Category Archives: Reviews

Reviews, Solo Activity, Stevie Nicks, UK Articles

Stevie Nicks review – an emotional evening with rock’s great survivor | The Guardian

Leave a comment

Kate Hutchinson
Sun 14 Jul 2024 13.42 BST
The Guardian

With that powerful voice, a hit-strewn back catalogue – plus some terrific between-song banter and a guest appearance by Harry Styles – this show is a moving testament to Nicks’ enduring musical legacy

Dressed for the British summer … Stevie Nicks at BST Hyde Park in London. Photograph: James Manning/PA

This month Steviemania swept the UK, with the singer’s first solo shows here in 35 years and – as further evidence of her enduring influence – a tribute from Taylor Swift during her Eras tour. So it was understandably gutting when Stevie Nicks cancelled her Glasgow and Manchester dates last week due to a leg injury at a few hour’s notice. Those shows have been rescheduled, but it was a reminder that while Nicks may be forever enshrined as a mythical rock survivor and queen of bohemia, she is not completely unbreakable.

There’s no mention of it when the 76-year-old takes to the stage in London’s Hyde Park, dressed for British summertime in a high-necked velvet jacket and gloves. You might imagine her thoughts are elsewhere: this is where she last performed in the UK, with her mentor Tom Petty, mere months before he passed away in 2017. And that sets the tone for an emotional evening that is both testament to Nicks’ legacy and an in memoriam for those she has lost. Petty’s Free Fallin’ gets a giant airing, and Prince flashes up on screen during Stand Back, the track they co-wrote.

Continue reading Stevie Nicks review – an emotional evening with rock’s great survivor | The Guardian →
Lindsey Buckingham, Reviews, Solo Activity, UK Articles

Lindsey Buckingham UK/Europe tour reviews

Leave a comment

Lindsey Buckingham UK/Europe tour reviews

Collection of tour reviews

Lindsey Buckingham review — the Fleetwood Mac soap opera continues | The Times

★★★★☆
Alongside becoming one of the pre-eminent guitarists of his generation, Lindsey Buckingham appears to have been on a lifelong mission to annoy Stevie Nicks as much as possible. Way back on Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 divorce masterpiece Rumours, Buckingham was contributing Second Hand News, Never Going Back Again and Go Your Own Way, self-explanatory break-up anthems all in some way about his former girlfriend. When Nicks finally flipped in 2018 and said either she went or he did, Buckingham put his subsequent sacking from Fleetwood Mac down to her probably still being in love with him. Finally in London after a much-delayed tour, he certainly didn’t shy away from highlighting his undeniable contribution to Fleetwood Mac, playing all the favourites alongside his solo material.

Buckingham was always the one who pushed things musically, embracing post-punk when the others wanted to stick to soft rock. It resulted in following up Rumours with the 1979 album Tusk, the title track of which still sounded as weird as ever here with its marching beat and eerie demand, “Don’t say that you love me.” Elsewhere the concert was a masterclass in guitar playing, from the sweet acoustic finger-picking on Never Going Back Again to the gentle balladry of Time, a cover version of the plaintive Sixties hit by harmony trio the Pozo-Seco Singers, which features on Buckingham’s (very good) 2021 solo album. And when he launched off on an interminable solo he looked as if he was going through every kind of agony and ecstasy before the roar of the crowd brought him some kind of climax when the solo finally ended.

Amid all this Buckingham was a slender, lithe figure who looked good for his age (he’s 73 today) and seemed perfectly content to play with his three backing musicians as if he was filling stadiums, even though he was actually in a mid-sized theatre before a seated audience. By Go Your Own Way everyone was up on their feet, singing along and doing a bit of dancing in the aisles before being removed by overzealous ushers; exactly the kind of rapturous response that proves Buckingham can indeed go his own way, which will annoy Nicks further. Don’t bet on Lindsey Buckingham’s role in the Fleetwood Mac soap opera being over yet, though.

