petty’s death last Oct. 2
It’s as dramatic a move as any in Fleetwood Mac’s storied career — perhaps even greater than Buckingham’s last departure, in 1987, which brought Billy Burnette and Rick Vito into the band. The schism still rankles, of course, but as the Mac makes ready to hit the road in North America — with dates booked into early April — Fleetwood is accentuating the positive and predicting plenty of, er, future games for what he promises is not a one-off but rather the new lineup of his band.
All parties, including Lindsey, were talking during the past couple of years about a definite tour for 2018. The events that transpired probably weren’t the way you envisioned commemorating the 50th anniversary of Fleetwood Mac’s first two albums.
No, it’s fair to say that it wasn’t. Having said that, the reality was, in simple language, we weren’t happy, and the details of that are part of the fabric, almost, of the story of Fleetwood Mac. We weren’t expecting this time, but it also does not seem surprising. Every man and woman in Fleetwood Mac wish Lindsey well in any ventures he’s doing and also have a huge respect for what he did with Fleetwood Mac; Having said that, it wasn’t working for us and we made the decision as a band to continue, and that’s what we’ve done with open heart. We’ve found two unbelievably talented gentlemen that have more than their own story to tell — which, by the way, is what’s made this work. They’re stylists, and they have their own integrity as artists, which I think was a huge help in what we’re doing. Continue reading Mick Fleetwood Talks Moving Forward Without Lindsey Buckingham, Working a Tom Petty Tune Into Fleetwood Mac’s Setlist | Billboard
By Tom Eames
Smooth Radio
5th September 2018
Eyebrows were raised earlier this year when it was announced that Fleetwood Mac had kicked out their longtime member Lindsey Buckingham.
Not only that, but the legendary band added Crowded House’s Neil Finn and The Heartbreaker’s Mike Campbell to their lineup.
Ahead of their North American tour next month, the band performed live on TV for the first time today (September 5), singing their classic track ‘The Chain’ on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Watch a clip from the performance below:
Buckingham was reportedly fired from the band over a disagreement regarding their tour. Instead, Buckingham will go out on his own tour just a few days after the band’s opener.
Last month, Mick Fleetwood said of Buckingham’s departure: “Obviously this is a huge change with the advent of Lindsey Buckingham not being a part of Fleetwood Mac. “We all wish him well and all the rest of it. In truthful language, we just weren’t happy. And I’ll leave it at that in terms of the dynamic.”
On including Campbell and Finn in the group, he said: “We are a week into rehearsals and it’s going really well and we’re looking forward, in true Fleetwood Mac style. “If you know anything about the history of this band, it’s sort of peppered with this type of dramatic stuff. It’s a strange band really.
The new-look Fleetwood Mac also performed their classic hit ‘Gypsy’ on the show, with Stevie Nicks on lead vocals. Watch the full performance below:
He also revealed details of a three-CD compilation of his solo career that will arrive on Oct. 5.
Buckingham’s tour will start at the Revolution Hall in Portland, Ore., on Oct. 7 and conclude at the Sands Events Center in Bethlehem, Penn., on Dec. 9. Tickets go on sale to the general public Friday and Saturday. You can get full details, including pre-sale information, at Buckingham’s website.
Solo Anthology – The Best of Lindsey Buckingham consists of three discs comprised of material from throughout his solo career, including “Holiday Road” and live versions of some of his most famous Fleetwood Mac songs. The set also includes two never-before-released tracks, “Hunger” and “Ride This Road.” A one-disc distillation of the collection will be available, as will a six-LP vinyl version that will be released on Nov. 23.
Tickets for all but the Wilmington, N.C., and New London, Conn., shows come with a CD or digital download of the single-disc version of Solo Anthology. You can see the track listing below the tour dates.
Buckingham parted ways with Fleetwood Mac earlier this year, reportedly because he wasn’t willing to commit to a lengthy tour. They’re moving on without him and have brought in Mike Campbell from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Neil Finn of Crowded House as replacements. Continue reading Lindsey Buckingham Announces First Post-Fleetwood Mac Tour | Ultimate Classic Rock
Roisin O’Connor
The Independent
6th Aug 2018
Mick Fleetwood has spoken about guitarist and co-vocalist Lindsey Buckingham’s departure from Fleetwood Mac, ahead of the band’s upcoming tour of North America.
Buckingham left the group in April after a 40-year career, and it was later announced that he would be replaced on tour by Mike Campbell [Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers] and Neil Finn [Crowded House].
His departure from the band caused shock for fans, particularly given the conflicting statements issued by himself and the remaining members of the band.
At the time, Buckingham claimed he was fired and accused the band of “losing perspective”. Speaking to Billboard, Fleetwood has now said he remains positive for the future of the band.
