Category Archives: Fleetwood Mac

Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey Buckingham, Release Info, Reviews, Solo Activity, UK Articles

Lindsey Buckingham & Christine McVie Review | MOJO Magazine

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Lindsey Buckingham & Christine McVie ****
Lindsey Buckingham & Christine McVie
EAST WEST. CD/DL

Fleetwood Mac’s new not-quite Fleetwood Mac album

The party line is that Stevie Nicks’ solo commitments have forced Fleetwood Mac to put their next album on hold. But as the recent Tango In The Night reissue proved, Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie were often the band’s great unsung partnership.

Confusingly, this duets album also includes bass guitarist John McVie and drummer Mick Fleetwood, making it essentially Fleetwood Mac, minus Nicks.

McVie brings the sing-song pop (Feel About You, Red Sun) and the slightly cloying Game Of Pretend; Buckingham, the whispered vocals and fingernail-splitting guitar solos on Sleeping Around The Corner and Love Is Here To Stay, plus the album’s best song: the nagging and melancholy In My World.

Does it miss Stevie Nicks? Yes, just as the last Fleetwood Mac album, 2003’s Say You Will, missed Christine McVie. But until all parties can sync their calen-dars, this will do nicely.

Mark Blake

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Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, Release Info, Solo Activity, UK Articles

The MOJO Interview: Christine McVie

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A graduate of Birmingham’s blues clubs, her songwriting and harmonic joy helped make Fleetwood Mac one of the biggest acts in the world. Then, she withdrew. “I just shut myself off,” admits a fully returned Christine McVie.

Interview by ANDREW MALE
Portrait by TOM SHEEHAN
June 2017, MOJO Magazine

I’M SORRY,” SHOUTS CHRISTINE McVIE FROM the kitchen, as she rummages for mugs under the I sink, “it’s a rented flat, and everything’s still in storage.” They’re words that conjure up a cheerless one-bedroom studio with wipe-clean beige walls and collapsed sofa bed, but for Christine McVie, 73-year-old singer-songwriter and on-off veteran of Fleetwood Mac, one of the biggest-selling bands of all time, the flat is a penthouse in Belgravia, decorated with antique Turkish carpets, giant African drums and, hanging in the drawing room, Edward Reginald Frampton’s 1898 Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece, – Saint Cecilia With Angels. “It looks like she’s playing a Hammond B3, doesn’t it?” smiles McVie, pointing at the spinet in the painting, a nod to her own early years, when as art student Christine Perfect she played keyboards in late-’60s Brummie blues outfits Sounds Of Blue and Chicken Shack.

Today, McVie’s look is a designer variant on Brumbeat beatnik; grown-out blonde bob, blue jeans, white T-shirt and black leather jacket, and her Smethwick drawl is still audible beneath a warm, measured voice with the same low blue tones that have coloured such soulful Mac belters down the years as Say You Love Me, Don’t Stop and Little Lies.

Indeed, Mac history is all around us, McVie’s walls bedecked with early photos of herself with band founder and drummer Mick Fleetwood, and bassist and one-time husband John McVie. There’s tour posters from the early-’70s Bob Welch years, and a plethora of platinum record updates on the 30-million-plus sales of the band’s 1977 LP Rumours. Recorded with LA conscripts Lindsey Bucking-ham and Stevie Nicks, the album set in motion 20 years of infra-band dance, dalliance and excess, and finally ended for McVie when she walked away from the group in 1998, exhausted and disillusioned, with a dream of living quietly in the Kent countryside.

Today she positively beams when discussing the band, especially her surprise return to the fold at the 02 Arena in September 2013 that led to the On With The Show world tour (“There was nothing bad about that tour. Everything was a joy!”) and the resultant reunion sessions with Buckingham, Fleetwood and McVie that have resulted in a buoyant new “duets” album, Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVie, recorded in Studio D at Village Recorders in Los Angeles, the same custom-designed annex the Mac had built, at ludicrous expense, for the recording of Tusk, some 39 years ago. “Lindsey gets me,” says McVie, happily, “and I love working with him. As with everything in Fleetwood Mac, it’s chemistry. I feel like I’ve come home. The prodigal daughter returns.”

