Category Archives: Fleetwood Mac

Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac

“Finally, Fleetwood Mac’s unsung hero Christine McVie is getting the spotlight she deserves” | Stylist

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Posted by Christobel Hastings
28 Dec 2019

She’s the longest-serving female member of Fleetwood Mac, and the group’s most successful singer-songwriter, but Christine McVie has always been overshadowed. But in a BBC documentary profile, Fleetwood Mac’s Songbird, the unsung hero of one of the world’s biggest bands finally gets to take the spotlight

There is one quiet moment of reflection in the BBC documentary, Fleetwood Mac’s Songbird, that perhaps sums up its subject more than anything else in the 90-minute retrospective of rock music history. It comes when Christine McVie, the longest-serving female member of Fleetwood Mac, and the group’s most successful singer-songwriter, speaks affectionately about her longtime friend, Stevie Nicks: “I could no more do twirls in chiffon than Stevie could do blues on the piano.” As she acknowledges her friend’s affinity for the spotlight, she showcases her brilliant talent for saying so much with so few words. It was this gift, we discover, that was intrinsic to the band’s success, and one that has ultimately allowed Fleetwood Mac to connect with people all around the world for over five decades.

Fleetwood Mac’s Songbird: Christine McVie in 1975

How and why the driving force behind one of the world’s best-selling bands was overlooked for so long is a question that is slowly unravelled in this fascinating profile of the legendary singer-songwriter, which traces McVie’s early beginnings in Birmingham, the British blues explosion in 1960s London, and her first foray into music. We learn that McVie was working as a window dresser in the department store Dickins & Jones, until she moved back to Birmingham to join her old friends Andy Silvester and Stan Webb in a blues band called Chicken Shack. Although she was initially tasked with playing keys and singing background vocals, when the band scored a hit with a cover of Etta James’ I’d Rather Go Blind with McVie on lead vocals, it quickly became evident that she was destined for greater things. Continue reading “Finally, Fleetwood Mac’s unsung hero Christine McVie is getting the spotlight she deserves” | Stylist →

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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, UK Articles

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

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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

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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 →

Fleetwood Mac, Fleetwood Mac 2018/19, Tour Info

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

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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 →

Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, Fleetwood Mac 2018/19, Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, UK Articles

The Never Ending Story of Fleetwood Mac | MOJO Magazine

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“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 →