Will Hodgkinson

—

Lindsey Buckingham review – slick guitar work and strong singing from the Fleetwood Mac veteran | The Guardian

London Palladium
With seven albums’ worth of solo material to his name, Buckingham makes the fans wait for classic Rumours tracks – but eventually delivers in style


Lindsey Buckingham is considered rock royalty thanks to the years he spent with Fleetwood Mac, and his role in transforming a one-time great British blues band that had lost its leader and sense of direction into a multi-platinum-selling soft-rock phenomenon. But he clearly wants to be known for even more: as a singer-songwriting soloist who is also a distinctive guitarist. Tonight, those who are desperate for him to get on to his Fleetwood Mac hits are reminded that he has recorded seven albums of his own songs.

Now in his early 70s, he comes on in very tight blue jeans, black vest and jacket, backed by a three-piece band of keyboards, drums, and a second guitarist, Neale Heywood, who has worked with Fleetwood Mac. Buckingham makes no introductions as he heads into a selection of his non-Fleetwood songs, demonstrating his guitar skills from the start. He likes the finger-picking style that is associated more with folk than rock, and the opening Not Too Late shows his slick, rapid-fire technique. He has a powerful vocal range and a catalogue of fine, tuneful songs, such as Soul Drifter, which would benefit from more emotion and variety than his consistently full-tilt approach allows.

Continue reading Lindsey Buckingham UK/Europe tour reviews →

Lindsey Buckingham, Reviews, Tour Info

Lindsey Buckingham Announces First Solo Album in a Decade | Rolling Stone

Leave a comment

Rolling Stone Online
By CLAIRE SHAFFER
June 8, 2021

Former Fleetwood Mac member also shared the single “I Don’t Mind”

Lindsey Buckingham announced on Tuesday that he’ll be releasing a self-titled album — his first solo LP in a decade — on September 17th via Reprise.

Alongside the announcement, Buckingham shared the album’s first single, “I Don’t Mind.”

“‘I Don’t Mind’, like many of the songs on my new album, is about the challenges couples face in long-term relationships,” Buckingham says. “Over time, two people inevitably find the need to augment their initial dynamic with one of flexibility, an acceptance of each others’ flaws, and a willingness to continually work on issues; it is the essence of a good long-term relationship. This song celebrates that spirit and discipline.”

Lindsey Buckingham will be the singer-songwriter’s first solo album since 2011’s Seeds We Sow, and his first since his departure from Fleetwood Mac. The album will feature new original songs as well as a cover of Sixties folk group the Pozo-Seco Singers’ hit single “Time.”

“I wanted to make a pop album, but I also wanted to make stops along the way with songs that resemble art more than pop,” he says. “As you age, hopefully, you keep getting a little more grounded in the craft of what you’re doing. For me, getting older has probably helped to reinforce the innocence and the idealism that hopefully was always there.”

Buckingham will embark on a U.S. tour in support of the album, marking his first in-person shows both since the pandemic and since undergoing open-heart surgery in 2019. The tour kicks off at Milwaukee’s Pabst Theatre on September 18th and wraps in Boulder, Colorado, on December 20th. Tickets go on sale on June 11th at 10:00 a.m. local time.


Lindsey Buckingham 2021 Tour Dates Continue reading Lindsey Buckingham Announces First Solo Album in a Decade | Rolling Stone →

Fleetwood Mac, Release Info, Reviews

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

Leave a comment

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 →

Lindsey Buckingham, Reviews, Solo Activity, UK Articles, Video Clip

At Home with Lindsey Buckingham | Culture Sonar

Leave a comment

BY STEPHANIE HERNANDEZ
December 17, 2020

Editor’s Note: This is a review of a live stream event performed earlier this month by Lindsey Buckingham. It consisted of a Q&A ahead of the concert, then an intimate show performed from his home studio in L.A.

***

Question and Answer Session:

When can we expect new music, and where will you be touring
The album that we will be releasing in the near future is something that has been waiting in the wings for about three years now. For now, we are talking about the United States, Europe, and Australia, which is more than I’ve ever done as a solo artist.

Future collaborations?
Maybe a duet album with a younger female artist, yet to be determined. Even Mick Fleetwood and I were talking about doing a project together, so who knows? There’s still lots of time.

Do you have a favorite song that you do live where you really like to “shred” it?
There are two kinds of shredding. I always love doing something like “Big Love” or “Never Going Back Again,” which represents the full orchestral style with just one instrument. Then there’s lead guitar shredding. I always love “I’m So Afraid.” Those three songs have been re-envisioned and re-engineered for the stage.