So, how did Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVie come about?
I’d rejoined the band, after being retired for 16 years, and I had a phone call from Lindsey saying, “If you’re going to do that Chris you gotta commit.” He’s very hardline. I said, “I’m committing!” And I did. I worked out, I started writing songs, I sent Lindsey some demos, and he did his magic on them. It never occurred to us anything would happen in terms of an album. Then we thought it was a good way of getting me back into the swing of things for the upcoming Fleetwood Mac tour. We got some studio time, Lindsey brought in some songs he’d recorded with John and Mick a few years back, and before we knew it we had, like, six or seven songs. We shelved them, because we had to rehearse to go on the road, then we just pulled them back out a few months ago and decided to make it a proper duets album.

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Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey Buckingham, Solo Activity, UK Articles

In Fleetwood Mac nothing fits into any formula | The Times

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26th May 2017
The Times

Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie have got back together to sing duets, they tell Will Hodgkinson

Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie: “It was clear early on that this wouldn’t be Fleetwood Mac”

Just when you have a handle on the Fleetwood Mac drama, the principal characters go way off script and do something nobody could have predicted. First, the songwriter and pianist Christine McVie makes a surprise return in 2013 after a 15-year absence. Now McVie has recorded a duets album with Lindsey Buckingham, the guitarist associated, through good and bad times, with the other woman in the group: one Stevie Nicks.

“This is a band where nothing fits into any formula,” says Buckingham, on an atypically stormy afternoon in Los Angeles. He is at the Beverly Hills office of Fleetwood Mac’s manager, Irving Azoff, where I have just heard a handful of songs from the forthcoming duets album. From Buckingham’s sweet, fairytale-like In My World to McVie’s breezily romantic Feel About You, the album features classic Fleetwood Mac-style soft rock, which isn’t surprising given that Mick Fleetwood and John McVie form the rhythm section. The only Maccer missing, in fact, is Nicks.

“Oh, she’s fine about it,” insists Buckingham, on what Nicks makes of her old boyfriend recording an album with her one-time ally in the male-dominated world of 1970s rock. “She was off on her own thing [a solo tour], she knew what we were doing, and it was clear early on that this wouldn’t be Fleetwood Mac. You can look at it cosmically. The universe was speaking to Christine and me, even to Stevie, for this to be a duets album.

“Doing a duets album with Lindsey was the last thing I expected,” says McVie. “We don’t hang out in the way Stevie and I do, but we do work well together, and we ended up with all this material while Stevie was off doing other things. It started when I was in LA to rehearse for the tour and it developed from there. It’s just another splinter off the tree.”

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Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey Buckingham, UK Articles

Fleetwood Mac: The Saga Continues. Meet… Buckingham McVie | Uncut Magazine

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Uncut Magazine
Stephen Deusner
May 2017

Go Your Own Way

Fleetwood Mac should be preparing for their farewell tour but, true to form, their epic saga has taken on another complicated turn. Introducing, then, the dynamic duo of Buckingham McVie  – “a nice splinter off the main artery of Fleetwood Mac.” In this exclusive interview, Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie reveal all to Stephen Deusner about their unexpected side project, and about how it fits into the storied past, present and future of Fleetwood Mac. “It’s that umbilical cord that can’t be broken,” says Christine. “It just pulls you back.”

