Category Archives: Fleetwood Mac

Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey Buckingham, UK Articles

Lindsey Buckingham blames “disoriented” Stevie Nicks for the lack of new Fleetwood Mac music | Classic Rock

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Dec 6, 2021

Lindsey Buckingham says the fact that Fleetwood Mac haven’t released a new album since 2003 “wasn’t for lack of trying”

(Image credit: Rob Ball/WireImage)

Lindsey Buckingham blames Stevie Nicks for the lack of new music from Fleetwood Mac, telling Classic Rock magazine that the fact that the legendary rock band haven’t released a studio album since 2003‘s Say You Will “wasn’t for lack of trying.”

Buckingham, who released a self-titled solo album earlier this year, was fired from Fleetwood Mac in 2018, and claimed earlier this year that Nicks was the catalyst for that decision: speaking with the LA Times, the guitarist said that Nicks issued a ‘him or me’ ultimatum to the band, in a bid to assert more control over the group, an accusation Nicks has denied.

Now, in a new interview running in the new issue of Classic Rock magazine, on sale on December 7, Buckingham suggests that his former partner’s reticence to get involved in the writing and recording of new Fleetwood Mac material is the reason there’s been no new album from the band in 18 years.

Buckingham claims that work had actually begun on a new Fleetwood Mac album back in 2012.

“I had a bunch of songs, and Mick [Fleetwood] and John [McVie] and I went in with the producer Mitchell Froom and cut a bunch of stuff,” he tells Classic Rock. “This was before Christine [McVie] returned to the band in 2014. We very much wanted to draw Stevie in, and for some reason she refused to participate.” Continue reading Lindsey Buckingham blames “disoriented” Stevie Nicks for the lack of new Fleetwood Mac music | Classic Rock →

Fleetwood Mac, Fleetwood Mac 2018/19, Lindsey Buckingham, Release Info, Solo Activity, UK Articles

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

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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 →

Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, UK Articles

‘Like Trump and the Republicans’: Lindsey Buckingham reignites Stevie Nicks feud | The Guardian

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Ben Beaumont-Thomas
Thu 9 Sep 2021 17.38 BST

War of words takes place between former Fleetwood Mac couple, with Buckingham accusing the band of dishonouring its legacy

Going their own way … Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. Composite: Getty

One of the bitterest feuds in pop music rolls on, after Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks – once a couple whose breakup powered the classic album Rumours – have strongly disputed Buckingham’s departure from the band.

In 2018, it was announced that Buckingham would not be appearing on a forthcoming Fleetwood Mac tour. Buckingham sued the band later that year, saying that he was “suddenly cut off” after a dispute over being able to postpone the tour to play solo dates.

The lawsuit was settled out of court, with Buckingham saying: “We’ve all signed off on something. I’m happy enough with it. I’m not out there trying to twist the knife at all. I’m trying to look at this with some level of compassion, some level of wisdom.”

But in a new interview with Rolling Stone, Buckingham has said he was ousted because Nicks “wanted to shape the band in her own image, a more mellow thing”. He added: “I think others in the band just felt that they were not empowered enough individually, for whatever their own reasons, to stand up for what was right. And so it became a little bit like Trump and the Republicans.”

He said the ensuing tour, with Mike Campbell and Crowded House’s Neil Finn replacing him on guitar, “seemed somewhat generic and perhaps bordering on being a cover band … what this did was dishonour the legacy that we built”. Continue reading ‘Like Trump and the Republicans’: Lindsey Buckingham reignites Stevie Nicks feud | The Guardian →

Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac

Christine McVie Sells 115-Song Catalog, Including Fleetwood Mac Songs, Solo Material | American Songwriter

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Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie has sold her 115-title song catalog to Hipgnosis, making her the fourth of the band’s five members to sell their publishing rights within the past nine months.

