Category Archives: Fleetwood Mac 2018/19

Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham on Stevie Nicks: ‘She’s never been over me’ | The Times

The Times (UK)
Will Hodgkinson
September 17 2021

Last week the singer revealed he had been fired from the group by Nicks. The reason? She’s probably still in love with him, he tells Will Hodgkinson

Lindsey Buckingham: “It’s hard for me to know what Stevie’s mentality is towards me — but I know what mine is to her”CHANTAL ANDERSON/NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX/EYEVINE
Lindsey Buckingham: “It’s hard for me to know what Stevie’s mentality is towards me — but I know what mine is to her” CHANTAL ANDERSON/NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX/EYEVINE

The soap opera continues. Last week Lindsey Buckingham announced that he was fired in 2018 from Fleetwood Mac because Stevie Nicks made an ultimatum: it was either him or her. They chose her. It was, says the guitarist who joined the band in 1975 with Nicks, then his girlfriend, the result of long-simmering tensions. They reached boiling point after Nicks refused to delay a tour so Buckingham could promote his solo album, and because of a perceived slight during her speech at the MusiCares charity event in New York, when she felt he was smirking behind her back. Nicks responded by stating: “I did not have him fired, I did not ask for him to be fired, I did not demand he be fired. Frankly, I fired myself.”

Rather than fuel the he-said-she-said back and forth, I’m interested to know where all this antipathy came from in the first place. Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 masterpiece, Rumours, was dominated by songs about the pair’s romantic tussles. She wrote Dreams about him, he wrote Go Your Own Way, Second Hand News and Never Going Back Again about her, and since then they have dealt with cocaine addiction, alcohol abuse, solo careers, Nicks going through rehab, Buckingham getting married to the interior designer Kristen Messner, and countless worldwide tours. If they could survive all of that, why should it fall apart in 2018 over a tour delay and a snigger? Continue reading Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham on Stevie Nicks: ‘She’s never been over me’ | The Times

Christine McVie doesn’t think Fleetwood Mac will tour with Stevie Nicks again | NME

Feb 9, 2021
By Sam Moore
NME Online

She also expressed doubt about going back out on the road again

Christine McVie, Stevie Nicks, and Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac perform onstage during the 2018 iHeartRadio Music Festival at T-Mobile Arena on September 21, 2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Picture: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for iHeartMedia)

Christine McVie has said that she doesn’t expect Fleetwood Mac will tour with Stevie Nicks again in the future.

The keyboardist and vocalist was asked about the band’s future plans in a new interview with BBC Radio 2’s Johnnie Walker.

Speaking on Sounds Of The 70s (listen to the full interview here at the 1:13:20 mark), McVie said that the question of touring with Fleetwood Mac was currently “an impossible question to even answer”.

“If we do, it will be without John [McVie] and without Stevie, I think,” McVie said. “I think I’m getting a bit too old for it now, especially having had a year off. I don’t know if I can get myself back into it again.

“I know Mick [Fleetwood] would do it in a lightning strike,” she added. “But I couldn’t possibly say. We’re certainly not touring this year either.” Continue reading Christine McVie doesn’t think Fleetwood Mac will tour with Stevie Nicks again | NME

Veteran Sideman Brett Tuggle on His Years With Fleetwood Mac | Rolling Stone

By Andy Greene
Oct 15, 2020
Rolling Stone Interview Series

This article only contains the Fleetwood Mac centric material, for the complete article, please click this link

THOUSAND OAKS, CALIFORNIA – FEBRUARY 10: Musician Brett Tuggle performs onstage during the ‘Music Strong’ benefit concert at Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza on February 10, 2019 in Thousand Oaks, California. (Photo by Scott Dudelson/Getty Images)


Rolling Stone interview series Unknown Legends features long-form conversations between senior writer Andy Greene and veteran musicians who have toured and recorded alongside icons for years, if not decades. All are renowned in the business, but some are less well known to the general public. Here, these artists tell their complete stories, giving an up close look at life on music’s A list. This edition features keyboardist Brett Tuggle.

