All posts by fmfanuk

Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, John McVie, Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, Peter Green, Stevie Nicks

Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Tusk’: 10 Things You Didn’t Know | Rolling Stone

Leave a comment

By Ryan Reed
Rolling Stone Online
October 11, 2019

How an in-studio bathroom replica, juvenile dick jokes, and a Peter Green guitar cameo informed the band’s sprawling, experimental follow-up to Rumours

BOSTON, MA – NOVEMBER 17: Stevie Nicks performs with Fleetwood Mac at the Boston Garden on Nov. 17, 1979. (Photo by Janet Knott/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Fleetwood Mac’s 12th album is both demented and debonair, familiar and foreign — a sprawling double LP that, like the Beatles’ White Album before it, reveled in its own messiness, jumbling together the work of three distinct songwriters. Singer Stevie Nicks and keyboardist Christine McVie carried the commercial weight on Tusk, penning playful pop grooves (the latter’s “Think About Me”) and stormy rockers (the former’s “Sisters of the Moon”) that massaged the same sweet spot as their previous record, the mega-platinum 1977 masterwork Rumours.

But Lindsey Buckingham was unwilling to repeat himself. Savoring the edgier modern sounds of New Wave and punk, the singer-guitarist prepared to march into the unknown — whether or not his bandmates were interested in the journey. That friction ultimately defines Tusk, the band’s fractured masterpiece. 

“The explosion of the punk movement had changed the musical landscape, and the popular conception was that bands like ours, Led Zeppelin, the Stones, Elton John and everyone else from our era, were a bunch of dinosaurs who’d lost touch with the real world,” drummer Mick Fleetwood wrote in his 2014 autobiography, Then Play On. “That wasn’t true, of course — we were in touch and aware of all those changes in culture, Lindsey most of all. He was intrigued by punk bands like the Clash and lots of New Wave artists such as Talking Heads and Laurie Anderson, and he wanted to follow that muse creatively. The issue for him was whether or not he was going to be able to do that with the rest of us.” Continue reading Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Tusk’: 10 Things You Didn’t Know | Rolling Stone →

Fleetwood Mac, Release Info

Classic Fleetwood Mac Albums to be reissued on Coloured Vinyl | Far Out

Leave a comment

Fleetwood Mac released five back-to-back multi-platinum albums between 1975 and 1987, an effort which led to them being one of the best-selling bands around the globe.

Now, those classic albums will be reissued individually on coloured vinyl on November 29. The albums include Fleetwood Mac on white vinyl; Rumours on clear vinyl; Tusk on a silver vinyl 2-LP set; Mirage on violet vinyl; and Tango In The Night on green vinyl. On the same day, all five coloured-vinyl LPs will be presented together in slipcase as a limited edition, individually numbered set of 2,000 copies, available exclusively at the Rhino store. This collection is available to pre-order now.

A new incarnation of Fleetwood Mac debuted in the summer of 1975 that included Mick Fleetwood, John McVie and Christine McVie, along with new members Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. The group’s first album together, Fleetwood Mac (sometimes called “The White Album”), topped the Billboard album chart, spent more than a year in the Top 40 and sold more than five million copies in the U.S. thanks to songs like ‘Landslide’, ‘Say You Love Me’, and ‘Rhiannon’.

In 1977, the band followed up with Rumours, considered by many to be among the greatest albums of all time. It won the Grammy for ‘Album of the Year’ and has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide. Its unforgettable tracks include: ‘Go Your Own Way’, ‘Gold Dust Woman’ and the band’s first number one smash, ‘Dreams’.

The double-album Tusk arrived in 1979. It sold more than four million copies worldwide and introduced fans to hits like ‘Sara’, ‘Think About Me’, and the title track. Three years later, in 1982, Fleetwood Mac again topped the charts with Mirage. Along with hits like ‘Hold Me’ and ‘Gypsy’, Mirage also features great album tracks like ‘Oh Diane’ and ‘Straight Back’.