CHRISTINE MCVIE (PHOTO: THOMAS COOPER)

In January, Lindsey Buckingham also sold 100 percent of his publishing rights to Hipgnosis, which has spent more than $2 billion in the past three years to acquire the rights to a collection of popular songs from artists, including recent deals with Shakira, Barry Manilow, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Neil Young.

Earlier this year Mick Fleetwood also made a similar deal with BMG, while Stevie Nicks sold off rights to her work to Primary Wave, which recently acquired a large portion of Prince’s rights, in December of 2020.

Hipgnosis has acquired worldwide copyright, ownership, and financial interest, including the writer’s share of McVie’s compositions and neighboring rights, according to the official announcement.

“Christine McVie is one of the greatest songwriters of all time, having guided Fleetwood Mac to almost 150 million albums sold and making them one of the best-selling bands of all time globally,” said Merck Mercuriadis, founder Hipgnosis, in a statement. “In the last 46 years, the band has had three distinct writers and vocalists but Christine’s importance is amply demonstrated by the fact that eight of the 16 songs on the band’s greatest albums are from Christine.” Continue reading Christine McVie Sells 115-Song Catalog, Including Fleetwood Mac Songs, Solo Material | American Songwriter →

Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, Stevie Nicks, UK Articles

Lindsey Buckingham says he never got “closure” with Stevie Nicks | NME

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By Will Lavin

“We had to spend an awful lot of time together without ever having gotten closure from each other”

Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. CREDIT: Lester Cohen/Getty Images

Lindsey Buckingham has said he never got “closure” with former Fleetwood Mac bandmate and ex-parter Stevie Nicks following their much-publicised breakup.

Speaking in a new interview, Buckingham, who was fired from the band in April 2018, discussed his relationship with Nicks and reflected on not getting any closure after their fallout.

“And really, again, that was part of the deal with Stevie and me was that we had to spend an awful lot of time together without ever having gotten closure from each other,” he told Nile Rodgers on his Apple Music 1 show Deep Hidden Meaning Radio With Nile Rodgers.

Buckingham continued: “Most people, when they break up, they don’t see each other for a long time or maybe ever again. But you’re not constantly having to not only see someone but, in my case, make the choice to do right for someone when I didn’t always feel that I wanted to, you know?

“In order to take a song of hers, like ‘Dreams’, which needed so much construction around it to take those same two chords and make them evolve from section A to section B to section C. And the love and the choice to do the right thing and to have the integrity to do that. It comes at a price sometimes, you know? It comes at the price of having your defences come up, and sometimes over a period of time, it’s hard to get those down.

Continue reading Lindsey Buckingham says he never got “closure” with Stevie Nicks | NME →

Fleetwood Mac, Mick Fleetwood, Release Info, UK Articles

Mick Fleetwood: ‘You’re talking to the dude who never gives up. We’re still a band’ | The Times (UK)

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Will Hodgkinson
The Times

The drummer talks about the soap opera that has been Fleetwood Mac since 1967 — and the all-star tribute to bandmate Peter Green

Mick Fleetwood at last year’s London Palladium concert
ROSS HALFIN

For the past 54 years Mick Fleetwood, 73, has kept Fleetwood Mac going in the face of insurmountable odds. When the guitarist Lindsey Buckingham was fired from the band in 2018, in part linked to his former girlfriend Stevie Nicks announcing that she could not bear to share a stage with him again, it was just the latest hurdle for the soft-rock stadium fillers who have faced everything from divorces to affairs to drug-induced breakdowns.

The problems began when Peter Green, the band’s founder and one of the greatest guitarists, took LSD at a commune in Munich in March 1970 and never recovered. He left Fleetwood Mac a few months later.

“He was a lot of fun, right up until the day he walked out of the band,” says Fleetwood down the line from his home in Hawaii. “He had a real sense of ambition about what he wanted to do. You can listen to Man of the World now and hear the signs [in 1977 Green was diagnosed with schizophrenia], but I thought Peter had just written a sad song about a feeling.”