“THERE WAS SOMETHING COSMIC about it.” says Lindsey Buckingham. He’s sitting at the head of a long table in the brightly lit conference room of an anonymous office building in the Westwood neighbourhood of L.A, talking about Buckingham McVie, the new album he wrote and recorded with his Fleetwood Mac bandmate Christine McVie. Even as they are preparing for a Fleetwood Mac farewell tour in 2018, these two members have emerged as intimate collaborators proving there’s still a lot of life left in the band. “She and I kept saying to each other, ‘Why did it take us so long to think that it would be cool to do a duets album?’ I guess it was logistics – just getting to the point where the stars all aligned.” It’s a record with a lot of history behind it: more than 40 years of hook-ups and break-ups, marriages and divorces, drug abuse and recovery, departures and returns, hits and misses. It’s a story that begins with pub gigs in the late 1960s and a fateful Tex-Mex dinner meeting in the early 1975 and ends with a final arena tour in the late 2010s, spanning nearly every continent (even Antarctica, if you count the band’s penguin mascot) and almost every style of rock, including Buckingham’s early acid-rock and McVie’s beloved blues. And yet, these two musicians, both so embroiled in their own dramas, never really had any drama between them.

“The idea of us working together wasn’t about what kind of album we were making, at least not initially. It was just about getting together and finding some common ground. The fact that she had stuff she wanted to work on was really intriguing, and as soon as we got in the studio – maybe a week in – we looked at each other and were like, Holy shit, this feels like… something… I don’t want to say a ‘duets album’, but it felt like something substantial. It had never occurred to us to pursue anything like that.” As he speaks, Buckingham glances out the window, which offers a perverse panorama of L.A swallowed up by low clouds. “It’s been raining for a while,” he says, “but we need it.” That might be an understatement. The city with which he and Fleetwood Mac have long been associated is under siege: it’s been pouring for hours, with a strong wind coming in off the ocean. Meteorologists call it a bombogenesis, or a weather bomb. Streets are flooding all over town. Traffic lights are going out. Fallen trees are blocking roads. There are reports of sinkholes opening up and swallowing cars whole. The scene is apocalyptic – if California is ever going to sink into the Pacific, today might be the day.

“I’ve grown up since I last worked with her”
Lindsey Buckingham

Buckingham, by contrast, looks the model of a gracefully ageing Golden State rock star, tanned and animated, his grey-green eyes still lively and his salt-and-pepper hair still standing on end. He’s sporting a black leather jacket over a plunging black V-neck and blue jeans: something of a uniform for the singer-songwriter-guitarist, producer. His hands fidget at the table, as though he’d much rather be playing guitar than talking to a journalist. Who wouldn’t?

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Continue reading Fleetwood Mac: The Saga Continues. Meet… Buckingham McVie | Uncut Magazine →

Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, UK Articles

Memories of Meantime | Uncut Magazine

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Christine McVie on her ‘lost’ third album

In September 2004, six years after retiring from Fleetwood Mac, Christine McVie released her third solo album, In The Meantime. It was a casual affair, Helped by her nephew Dan perfect and featuring contributions from former Fleetwood Mac member Billy Burnetts, ex-husband Eddy Quintela and singer-songwriter Robbie Pattern (with whom she wrote “Hold Me” in the early 1980s.

Recorded entilely in her garage in rural Kent, In The Meantime feature some of the strongest songs in decades, including the sweet opener “Friend” the globe-trotting travelogue “Bad Journey” and the devastating “So Sincere” (“Didn’t you like my love song darling? I was so sincere”). “It’s a great little record.” she says. “My nephew happens to be pretty handy with ProTools, and he plays a pretty good guitar. He did quite a bit of writing on it as well. He and I get on really well, I think because we share the same self-deprecating humour. It was a successful project inasmuch as it brought us closer together.

It was not a particular successful however, in other regards, and McVie blames herself and her fear of flying for the record’s failure to fine an audience. “I couldn’t even contemplate going on the road with it. I did fly to New York once, bit I had to get drunk to do it. So then album died a graceful death.

In retrospect, In The Meantime holds up surprisingly well, especially when compared to Fleetwood Mac’s more bombastic Say You Will, released the year before. It was the band’s first record in 36 years without McVie, and her love songs are greatly missed. “Even with John and Mick playing, it was a glorified Buckingham-Nicls album,” she says, referring to the duo’s pre-Mac release. “I think that element of me might have been missing, those love songs that are both intimate and commercial. So to be back in the band again is just magical.

