Press Kit for The Other Side of The Mirror uploaded – http://
Press Kit for TUSK uploaded – http://
Press Kit for The Other Side of The Mirror uploaded – http://
Press Kit for TUSK uploaded – http://
Pete Pahides
Oct 10, 2009
Fleetwood Mac
Copenhagen
*****
Fleetwood Mac hardly need to be made aware of the fact, but hindsight can have a way of teasing you into your dotage. Thirty-three years after the group’s classic line-up released the 20-million-selling album Rumours, it has long become clear that – contrary to what arguably its most well-known song would have you think – going your own way is somewhat more easily said than done.
As Fleetwood Mac’s Unleashed tour finally reached Europe, it took Lindsey Buckingham all of three songs to address the “fairly convoluted emotional history” of the group who knew no equals when it came to alchemising their complicated hotel-room arrangements into FM pop gold.
Buckingham and his ex-partner Stevie Nicks have since sporadically ventured into solo territory, but even in a characterless hangar on the outskirts of Copenhagen it became clear that the on-stage dynamic between Buckingham and Nicks still exerts a fascinating hold.
With no new studio album to promote, a ruddy, red-shirted Buckingham suggested that band and audience were bound by no greater motive than to “have fun”. In the case of the 61-year-old Nicks – who delivered star turns such as Gypsy and Dreams with all the wistful gauziness you remembered from their recorded counterparts – that was easy enough to believe.
On a thrilling sprint through The Chain, drummer Mick Fleetwood showed a level of facial commitment that looked more like something out of the Jim Henson workshop than a rock show. However, anyone who has seen Buckingham perform will know that fun, in the straightforward sense, isn’t a concept you would apply to the 60-year-old’s stage manner. Far from being a problem, however, it accounted for many of the evening’s most gripping spectacles. On the tribal paean to paranoia that was Tusk, from 1979, he was a picture of demonic intent.
Left alone altogether to perform the group’s 1987 hit Big Love, Buckingham was revelatory. By the time he navigated the song from an intricate folk-picking whisper to a finger-shredding climax, all residual chatter from the back of the hall had dissipated.
Lest we had dared forget, of course, Fleetwood Mac’s success in the years predating Buckingham and Nicks was partly predicated on the brilliance of their troubled guitarist, Peter Green.
Paying tribute to his predecessor, Buckingham turned his attention to Green’s own pièce de résistance Oh Well – while, behind him, Fleetwood and John McVie locked effortlessly into the song’s piledriving blues. If Buckingham, on several occasions, looked close to stealing the show, it was to Nicks’s credit that she seemed happy to allow him.
Even when occupying the spotlight for Sara, the female singer — dressed in figure-hugging black – left her microphone and ambled over to Buckingham.
As the song finished, she hugged him and, sweetly, he simply allowed his head to rest on her shoulder. Time may have healed old wounds but, in the case of certain songs, it made little difference to the pride that Fleetwood Mac took in showing them off.
Nicks, ceremonially donning a top hat, grandly returned to her mike stand for Go Your Own Way. As ever, her performance was an object lesson in poise and control, while Buckingham’s was about the absence of those qualities. Minutes later, hindsight issued another tease – a valedictory Don’t Stop, complete with the exhortation “Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone”. Few noticed, less still cared.
Tour begins Glasgow SECC, October 22
(www.fleetwoodmac.com)
By Andy Threlfall
September 10, 2009
BlackBook
The tangled web that’s the story of Fleetwood Mac is easily one of rock and roll’s, well, quirkiest. A once-quintessentially English blues band came to be the sound of California dreaming in the mid-70s when, seemingly washed up and on the verge of permanent disbandment, drummer Mick Fleetwood asked L.A. husband and wife singer-songwriting team Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks to join the group in one last desperate throw of the musical dice. The rest was multi-platinum history; Rumours still boasts a place a place in the top-ten selling albums ever. But while the songs have endured, the addictions, the divorces, the petty band politic chipped away at their legacy for 30 years. Here, a reflective Lindsey Buckingham tries to find new meaning in those lost days of summer, and how being lucky enough to survive them has allowed Fleetwood Mac to get on stage one more time for their 2009 World Tour. Continue reading Lindsey Buckingham: Getting Fleetwood Mac Back Together for One Last Tour
One of the best selling groups of all time Fleetwood Mac are set to re-unite for a very special UK arena tour.