Perhaps that hindsight helped to spur Fleetwood on to put together a remarkable concert, which took place at the London Palladium on February 25, 2020 — just before the pandemic hit the UK — in honour of Green. Everyone from Fleetwood Mac’s keyboardist and singer Christine McVie to Pete Townshend to David Gilmour joined in, alongside some rather surprising Peter Green fans. Continue reading Mick Fleetwood: ‘You’re talking to the dude who never gives up. We’re still a band’ | The Times (UK) →

Fleetwood Mac, UK Articles

Drug abuse, violence, and the making of Fleetwood Mac’s Tango In The Night | Classic Rock

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Forget Rumours: Fleetwood Mac’s craziest album was Tango In The Night

(Image credit: Barry King/Getty Images)

In December 2012, three members of Fleetwood Mac cried together, in public, at the memory of something that had happened all of 25 years previously.

Singer Stevie Nicks, guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and drummer Mick Fleetwood were doing a round of media interviews to announce the band’s 2013 tour when they were asked about the events of 1987, when Buckingham quit the band following the release of the album Tango In The Night.

Buckingham did not respond directly to the interviewer. Instead he turned to Nicks and Fleetwood and reiterated his reasons for leaving the group at a critical stage of their career: foremost among them, his sense that Nicks and Fleetwood had lost their minds and souls to drugs.

“What Lindsey said in that interview was very moving,” Fleetwood says. “He told us: ‘I just couldn’t stand to see you doing what you were doing to yourselves. Did you ever realise that? You were so out of control that it made me incredibly sad, and I couldn’t take it any more.’ It was really powerful stuff. This was someone saying: ‘I love you.’ It hit Stevie and me like a ton of bricks. And we all cried, right there in the interview.”

It was a moment that Mick Fleetwood describes as “profound”. But even after all these years, his memories of that time in 1987 are still raw. For when Lindsey Buckingham walked out on Fleetwood Mac, he did not go quietly. When Buckingham told the band he was leaving, it led to a blazing argument that rapidly escalated into a physical altercation between him and former lover Nicks, in which she claimed she feared for her life. Continue reading Drug abuse, violence, and the making of Fleetwood Mac’s Tango In The Night | Classic Rock →

Fleetwood Mac

April 1987: Fleetwood Mac’s Classic Lineup Bows Out Big with TANGO IN THE NIGHT | Rhino

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April 13, 2021
Rhino Insider

Fleetwood Mac was in pretty rough shape when the band got together to record what would become the group’s 14th studio effort, Tango in the Night. The record was originally conceived as a Lindsey Buckingham solo project; it was Mick Fleetwood who  coerced the guitarist into morphing it into a full Fleetwood Mac release.

Remastered CD

“That was in my estimation when everybody in the band was personally at their worst,” Buckingham recalled years later. “If you take the whole subculture that existed in the 1970s, and what it led to — and how it degraded — by the time we did Tango in the Night, everybody was leading their lives in a way that they would not be too proud of today. It was difficult for everybody.”

That included singer Stevie Nicks, who spent most of the laborious 18-month process making Tango in the Night out on the road promoting her third solo album, Rock a Little. Ultimately spending only two weeks at Buckingham’s home studio over the course of recording, Nicks customarily got drunk on brandy before singing her vocal takes. Most of them were left on the cutting room floor.

Once the dust settled, Fleetwood Mac released Tango in the Night on April 13, 1987. Much like Rumours, the behind-the-scenes drama was the genesis for hit records. Lead single “Big Love” cruised up the charts, peaking at #5 on the Hot 100 for the week of May 21, 1987. The song was also a hit on the dance floor, with an extended remix of the track twirling all the way to #11 on the Billboard Dance Sales chart in June 1987.