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Fleetwood Mac, Release Info, Reviews, UK Articles

Fleetwood Mac: Tango In The Night Deluxe Edition Review | Classic Rock Magazine

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The soundtrack to the Yuppie era in all its designer-suited finery.

There’s a reason that 1980s nostalgia has never really taken hold, and that’s because the 1980s generally sucked. Sure, interesting things were happening on the fringes, but mainstream culture was taking the express elevator all the way down to Yuppie Hell. And playing through the speakers in that elevator was Tango In The Night.

With 1977’s Rumours, Fleetwood Mac had accidentally invented the 80s in all its self-absorbed cocaine glory three years early. A decade on, the pharmaceutical vitality which gave that album its spirit had given way to the hollow-souled, million-dollar chintz of Tango In The Night. That it sold by the truckload tells you all you need to know about 1987.

This 30th-anniversary ‘deluxe’ edition is the musical equivalent of digging up a Blue Peter time capsule and finding the films of Sylvester Stallone on VHS. In both cases, you can’t help thinking: “Did people really like that shit?” As with Rocky IV and Rambo, Fleetwood Mac’s 14th album has not aged well. The twinkling keyboards and electronic drums that cling to Everywhere and Little Lies like an Exxon Valdez oil slick may have been state of the art in 1987, but then so was the Sinclair C5.

But the production isn’t the biggest problem here — the songs are. Whatever magic Mac once possessed had long since been dispelled by time and internal psychodramas. Lindsey Buckingham would once have dismissed Family Man and You And I, Part II for being too trite, Christine McVie’s Mystified is barely a breath away from lift music, while Stevie Nicks’ increasingly strangulated warbling has the emotional resonance of a goat being strangled by a goose.

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Fleetwood Mac

Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham And Christine McVie Reunite For ‘In My World’

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Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie’s new album, Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie, comes out June 9.
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: Lindsey Buckingham, Christine McVie, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie walk into a studio… and actually make a record together. Fleetwood Mac’s drama-filled history is the stuff of a “great play,” to say the least.

McVie returned to the band after 15 years during its 2014 tour, which sparked the forthcoming duets record, Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie. It’s the first time the two have worked together since Fleetwood Mac’s 1987 album Tango In The Night.

“We were exploring a creative process, and the identity of the project took on a life organically,” Buckingham says in a press release. “The body of work felt like it was meant to be a duet album. We acknowledged that to each other on many occasions, and said to ourselves, ‘What took us so long?!'”

With so many years since her time with these musicians and over a decade since her last solo album, In The Meantime, it’s a treat in itself just to hear Christine McVie sing again. The Buckingam-penned “In My World” is immediately familiar to anyone who’s spent many nights pouring over the swift guitar work and swaying grooves of Rumours or Tusk, striking a delicate balance between whimsy and wistful.

Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie comes out June 9 on Atlantic. The pair go on tour this summer.

Posted: At Radio WPSC
By: Lars Gotrich

 

Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey Buckingham, Release Info, Solo Activity, UK Articles

Fleetwood Mac members announce new album – without Stevie Nicks | Sky News

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Entitled simply Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie, the 10-track album will come out on 9 June and will be followed by a US tour.

Members of the rock band Fleetwood Mac stand together on stage after performing a concert on NBC’s ‘Today’ show in New York City, October 9, 2014. REUTERS/Mike Segar

By Duarte Garrido, Entertainment Reporter

Members of rock group Fleetwood Mac have announced a new album that will bring together all of the classic lineup – minus Stevie Nicks.

Entitled simply Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie, the 10-track album will be the first for the band’s guitarist and keyboardist as a duo.

Christine McVie, who stayed out of the spotlight for years, rejoined Fleetwood Mac for a 2014-15 global tour alongside Buckingham.

The pair said in a statement that the two started working on new material when McVie joined rehearsals for the tour and “their natural creative chemistry was reignited”.

Drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie, two of the founding members of the group, joined their bandmates in the studio in Los Angeles – but not Nicks. Continue reading Fleetwood Mac members announce new album – without Stevie Nicks | Sky News →

Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey Buckingham

“He could be brash; he could be harsh. He was very motivated”: The real story behind Fleetwood Mac’s “Tango in the Night” | Salon

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By ANNIE ZALESKI
April 2, 2017
Salon.com

Lindsey Buckingham’s producer and engineer toiled day and night for 18 months to make the triple platinum album

On March 31, Rhino Records released a deluxe edition of Fleetwood Mac‘s “Tango in the Night.” First released in 1987, the LP embodies the era’s glossy combinations of flashy rock ‘n’ roll and airy synth-pop. Layers of gauzy harmonies envelop Christine McVie compositions “Little Lies” and “Everywhere;” glittering keyboards add melancholy to the Stevie Nicks-helmed “Seven Wonders;” and jagged, lightning-bolt guitar riffs cut through “Isn’t It Midnight” and the title track.

Despite its effortless sound, the record took 18 months to make. Nicks was absent for most of the proceedings, owing to a packed tour schedule for her 1985 solo record “Rock a Little” and then a trip to Betty Ford to get sober from cocaine (the “Tango in the Night” song “Welcome to the Room. . . Sara,” in fact, is about this rehab visit). Prior to the launch of Fleetwood Mac’s tour in support of the record, Buckingham left the band. The core group of Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood wouldn’t reunite and play together until 1997.

Despite the rocky genesis, “Tango in the Night” became one of the band’s biggest-selling studio records: The record is certified triple platinum, trailing only ’70s juggernaut “Rumours” in terms of sales, and spawned multiple Top 20 Billboard singles, including the Top 5 hits “Big Love” and “Little Lies.”

For a certain segment of Fleetwood Mac fans, this album is as important as “Rumours.” In fact, the LP is a sonic touchstone for modern production, particularly in the way pop-leaning acts seamlessly combine electro and rock influences. HAIM’s soft-glow synth-rock, Best Coast’s lush production and the plush approach of countless electropop acts all nod to “Tango in the Night.” On the cover tip, synthesizer-heavy act Hot Chip has performed “Everywhere” live, while Hilary Duff did an EDM-influenced studio version of of “Little Lies.” Continue reading “He could be brash; he could be harsh. He was very motivated”: The real story behind Fleetwood Mac’s “Tango in the Night” | Salon →

Fleetwood Mac, Release Info, Reviews, UK Articles

Album Review: Fleetwood Mac: Tango In The Night Deluxe | The Times

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Will Hodgkinson
March 31 2017, 12:01am,
The Times

★★★★☆

Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 masterpiece, Rumours, is remembered as the ultimate cocaine album, but the warring superstar rockers saved the real excesses for ten years later. Tango in the Night is the last word in sophisticated, expensively produced soft rock, with such FM radio classics as Christine McVie’s Everywhere and Lindsey Buckingham’s Big Love sounding as if they were made for driving your Ferrari down Sunset Strip to.

The songs were, however, born of total chaos. The bassist John McVie was drinking himself into a stupor; Stevie Nicks, busy swapping cocaine for the damaging tranquilliser Klonopin, while also building up her now successful solo career, rarely turned up at the studio. The whole thing came to an end when guitarist Buckingham announced he was leaving the band, reportedly leading to an ugly physical confrontation between him and his former girlfriend Nicks.

All these years later the album seems less like a soundtrack to a designer lifestyle and more a portrait of collapse. Nicks’s little-girl-gone-to-seed croak on the ballad When I See You Again is heartbreaking, and the evergreen synthesizer pop of McVie’s Little Lies smoothes over words about refusing to face up to reality, something the band members appear to have been quite good at.

On this three-disc set not all of the alternative versions are strictly necessary, and Buckingham’s comedy voices on Family Man are as dated as a piano necktie, but for the most part the quintessential Eighties album has ended up being far more profound and enduring than anyone could have predicted. (Warner Bros)

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