“Obviously this is a huge change with the advent of Lindsey Buckingham not being a part of Fleetwood Mac,” he said.
“We all wish him well and all the rest of it. In truthful language, we just weren’t happy. And I’ll leave it at that in terms of the dynamic.”
He praised Campbell and Finn as he spoke about rehearsals for the tour, and added: “If you know anything about the history of this band, it’s sort of peppered with this type of dramatic stuff. It’s a strange band, really.
“It’s ironic that we have a 50-year package coming out with all the old blues stuff with Peter Green, all the incarnations of Fleetwood Mac, which was not of course planned.”
Fleetwood Mac’s tour of North America begins in October this year and runs until April 2019
The 71-year-old rock drummer, who has been taking his own cameras out on the road with him since the early days of Fleetwood Mac, has always had an affinity for a great rock and roll shot. In order to share that with the public, he teamed up with the Morrison Hotel Gallery in 2016 to open a gallery space inside his Maui-based restaurant, Fleetwood’s General Store, which features a rotating array of fine art music photography.
On Saturday night (Aug. 4) in Los Angeles, Fleetwood — who is in town rehearsing for the upcoming Fleetwood Mac tour — popped by the Sunset Marquis Hotel in conjunction with the Morrison Hotel Gallery to showcase a selection of his favorite music shots, which included candid photos of the likes of Keith Richards, John Lee Hooker and bandmate Stevie Nicks.
Billboard caught up with Fleetwood on site to discuss his love of rock photography, his secret mission to infiltrate the stash of early Fleetwood Mac shots that McVie has been holding hostage and what he’s most looking forward to about his band’s upcoming tour.
What inspired your partnership with the Morrison Hotel Gallery?
We’re celebrating our sixth year with my Fleetwood’s, and in a restaurant that’s a lot. That’s another way to lose your hair but we’re part of the fabric there now, which is great. We opened up with the Morrison Hotel Gallery about two years ago and it’s been a huge success. Pattie Boyd, who was married to George Harrison and Eric [Clapton], did a little tour with Peter Blachley, one of the owners of the gallery. I met them in Australia years ago when Pattie was doing a show and I went to support. We were on the road and Christine, myself and John went to a gallery opening to support Stevie who was showing a Polaroid shot. She doesn’t really do that but Peter approached her and she said, “Okay. I’ll do it.” I met Peter again. We talked about one day doing something and then he came on holiday to our gallery. We had a regular gallery with open art at Fleetwood’s and I decided to go into partnership with Morrison Hotel Gallery. I said, “This is it.” For me, it’s a perfect fit. It makes a lot of sense because this is my world. We have a lot of fun. Whenever I’m at the restaurant, I pop down into the gallery and talk about some of the pieces that I know and introduce some of the people in the photographs that I was inspired by Continue reading Mick Fleetwood Opens Up About His Rock Photography, Fleetwood Mac’s Tour & Lindsey Buckingham’s Departure | Billboard
The Times
When Danny Kirwan joined Fleetwood Mac in 1968 his arrival created a three-pronged guitar attack that turned the group into one of the biggest-selling bands in Britain.
His unique vibrato style helped the instrumental Albatross to No 1, and further chart-topping hits featuring his distinctive guitar work followed with Man Of The World and Oh Well. Yet by 1972 Kirwan and both his fellow guitarists had gone, all three of them succumbing to psychotic breakdowns in what came to be known as “the curse of Fleetwood Mac”.
The first of them, Peter Green, quit in 1970, giving away his guitars and his money after a schizophrenic attack brought on by hallucinogenic drugs. Jeremy Spencer disappeared the next year, walking out of the band’s hotel, saying he was going to buy a magazine. He never returned and was later found to have joined a religious cult.
Yet Kirwan’s meltdown was in many ways the most dramatic of all. Sensitive and mentally fragile, he struggled to deal with fame and responsibility, went days on end without eating and developed a crippling stage fright, which in turn drove him to alcoholism.
His career as a rock star came to a shattering halt one night in 1972 on tour in America. Back stage while the band were tuning up before going on, something snapped and he hurled his Les Paul guitar at a dressing-room mirror, showering broken glass over his bandmates. Smashing his fists and head against the wall until they were bleeding, he refused to take the stage and instead spent the gig heckling from the audience as the band struggled on without him. He was sacked and never played with Fleetwood Mac again. Continue reading Danny Kirwan obituary | The Times
Rolling Stone
By Daniel Kreps
12th April 2018
Lindsey Buckingham spoke about his firing from Fleetwood Mac for the first time when the guitarist performed Friday night at a California campaign fundraiser.