The second single from Tango in the Night was another radio winner: “Seven Wonders.” The Stevie Nicks showcase made a formidable chart run, breaking into the top 20 to peak at #19 on the Hot 100 for the week of August 15, 1987.

It was Christine McVie who shined on third Tango in the Night single, “Little Lies.” Peaking at #4 on the Hot 100 in November 1987, the song soared all the way to #1 on the Adult Contemporary chart for the week of October 10, 1987.

Christine McVie again took the spotlight with the album’s fourth single, “Everywhere.” The song followed “Little Lies” up the Adult Contemporary chart, hitting #1 on January 15. 1988. Over on the Hot 100, “Everywhere” broke into the top 20 to peak at #14 in February 1988. Continue reading April 1987: Fleetwood Mac’s Classic Lineup Bows Out Big with TANGO IN THE NIGHT | Rhino →

Fleetwood Mac, Release Info, Reviews

Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Live’ is better then ever on expanded remaster | Pop Matters

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By Jordan Blum
6 April 2021

Fleetwood Mac’s Live sounds better than ever, giving both longtime fans and newcomers a stronger glimpse into how immaculate they were at the turn of the decade.

Almost no other rock band was bigger than Fleetwood Mac in the mid-to-late 1970s. Sure, they’d been going strong for roughly a decade by then; however, it was the inclusion of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham (following the departure of Bob Welch) on 1975’s self-titled tenth LP that took their mainstream appeal to the next level. Of course, 1977’s Rumours was even bigger, while 1979’s experimental double album, Tusk, continued their creative prosperity (despite being considered a commercial failure at the time).

Naturally, the greatness of that trilogy meant that the band’s debut concert recording, 1980’s Live, was as highly anticipated as it was enormously satisfying. Comprised mostly of material from the 1979 – 1980 Tusk tour (as well as a few pieces from the preceding Rumors and Fleetwood Mac tours, of course), it contained virtually every song you could possibly want to hear from their most recent records. Continue reading Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Live’ is better then ever on expanded remaster | Pop Matters →

Fleetwood Mac, Mick Fleetwood, UK Articles

Mick Fleetwood wants a Fleetwood Mac reunion with “everyone who’s ever played” in the band | NME

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By Will Richards
26th March 2021

“I’m not done. And if I can get John McVie off his boat, he’s not done either!”

Mick Fleetwood, Christine McVie, Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, and John McVie of Fleetwood Mac arrive at the 60th Annual GRAMMY Awards on January 26, 2018 in New York City. CREDIT: Steve Granitz/Getty Images

Mick Fleetwood has shared his desire for a full Fleetwood Mac reunion, and “everyone who’s ever played in Fleetwood Mac would be welcome”.

The news comes after Fleetwood revealed this month that he has reconciled with former bandmate Lindsey Buckingham – and would like to think a reunion could happen.

Guitarist Buckingham, who first left the band in 1987 before returning in 1997, was fired by the band in 2018, with Fleetwood adamant until now that his former bandmate would never be allowed to rejoin the band. Last year, he maintained his stance ruling out a reunion.

Elsewhere in Fleetwood Mac’s revolving door of band members, Stevie Nicks left in 1991 before returning alongside Buckingham in 1997, while Christine McVie rejoined the band in 2014 after retiring. The band’s latest tour in 2018 saw Buckingham replaced by Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers’ Mike Campbell and Crowded House’s Neil Finn on guitars.

NEW YORK, NY – OCTOBER 07: Mick Fleetwood and Lindsey Buckingham perform at Madison Square Garden on October 7, 2014 in New York City. (Photo by Kevin Mazur/WireImage)

Asked who he thinks will be a part of Fleetwood Mac when the band next tours in a new interview by the Los Angeles Times, Fleetwood said: “I hope the whole fucking lot of them! I’m not done. And if I can get John McVie off his boat, he’s not done either!

Continue reading Mick Fleetwood wants a Fleetwood Mac reunion with “everyone who’s ever played” in the band | NME →