Emerging from the British blues boom, Fleetwood Mac would go on to dominate the pop market with some of the most popular albums ever released. The band perhaps peaked with the spectacular success of ‘Rumours’, and the line up that crafted this album is set to gather for an extremely rare tour.
To gather the roots of Fleetwood Mac would take a box set. Formed by guitar hero Peter Green, the band used some of the finest musicians from the British blues scene. However Green would depart in 1970 after a period of mental decline, leaving the band to battle on.
Centred on the rhythm section pairing of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, Fleetwood Mac would later gather the twin talents of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks.
The group would later inter-marry, but the pressures of success took their toll on the relationships with the band divorcing just a few years later. The inter-band politics seemed to drive them on to greater artistic endeavours, crafting the massively successful album ‘Rumours’.
To date the album has sold over 25 million copies, and spawned the classic hits ‘Go Your Own Way’, ‘Dreams’ and ‘Don’t Stop’.
In total, the band have sold a staggering 100 million albums making them one of the most popular rock acts ever. Subsequent albums such as ‘Tusk’ and ‘Tango In The Night’ would enhance Fleetwood Mac’s reputation as a supreme artistic outfit, yet full scale tours are few and far between.
Fleetwood Mac have only played two full scale tours in more than twenty years. In fact, it is over a decade since the band’s last appearance in public together.
Hell, even solo appearances are hard to come by. Since the release of a live album in 1998 the band members have taken time off, with Mick Fleetwood said to be the lynchpin behind getting the group to reform.
More than thirty years on from the release of ‘Rumours’ Fleetwood Mac remain one of the most popular groups on the planet. A rare chance to catch this band in the live arena, make sure you don’t miss out!
Fleetwood Mac are set to play the following dates: Continue reading Fleetwood Mac UK Arena Tour
Fleetwood Mac are definitely reforming for live dates to take place next year, the band’s guitarist Lindsey Buckingham has said.
The legendary band will reform for a tour in early 2009, their first since 2003, and they are also planning on making a new studio album too, once they have played together for a while.
Buckingham has said in an interview with US publication Billboard.com: “I think maybe there was even a sense that we would make a better album if we went out and hung out together first on the road …Maybe even sowing some seeds musically that would get us more prepared to go in the studio rather than just going in cold. It takes the pressure (off) from having to go in and make something cold.”
As previously reported here on uncut.co.uk, Buckingham has enlisted the help of Fleetwood Mac members Mick Fleetwood and John McVie for two tracks on his forthcoming solo album ‘Gift of Screws’, due for release on September 16.
Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham has enlisted the help of band members Mick Fleetwood and John McVie on at least two of the tracks for his forthcoming fifth ‘solo’ album ‘Gift of Screws.
The three of them have worked on tracks, including the album’s title track and one called “Wanna Wait For You. “Buckingham, who earlier this year spoke of the possibility of a Mac reunion tour in 2009, has commented on his forthcoming album, saying: “This album distills several periods of time. It has false starts to make albums, songs that go back a number of years that took a while to find a home and brand-new songs. I wanted to bring it all together in one place. As an artist I’m still, for better or worse, clinging to my idealism and to my sense that there is still much to be said. This album is a culmination of that.”Gift of Screws was originally titled way back in 2001, after songs were being written and recorded between 1995 and 2000. Some of the tracks were orignially recorded live by Fleetwood Mac and subsequently used on The Dance tour.
There is no more comment on news of a full band reunion tour, but recording together is a pretty auspicious start.Buckingham’s Gift of Screws, due out in September, full track listing is:
“Great Day”
“Time Precious Time”
“Did You Miss Me”
“Wanna Wait for You”
“Love Runs Deeper”
“Bel Air Rain”
“The Right Place to Fade”
“Gift of Screws”
“Underground”
“Treason”
Fleetwood Mac Plots Return — With Or Without Crow
Billboard
March 25, 2008, 2:25 PM ET
Gary Graff
Detroit
Fleetwood Mac — with or without Sheryl Crow in tow — is planning to be active again.
Singer/guitarist Lindsey Buckingham — who’s just released a new concert DVD, “Live at the Bass Performance Hall,” from his 2006-07 solo tour — tells Billboard.com that the group is “looking at the idea of touring sometime in the first half of 2009,” possibly with some new material to play.