“It’s been an interesting time on a lot of levels,” Buckingham said at the fundraiser supporting Democratic congressional candidate Mike Levin (via Jeremy Roberts).
“For me, personally, probably some of you know that for the last three months I have sadly taken leave of my band of 43 years, Fleetwood Mac. This was not something that was really my doing or my choice.”
“I think what you would say is that there were factions within the band that had lost their perspective,” Buckingham continued. “The point is that they’d lost their perspective. What that did was to harm – and this is the only thing I’m really sad about, the rest of it becomes an opportunity – it harmed the 43-year legacy that we had worked so hard to build, and that legacy was really about rising above difficulties in order to fulfill one’s higher truth and one’s higher destiny.”
Buckingham, who weaved his remarks about the Fleetwood Mac firing into a speech supporting Levin, remained diplomatic about the rift with his now-former bandmates, even sidestepping an audience member who yelled “Fuck Stevie Nicks.”
The brief comments were Buckingham’s first on the matter since Fleetwood Mac announced in April that the band recruited the Heartbreakers’ Mike Campbell and Crowded House’s Neil Finn to replace Buckingham, who reportedly didn’t want to embark on a Mac tour this year.
“Words like ‘fired’ are ugly references as far as I’m concerned,” Mick Fleetwood told Rolling Stone in April. “Not to hedge around, but we arrived at the impasse of hitting a brick wall. This was not a happy situation for us in terms of the logistics of a functioning band. To that purpose, we made a decision that we could not go on with him. Majority rules in term of what we need to do as a band and go forward.”
Watch Buckingham’s comments on the Fleetwood Mac situation below:
Rolling Stone
by Andy Green
April 25, 2018
A little over a month ago, the majority of Fleetwood Mac – Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood – quietly gathered at a little theater in Maui with their future in doubt. The band had secretly parted ways with Lindsey Buckingham, the longtime guitarist and voice behind many of their most enduring songs. According to the group, the split came down to a scheduling conflict surrounding a world tour. “We were supposed to go into rehearsal in June and he wanted to put it off until November [2019],” says Nicks. “That’s a long time. I just did 70 shows [on a solo tour]. As soon as I finish one thing, I dive back into another. Why would we stop? We don’t want to stop playing music. We don’t have anything else to do. This is what we do.”
So instead, they invited Mike Campbell, the former guitarist of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and Crowded House frontman Neil Finn and spent a few days workshopping tunes from their vast catalog to see if this new lineup had the right chemistry. “I immediately felt like I’d known them for years,” says Christine McVie, “even though we’d only just met.”
The new lineup will embark on a massive 52-date tour beginning October 3rd in Tulsa and criss-crossing the country before wrapping up in Philadelphia in April 2019. Tickets for the tour go on sale Friday, May 4th at 10 a.m. local time. (A complete itinerary is listed below.) The group also announced the launch of a SiriusXM channel devoted to the band beginning Tuesday, May 1st. Continue reading Fleetwood Mac Detail New Tour and Talk Life After Lindsey Buckingham | Rolling Stone
By Sharon Lacey
April 19th, 2018
Let’s not get into the blame game here because who knows what was said behind the scenes but there has been obvious tensions in the band for quite a while evidenced by Stevie Nicks’s reluctance to tour and even record with the band (last year’s Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie album was started as the next Mac record but was eventually released as a duo album after Nicks refused to contribute.)
This high drama was always been a huge part of the Mac and their appeal but to actually fire one of the key members of their most successful line-up is a huge move and, to many fans, a terrible mistake.
Buckingham wasn’t just the third voice and songwriter or guitar god of the band, he was the arranger and producer, the visionary, the man who helped bring out the brilliance in all of their songs. Fleetwood Mac carried on without Buckingham back in the late ’80s and early ’90s but there is no doubt a big part of the magic was gone. It’s hard to imagine, although the new members are both hugely talented, that they can recapture that special chemistry with new members Mike Campbell and Neil Finn so late in the game.
Of course, the Mac has had a revolving line-up over the years with some amazing talents (in particular the legendary Peter Green but also, the often forgotten but wonderful Bob Welch), but the impact of Rumours overshadows it all. Buckingham’s massive contribution to that is not only undeniable but an important part of why Fleetwood Mac still mean so much to people decades after they first formed and it could be argued, why they are still around at all.
Buckingham, after all, gave up plans for solo albums on at least two occasions to keep the Mac going. Fleetwood usually gets all the credit for the Mac soldiering on but there are times when it was Buckingham who actually made it happen. His enthusiasm meant we were just one voice away from getting that final Rumours line-up album that every fan has been dreaming about but at the very least his parting gift to the Mac is the rather lovely Buckingham McVie record. Continue reading Deep Tracks: Lindsey Buckingham
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