Keyboardist Brett Tuggle was travelling through Europe on a 1997 tour with Toto’s Steve Lukather when he heard that Mick Fleetwood was trying to get in touch with him. “I called him from the airport and he said, ‘Brett, we’re putting the Big Five [members of Fleetwood Mac] back together,’” says Tuggle. “‘We’re going to augment the band with a couple of great musicians and you’d be great with Christine [McVie]. Are you in?’”

“Let me check my calendar,” he joked. “Of course, I’m in.”

The single television special that resulted kicked off a two-decade stint for Tuggle as the go-to keyboardist for all Fleetwood Mac tours along with solo treks by Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham in addition to the Buckingham McVie side project.

How did you first enter the world of Fleetwood Mac?
It was because of Mick Fleetwood, his majesty. I was in a band with Mick called the Zoo. We did an album in the Nineties. David Lee Roth wasn’t doing much. I think that was already over. I had gotten a call that Mick was looking for a keyboard player for his band the Zoo, which I had heard of. I didn’t know much about them, but I thought it could be interesting. It had a pretty good lineup of people. It was Bekka Bramlett on lead vocals. She’s Delaney and Bonnie’s daughter. There was also Billy Thorpe from Down Under. He was a big star in Australia. Continue reading Veteran Sideman Brett Tuggle on His Years With Fleetwood Mac | Rolling Stone

Mick Fleetwood on His Peter Green Tribute Show, Future Plans, and Lindsey Buckingham | Rolling Stone

By Andy Green
Jan 28, 2020
Rolling Stone

“Lindsey’s legacy is alive and well, and as it should be,” says the drummer. “It will never be taken away, and never be down-spoken by any of us.”

phone via: Randee St. Nicholas

Mick Fleetwood should be relaxing. He just wrapped up a 13-month world tour — Fleetwood Mac’s first since parting ways with Lindsey Buckingham and replacing him with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell and Crowded House frontman Neil Finn — but the 72-year-old drummer is already deep into planning his next project: a tribute concert to Peter Green, who co-founded Fleetwood Mac and wrote many of the group’s early classics before being sidelined by mental illness and addiction issues. The show is set for February 25th in London, with special guests David Gilmour, Christine McVie, John Mayall, and Steven Tyler. “I wanted people to know that I did not form this band — Peter Green did,” Fleetwood says. “And I wanted to celebrate those early years of Fleetwood Mac, which started this massive ball that went down the road over the last 50 years.”

Peter Green hasn’t been seen much in public over the past decade. When is the last time that you and he spoke?
It was about a year and a half ago. I went out with my girlfriend, and spent the day with him. He’s not the Peter that I knew, clearly. But he plays acoustic guitar. He loves painting, and fishing is his hobby. It’s no secret that he took a left turn and never came back, but he’s OK. He also has really little or no ego at all, which is unbelievable. You want to go, “Do you realize what you did?” “No, no. Yeah, I suppose so.” He has no ego about what he did. Continue reading Mick Fleetwood on His Peter Green Tribute Show, Future Plans, and Lindsey Buckingham | Rolling Stone

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

Fleetwood Mac: ‘We’ll burn in hell if we don’t play Glastonbury one day’ | The Independent

The Independent
27th April 2019

Cocaine, fights, love affairs and break-ups. Mick Fleetwood and Christine McVie speak to Chris Harvey about the success, the hardship and the torment of the band as they prepare to play Wembley in June

Left to right: Mike Campbell, John McVie, Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie and Mick Fleetwood ( AFP/Getty )

This strange, funny band is complicated,” says Mick Fleetwood. “It’s all about people, it’s not horrific.” I’m talking to the man who has been the only member of Fleetwood Mac to appear in every line-up of the band since they were formed. When they step out on stage at Wembley Stadium in June, that will be coming up to 52 years ago.

We’ve been chatting about the period when Fleetwood Mac moved from stars to superstars with the release of Rumours in 1977. It was during the era of Seventies rock excess, when band mythologies are wreathed in tales of groupies, sexual exploitation, drug addiction and death.