In recent weeks Crow, who’s friendly with Mac’s Stevie Nicks, has talked about joining the band, which Buckingham acknowledges is a possibility, though he adds, “I don’t think anything is written in stone yet.”
“I think we were all a little surprised (Crow) was announcing that to the world with such certainty,” Buckingham says with a laugh. “We have talked about the possibility of bringing another woman into the scene to kind of give Stevie a sort of foil and shake it up a little bit. (Crow) was certainly a name that has come up. We’ll have to see.”
Nicks has been the group’s sole female member since Christine McVie retired from the band in the late ’90s. Buckingham says that he has “a ton of new stuff” that could be used for a new Fleetwood Mac album, though he adds that he might want to step back from the production role he’s had in the band.
“I don’t think I want to produce again ’cause it takes so much,” he explains. “Whatever happens we’ll all sit in a room and make something work as a group. a little more like we used to, sort of try to open it up and get everyone sharing the activity a little more.”
Buckingham, meanwhile, is also planning another solo album — the follow-up to 2006’s “Under the Skin” — for this summer. Recorded with members of his touring band as well as Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, it “has a little more of a rock feel to it” than “Under the Skin,” according to Buckingham. “It’s just another group of tunes that hopefully will translate to stage, and hopefully we can get some more (solo) dates this summer.”
Formerly signed to Reprise, Buckingham says he’s a “free agent” now, without a label deal as a solo artist. “We’re gonna figure out who wants to put it out,” he says of the as-yet untitled album. “I’m keeping an open mind. People need to hear the music and we’ll see what they think and what the best situation for it will be.”
US Airlines In Flight Magazine
September 2007
Merging an affinity for splendid and soaring melodies, a playful sensuality, and a musical undergirding built on equal parts across-the-pond blues and stateside decadence, Fleetwood Mac was arguably the quintessential pop band of the 1970s. Though the band had enjoyed some moderate success in the late ’60s and early ’70s, it was the arrival of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks in 1975 that gave the band a new sound, a new image, and Beatlesque chart success. During his tenure with Fleetwood Mac, Buckingham penned and produced some of the most resonant and hummable pop songs of the ’70s and ’80s, including “Go Your Own Way,” “Big Love,” “Tusk,” and “Don’t Stop.”
Today, Buckingham, who previously seemed a tortured virtuoso in a disposable pop landscape, emanates serenity, genuine gratitude, and no shortage of musical wit. Perhaps the new calm is because Buckingham has taken on the roles of husband (he married girlfriend Kristen Messner in 2000) and father (the youngest of his three children was born in 2004) over the last decade. Perhaps it’s that, after a 14-year delay, he’s just released his fourth solo album, the largely acoustic, deeply intimate Under the Skin. Regardless, Buckingham is an artist for the ages, always reaching and searching, never shying away from documenting his journey — and perhaps that of an entire generation — in memorable, personal tunes. Continue reading Verbatim: Lindsey Buckingham
By: Patrick McKay
Published on: 2007-08-14
The Diamond is an apt name for albums certified for 10 million + sales by the Recording Industry Association of America. The hardest substance on earth: insoluble, impervious to penetration, secure in itself. “The formation of natural diamond requires very specific conditions,” Wikipedia says. The aim of this feature is to define what made Cracked Rear View, Come On Over, Boston and The Lion King soundtrack not just sales benchmarks of their respective artists’ careers, but inexplicable loci at which shrewd marketing and the inscrutability of mass market taste met to produce high-quality entertainment no one breathing could escape. This column will also study why artistic peaks like Rumours, Born in the U.S.A., Thriller, Can’t Slow Down, and Hysteria deserved their sales. Each entry in this series will pose the question: why should we separate art from commerce?
By 1977 all the longhairs who’d lived through the Summer of Love were over thirty. They’d traded their painted vans for station wagons, left their communes for a split-level in the suburbs, and watched their free-love idyll end in divorce. The hippies had matured into yuppies. They had money to spend and hi-fi stereos to show off. They’d grown up during the golden age of rock, but it was the height of punk, and they weren’t going to listen to “God Save the Queen.” So instead, they listened to Fleetwood Mac.