In 1987, Tango in the Night became the second-most successful album of the band’s career, selling more than 15 million copies worldwide with the massive hits ‘Everywhere’, ‘Big Love’ and ‘Little Lies’.

Pre-order the collection, here, and have a closer look below.

Fleetwood Mac

Self-indulgence and acrimony: the making of Fleetwood Mac’s 1979 album ‘Tusk’ | Independent.ie

Leave a comment

Saturday 5 October 2019
The Independent.ie
John Meagher

It was 1978 and Stevie Nicks was having to get used to the business of being extremely famous. She had appeared on the cover of the previous year’s biggest selling album, Rumours, and her vocals were adorning some of the most played songs of the era. She had gone from relative obscurity to the big time on joining Fleetwood Mac with then boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham just a few years before and now, at the age of 30, she had the world at her feet.

But life was far from rosy for the Arizona-raised, California-adopted singer and her complicated love life would prove inspiring when it came to writing a song that would be the centrepiece of Fleetwood Mac’s next album as well as perhaps being the most emblematic of her entire career.

That song was ‘Sara’ and Nicks spent more time fashioning it than on any other – before or since. Months before the band reconvened for the marathon recording sessions of what would become the double-album, Tusk, Nicks had a nine-verse, 16-minute song on her hands. It would eventually be whittled down to just over six minutes on the original vinyl version of the album and trimmed further to four-odd minutes when released as a single.

‘Sara’ was inspired by a large number of things that were taking Stevie Nicks’ headspace at the end of the 1970s. It was, ostensibly, written about her friend Sara Recor and her relationship with Mick Fleetwood, one of band’s founding members and with whom Nicks had an intimate relationship after she and Buckingham had finished. And it’s a hirsute Fleetwood who appears on the Rumours cover, of course.

Despite the pair having broken up, and Nicks being in what would turn out to be a short-lived relationship with the Eagles’ Don Henley, she admitted to have been upset by her friend’s new romance with her former paramour. Fleetwood, she later said, had been a steadying influence during the acrimonious Rumours sessions and she immortalised him in the line, “And he was just like a great dark wing/ Within the wings of a storm”. Continue reading Self-indulgence and acrimony: the making of Fleetwood Mac’s 1979 album ‘Tusk’ | Independent.ie →

Fleetwood Mac, Release Info

Fleetwood Mac ‘Rumours’ Getting New Deluxe Edition

Leave a comment

Best Classic Bands

Fleetwood Mac are releasing a deluxe edition of their 1977 juggernaut, Rumours, to coincide with the band’s ongoing tour.

The 4-CD set, coming October 25 via Rhino, replicates the 2013 deluxe edition that included numerous previously unreleased takes from the album’s recording sessions and live performances from the subsequent world tour.

In recent years, the band have been methodically issuing deluxe editions of much of their 1970s and 1980s output. The new Rumours release raises eyebrows since the 2013 deluxe edition of the album is still in print. (The new edition omits the latter’s DVD and vinyl release of the studio LP.)

The 2019 deluxe edition of Rumours includes the original album and the b-side “Silver Springs,” a dozen live recordings from the group’s 1977 world tour, an entire disc filled with takes from the album’s recording sessions, and an additional disc of outtakes. Continue reading Fleetwood Mac ‘Rumours’ Getting New Deluxe Edition →

Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, TV Spot, UK Articles

What’s on TV tonight: Friday September 20, 2019 | The Times

Leave a comment

Fleetwood Mac’s Songbird: Christine McVie
BBC Four, 9pm

Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks in 1987
GETTY IMAGES

As always with BBC Four’s rock-doc tributes, the eulogies flow freely over introductory footage, in this case of Fleetwood Mac taking the stage at Wembley this summer. Anyone who was there will have been reminded how Christine McVie is the band’s not-so-secret weapon. Not only did she write their most beguiling hits (Songbird, You Make Loving Fun, Don’t Stop, Everywhere), her voice is a thing to cherish — a warm, bluesy thing, a world away from today’s bombastic divas. She is the longest-serving female member of any of the rock ’n’ roll acts that emerged from the 1960s, but this profile reminds us that she was famous before the Mac, as Christine Perfect, in the band Chicken Shack, singing their 1968 hit I Would Rather Go Blind. Then she saw Fleetwood Mac, met their bassist John McVie and the rest is rock history — mega-selling albums, cocaine, divorce, make-ups, seclusion in Kent, comeback glory. All covered in this rock-doc. Mrs McVie talks about how she was initially jealous of Stevie Nicks who took the spotlight while Christine was stuck behind the piano. Yet they also bonded as two women in rock’s boys’ club. “I told her, we will be a force to be reckoned with for all these men that surround us,” recalls Nicks. Christine talks of the infamous decadence during the Rumours era — she wrote You Make Loving Fun about the lighting guy with whom she was having an affair — one that was kept from John despite Christine singing the song on stage every night. At least the music was great. She also recalls her relationship with Beach Boy wild man Dennis Wilson, “really sweet man” but also a “nut”. Quite a life for an unassuming girl from Smethwick.

Catchup with the show on BBC iPlayer (UK viewers only)

Fleetwood Mac 2018/19, Reviews, Tour Info, UK Articles

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

Leave a comment


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 →

Fleetwood Mac 2018/19, Reviews, UK Articles

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

Leave a comment
Will Hodgkinson

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 2018/19, Mick Fleetwood, Tour Info, UK Articles

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

Leave a comment

From Simon Boyle’s Bizarre Column
16 Jun 2019, 21:00

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 →

Fleetwood Mac, UK Articles

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

Leave a comment

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 →

Fleetwood Mac, Solo Activity, Stevie Nicks

How Stevie Nicks’ Lost Masterpiece ‘Ooh My Love’ Became a Cult Fan Favorite | Rolling Stone

Leave a comment

By Rob Sheffield
Rolling Stone
May 30th, 2019

Deep cut from 1989’s ‘The Other Side of the Mirror’ summed up what Nicks called a “magical time” in her career

Mandatory Credit: Photo by Ian Dickson/REX/Shutterstock (8289678b)
Stevie Nicks in concert, 28 November 1989
Stevie Nicks in concert, Wembley Arena, London, UK – 1980s

Happy birthday to Stevie Nicks’ best song ever, “Ooh My Love.” It’s a buried treasure in her legendary career — never a hit, not even a single. She’s never sung it live. Just a deep cut from her most tragically underrated solo album, The Other Side of the Mirror, released 30 years ago, in the last days of May 1989. The album fell through the cracks — nobody was really checking for solo Stevie in the late Eighties. But it’s prized by hardcore Stevie freaks, especially “Ooh My Love.” For some of us, it sums up everything that makes her the ultimate rock queen — her most soulful moment ever, with or without Fleetwood Mac. If I had five minutes to convince a jury she’s a genius, “Ooh My Love” is what I would play. When my time comes, bury me with this song in Stevie’s shawl vault.

When I interviewed her in 2014, I confessed “Ooh My Love” was my favorite. “That’s one of my favorites too,” she said. “In fact, The Other Side of the Mirror is probably my favorite album. Those songs were written right before the Klonopin kicked in. ‘In the shadow of the castle walls’ — that song was very important to me. I was lucky those songs were written when they were, before that nasty tranquilizer. It was a really intense record. People don’t talk about that record much, but it was different from all the others. It was a moment in time. I had gotten away from the cocaine in 1986. I spent a year writing those songs. I was drug-free and I was happy.” Continue reading How Stevie Nicks’ Lost Masterpiece ‘Ooh My Love’ Became a Cult Fan Favorite | Rolling Stone →