Fleetwood Mac were no strangers to drugs: LSD had cost the group its original leader, Peter Green, at the end of the Sixties, and cocaine was an integral part of the band’s Seventies. Fleetwood wrote in his autobiography that Rumours was written with “white powder peeling off the wall in every room of the studio”.

“I think we were damned lucky that our music never went down the drain because we went down the drain,” the 71-year-old drummer says now, “and I think in truth there are moments where you could have said we got pretty close, you know. Continue reading Fleetwood Mac: ‘We’ll burn in hell if we don’t play Glastonbury one day’ | The Independent

The Never Ending Story of Fleetwood Mac | MOJO Magazine

“It Wasn’t About Replacing Lindsey Or Replicating Him In Any Way”

Minus the persona non grata and now-incapacitated Lindsey Buckingham, FLEETWOOD MAC truck on towards a date with the UK in June. Their new line-up is controversial, but they claim it’s working and, what’s more, it was ever thus. “If you look at the history of Fleetwood Mac,” Mick Fleetwood tells DAVE DIMARTINO, “it’s a miracle that it survived. A miracle.”

IT IS MID-NOVEMBER OF 2018, FLEETWOOD MAC are performing at Moda Center in Portland, Oregon, and Stevie Nicks is introducing Landslide.

“This song was written in 1973 in Aspen, Colorado,” she tells the rapt audience. “just me and my little guitar, deciding what I want to do with my life. I want to dedicate this to my cousins Sandy and Eddie, who are here, and also to Lindsey Wilkinson, an old friend. Another Lindsey that I also really loved, you know.” There is a brief, barely perceptible pause. “Not like that.” The crowd laughs at her mixture of candour and innuendo, that wee wisp of Harlequin romance paperback covers long gone, and the band plays Nicks’ classic note perfect, as if it were 1975 all over again. But of course, it isn’t 1975 again.

Absent from the stage is guitarist/singer and one-time Nicks musical and personal partner Lindsey Buckingham, who with Nicks joined the band at the tail end of 1974 and helped guide them to an unparalleled level of fame. He’s not only gone, he’s really gone: a month previously Buckingham had filed suit in the Superior Court of Los Angeles claiming to have been unjustly booted from the band. Thus this long-planned, lucrative tour — which extends through 2019 and includes the States, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, the UK, Australia and New Zealand — now features replacements Neil Finn, of Crowded House, and Mike Campbell, of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, and no Lindsey Buckingham. Continue reading The Never Ending Story of Fleetwood Mac | MOJO Magazine

Christine McVie: inside the world of Fleetwood Mac, then and now | Harper’s Bazaar

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As the band prepares for its UK return in June, Christine McVie talks Glastonbury, rock ‘n’ roll and retirement

June 2019 will be a big month for music fans for two reasons – an under-the-radar, little-known festival called Glastonbury and the return of Fleetwood Mac, the band’s first UK dates in six years. Sadly, this year at least, the two aren’t linked, but lead vocalist and songwriter Christine McVie says any decision to perform at Glastonbury isn’t down to the band itself.

“It isn’t up to me, it’s up to the management,” said McVie. “It’s their decision and down to logistics. I can’t say yes or no to Glastonbury, but I’d like to – so long as I don’t have to wear wellington boots on stage. Or maybe I’d just have to roll with it – wellie boots with mud.”

For now, fans will have to make do with two UK gigs at Wembley (the first time that McVie has performed in the UK with the group since officially rejoining), one of which sold out so fast that the band added a further date. Over 50 years after the band were first formed, appetite for Fleetwood Mac shows no signs of waning.

“Maybe people are just wondering when the first one of us is going to pop off because we’re not youngsters anymore,” laughs McVie. “Maybe people want to see us because they think it’s the last chance. We’re a young band at heart; you’d never think we are the age we are. We’re never static. It’s going to be fantastic.”

Continue reading Christine McVie: inside the world of Fleetwood Mac, then and now | Harper’s Bazaar