Since its release in February 1977, Rumours has sold 19 million copies in the United States. Since the U.S. population has just passed 300 million, it’s not an exaggeration to say that nearly seven percent of America has probably owned a copy of Rumours at some point in their life. Not counting compilations or double albums, this makes it the fifth bestselling long player of all time. And unlike many of its fellow diamond-certified records that earned their status after decades of steady catalogue sales (Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits, Volume I and II, Legend), this one was a blockbuster from the first, topping the charts for an astounding 32 weeks. Though it spun off four top ten singles “(Dreams,” “Don’t Stop,” “Go Your Own Way,” and “You Make Loving Fun”), every track earned airplay on AOR radio, making standards out of album cuts like “Gold Dust Woman” and “The Chain.” By 1979, it’d sold thirteen million copies. This was much more than a hit record—this was a phenomenon.
Rumours’ success is all the more surprising considering that in the early-‘70s, Fleetwood Mac barely functioned as a band at all. Original frontman Peter Green left the group in 1971, leaving only the rhythm section of John McVie and Mick Fleetwood, who were forced to bring in McVie’s wife Christine, among others. Only later did they persuade folk-rock duo Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks to join, the result being the Mac Mach II. Their first record, 1975’s Fleetwood Mac, had been a smash in its own right, but the commercial triumph of Rumours launched them into superstardom, a feat they never managed to top, even if its immediate follow-up, the messy, idiosyncratic Tusk, is the more accomplished artistic statement.
Thirty years later, it’s important to remember the atmosphere Rumours was borne into: 1977 was the year punk rock broke on both sides of the Atlantic. Johnny Rotten said “fuck” on the BBC while Patti Smith performed songs like “Piss Factory” at CBGB’s. The sun-baked optimism of groups like the Beach Boys and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young had long since soured, and a coke-fueled disco inferno was right around the corner (1977’s other smash hit? The Saturday Night Fever soundtrack).
To pop music fans, Fleetwood Mac must have seemed like a safe middle ground between Richard Hell and Barry Gibb. Even critics bought into the act: in The Village Voice’s year-end Pazz & Jop poll, Robert Christgau wrote that “rock and roll is supposed to be about pleasure as well as all the heavy stuff, and I’m glad that in this year of the punk Fleetwood Mac [is] here to remind us of that.”
Christgau makes a crucial distinction: appearances to the contrary, this is not soft pop, but rock and roll. By 1987’s Tango in the Night, Fleetwood Mac had morphed into VH1-friendly easy listening, but Rumours still leans heavily on the blues-rock foundation built by Peter Green. McVie’s “You Make Loving Fun” and Nicks’ “I Don’t Want To Know” impress with their pop melodies, but are driven by a rhythm section as insistent as Watts and Wyman. “Dreams” and “The Chain,” ostensibly ballads, are built around thick drum patterns and churning bass lines.
The up-tempo material—Buckingham’s “Second Hand News” and McVie’s “Don’t Stop”—moves as fast as anything Dylan put to vinyl in the “Tombstone Blues” era. The cocaine-bright, oh-so-‘70s production finds room for Moog washes, rattling tambourines, rich Brian Wilson-esque vocal arrangements, and even the odd guitar flourish—see the tasteful solo announcing the fade-out to “Second Hand News,” or the gorgeous guitar break at the heart of “The Chain,” which could fit in fine on a Zeppelin record.
All good rock albums rely on rhythm sections, deep production, and fretwork. What distinguishes Rumours—what makes it art—is the contradiction between its cheerful surface and its anguished heart. Here is a radio-friendly record about anger, recrimination, and loss. Much has been made of the intra-band relationship problems that produced these songs—the McVies were divorcing, and Buckingham and Nicks had suffered a bitter split—but this is not a typical breakup album, like Blood on the Tracks or Sea Change, which find their respective authors looking back on heartbreak from a safe distance.
Rumours is the sound of a breakup in progress. Nine of the album’s eleven songs employ the not-so-ambiguous pronouns “I” and “you,” and usually prefer direct address to rumination: “I’m never going back again,” “I never meant any harm to you,” “You know you make me cry,” “You can go your own way.” This puts Fleetwood Mac in a grand tradition, stretching from Gershwin to the Supremes, of sad songs that sound happy. In this way, Rumours was as much a return to earlier forms as punk rock: the Ramones wanted to be the Beach Boys but twice as fast; Fleetwood Mac wanted to be a girl group, only slower.
