Mojo Magazine (Match 2018)
By Mark Blake

FLEETWOOD MAC DELUXE EDITION
****
Reprise CD/DL/LP

A fine romance

Starcrossed lovers 1975 hits album just before divorce proceedings began now expanded

Has there ever been any more serendipitous album then Fleetwood Mac? At the end of 1974, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie’s group were drawing their last breath. The boom years with guitarist Peter Green over, and the previous years trippy West Coast influenced Heroes Are Hard To Find was the latest in a long line of poor sellers.

It was make-or-break time, when Fleetwood hired unknown singer/ songwriter Lindsey Buckingham and, despite Fleetwood’s initial reluctance, Buckingham’s girlfriend Stevie Nicks; a story Nicks’ has rightly dined out on ever since. A year later, the rebooted Fleetwood Mac were basking in the success of a US number one hit. This deluxe edition contains fewer previously unreleased studio tracks but more live numbers than 2016’s things remastered Tango In The Night. The ‘White Album’ (as it’s often known) doesn’t have to sleep-deprived, teeth-grinding tension of his successor Rumours or a song as gleefully bombastic as The Chain. It’s warmer, slightly less druggie, and none the worse for that.

The original album contains three songs which between them templated the future sound of Fleetwood Mac. As anyone has heard 1973’s Buckingham Nicks album will confirm, the couple bought existing ideas to the table. They even re-recorded one of its songs, Crystal on Fleetwood Mac. Continue reading Fleetwood Mac Reissue Review | Mojo Magazine →

Classic Rock Magazine (issue 246)
By Mark Beaumont
4th Feb 2018

Fleetwood Mac | WARNERS | 8/10

In which Fleetwood Mac Mk 2 rises from two separate dumpers.

Some tacos are destined to change the world. Take the ones over which the remnants of Fleetwood Mac ‘auditioned’ Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks in a Mexican restaurant in LA in 1974. Mac were smarting from five years of slumping record sales and the departure of guitarist and songwriter Bob Welch; Buckingham and Nicks, who had a flop album themselves with 1973’s Buckingham Nicks, were on the verge of quitting their part-time LA jobs, ending their floundering relationship and going their separate ways.

The Mac needed only a new guitarist, but Buckingham refused to join unless they took Nicks as well. Mick Fleetwood gave his remaining core songwriter, Christine McVie,
a veto over Nicks, but the pair got on famously. By the time the margaritas were drained, soft-rock history was shaken on.

The Mac album (the band’s tenth) that this fresh new line-up began recording just three weeks later — with Buckingham so pushy in teaching the veteran rhythm section their parts that John McVie chided him: “The band you’re in is Fleetwood Mac. I’m the Mac. I play the bass” would become their second self-titled release, to mark their final transition from Peter Green’s blues-rock version to a new country-rooted pop rock sound. The title heralded a new Fleetwood Mac, and their second era would become one of the most successful rebirths in rock. Inevitably, one returns to 1975’s Fleetwood Mac with radar attuned to the first whispers of Rumours, and there are plenty circulating within these semi-magical 42 minutes. Continue reading Fleetwood Mac Reissue Review | Classic Rock Magazine →

By Nigel Williamson
Uncut Magazine
Warners
9/10

Career-changing 1975 album expanded into three-disc deluxe edition

When Lindsey Buckingham was invited to join Fleetwood Mac in late 1974, it was the group’s final throw of the dice. After nine lineup changes in eight years, the previous album, Heroes Are Hard To Find, had barely sold enough “to pay the electric light bill”, as Mick Fleetwood put it. When Buckingham insisted that his girlfriend Stevie Nicks join with him, the group agreed with considerable reluctance. Yet the results were transformative.

The newcomers wrote six of the 11 songs on the next album, including Nicks’ all-time classics “Rhiannon” and “Landslide”, which came to define the Mac’s ‘new’ sound. Their presence also energized Christine McVie, who contributed two of her most enduring compositions in “Say You Love Me” and “Over My Head”. The album was released to initial indifference, but support built slowly. Fifteen months after its release, the album was sitting on the top of the US charts, by which time the group were already back in the studio recording the epoch-defining Rumours.

Extras 8/10. An alternate version of the original album comprising unreleased outtakes and early versions of each of the 11 songs, plus a plethora of 1976 live performances.

Thanks to Stéphane Blanc for providing this review