It’s also worthwhile to note the record’s sheer consistency. Unlike Tusk, which spreads the work of Mac’s three songwriters over twenty songs in eighty-five minutes, Rumours’ eleven songs in forty minutes leave little room for self-indulgence. To these ears, the record’s only dud is McVie’s somnolent “Songbird,” which closes out the otherwise-flawless side one with a whimper instead of a bang. Some of the strongest tracks are seeming throwaways like Buckingham’s lovely “Never Going Back Again” or Nicks’ bouncy “I Don’t Want to Know,” and the major statements—“Dreams,” “Go Your Own Way”—retain their power even after decades of constant rotation on classic rock radio.
Unlike, say, the Beatles, where the work of each songwriter is strikingly distinct, the songs on Rumours sound like the work of one shared voice—an ironic effect, considering that the band came together out of circumstance. Heard in sequence, “Don’t Stop,” McVie’s attempt to cheer up an ex who can’t move on, and “Dreams,” Nicks’ kiss-off to a restless lover, almost sound like two different phases of the same relationship. The druggy egotist torn to shreds in Nicks’ “Gold Dust Woman” (a self-portrait?) could be the same woman to whom Buckingham became “Second Hand News” when she discovered a new lover. This is a portrait of a make-love-not-war generation that hit its thirties only to learn the hard way that sex kills, that love isn’t all you need.
While the Clash and the Sex Pistols renewed rock with a shot of youthful danger, Rumours allowed for the possibility that rock could age gracefully, and take on subjects of an emotional complexity unavailable to a teenager. This may have begat adult contemporary, VH1, and Phil Collins, but at least with Rumours, Fleetwood Mac wasn’t trying to soften rock, but to blunt its edge, to create something more expansive in effect and broader in appeal. The consequence was a career spent in the shadow of that peak; the reward was a receptive audience—of 19 million and counting.
http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/diamond/fleetwood-mac-rumours.htm
Stevie Nicks built a beloved body of work within and without Fleetwood Mac—but success had a steep price. As a new greatest-hits album chronicles her solo success, the mysterious superstar takes stock on her life and music.
By Chris Neal
Performing Songwriter
June 2007
The weather is grey, windy and, as Stevie Nicks notes, “a little creepy” outside her home overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
“I call it the ‘amoeba fog,” she says, looking out from the living room of her Los Angeles home. “It sticks right to the coast. You might as well be in Seattle or London for several months out of the year. It suit me sometimes, but after it’s been that way for a couple of week, I start to go, ‘OK, I’d like to see the blue sky.”
Nicks is well acquainted with both the clouds and the blue sky of L.A. A native of Phoenix (she also keeps a house there), she moved to L.A. from San Francisco with guitarist and then-paramour Lindsey Buckingham in 1971. On New Year’s Eve 1974, both were asked to join Fleetwood Mac—and alongside keyboardist Christine McVie, bass player John McVie and drummer Mick Fleetwood, they helped to turn a British blues-rock warhorse into one of the best-selling and most influential bands in pop history.
Nicks became the group’s breakout star, thanks to her striking beauty, dusky alto and magnetic stage presence—but perhaps most of all her talents as a writer. Songs like “Dreams,” “Rhiannon,” “Sara” and “Gold Dust Woman” rang out as evocative, impressionistic transmissions from a parallel world a little more vivid and romantic than our own. Through a poetic lens, she examined femininity, mythology and love—particularly the disintegration and aftermath of her relationship with Buckingham.
In the spring of 1980, Nicks began work on her first solo album. The intervening years have seen her build a persona, fan base and musical legacy that stands apart from the mighty Mac. Hits like “Edge of Seventeen,” “Stand Back” and “Talk to Me” provided a constant reminder that Nicks was a singer and songwriter whose talents went much father than her contributions to the band she could never completely abandon. Those songs and a bounty of others chosen by Nicks herself are now collected on a new compilation album, Crystal Visions… The Very Best of Stevie Nicks. As dusk settled over L.A. and the “amoeba fog” clung stubbornly to the coast, we asked Nicks, 58, to describe her creative process, recount her journey through music and predict the future of Fleetwood Mac.
Continue reading Vision Quest – Stevie Nicks | Performing Songwriter (June 2007)
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