How did you create your guitar style?
I was completely self-taught, so there was nobody there to tell me that I had to use a pick. It comes down to the music I happened to be exposed to, but probably more importantly because I made my own way and made my own rules.

What was your biggest contribution to Fleetwood Mac?
I just saw what my role needed to be. They needed a musical visionary and leader, they needed someone who could organize, and produce. I somehow was able to hold the line with the role I needed to fulfill for the band. Continue reading At Home with Lindsey Buckingham | Culture Sonar →

Fleetwood Mac 2018/19, Reviews, Tour Info, UK Articles

Fleetwood Mac review – all the hits, with a sour aftertaste | The Guardian

Leave a comment


The Guardian
June 22, 2019

Wembley Stadium, London
3/5 Stars

Lindsey Buckingham’s absence casts a pall over a singalong show, despite sterling work from subs Neil Finn and Mike Campbell

‘Brutal calculation’: Fleetwood Mac onstage at Wembley Stadium, and on screen (clockwise from bottom left): Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Stevie Nicks, Neil Finn, Mike Campbell and Christine McVie. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

There is no arguing with the numbers. Wembley Stadium is brimming with fans, even on a wet Tuesday. A dozen people fill the vast stage, reproducing some of the most opulent harmonies and venomous kiss-offs of the late 20th century. On Dreams, a bittersweet classic written by an enduringly swirly Stevie Nicks, a chandelier descends from the rigging. Amusingly, it goes back up afterwards, reappearing and disappearing with every one of her compositions on the final night of Fleetwood Mac’s European tour.

Superfan Harry Styles has brought his mum, Nicks reveals, complimenting her on what a well-brought-up young man he is. Super-producer Jimmy Iovine (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Nicks’s 1981 solo album Bella Donna) has flown over from the States, she says. The Fleetwood Mac setlist – barely varying from Berlin to London – is replete with peak-period hits and refreshed by a couple of deeper cuts. One, the Peter Green-era blues Black Magic Woman, made famous by Carlos Santana, finds Nicks vamping her way through a female reading of the tune as the chandelier glitters darkly. Continue reading Fleetwood Mac review – all the hits, with a sour aftertaste | The Guardian →

Fleetwood Mac 2018/19, Reviews, UK Articles

Review: Fleetwood Mac at Wembley Stadium | The Times (UK)

Leave a comment
Will Hodgkinson

The Times

With no Lindsey Buckingham, what should have been a celebration of a huge band’s enduring power felt like an empty spectacle

The sound was muddy, Stevie Nicks’s vocals veered towards flatness and the band stomped when they should have swung
MARILYN KINGWILL

★★☆☆☆

And so the soap opera continues. The story of Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 album Rumours is enshrined in soft-rock history: new recruits Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham inject California pizzazz into moribund British blues rockers, their relationship crumbles and the result is the divorce classic of the 1970s, with Buckingham lacerating his former lover on Second Hand News and Go Your Own Way and Nicks offering the gentler Dreams.

Forty million album sales certainly helped the band members to see past their emotional entanglements and keep the show on the road, but it all got too much last year when, according to their manager, Irving Azoff, Buckingham failed to suppress a smirk during a speech by Nicks at an awards ceremony. That was the last straw. After 43 years he got the boot. Now the band were carrying on regardless, with Neil Finn of Crowded House and Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers hired to fill Buckingham’s shoes, and what should have been a celebration of a huge band’s enduring power felt like an empty spectacle.

Unsurprisingly at this Wembley gig there was no Tusk, Buckingham’s experimental masterwork from 1979, and no Never Going Back Again, his folky acoustic moment from Rumours, but also no mention of him at all. Had there been a Rumours-era photograph of Fleetwood Mac shown on the screen with Buckingham cut out and Finn stuck in his place, it wouldn’t have been surprising. Yet the inescapable fact is there was chemistry between Buckingham and Nicks, even if they disliked each other, and no amount of gushing about how wonderful this new line-up was could replace that.

Continue reading Review: Fleetwood Mac at Wembley Stadium | The Times (UK) →

Lindsey Buckingham, Reviews, Solo Activity, Video Clip

Lindsey Buckingham Reveals Stories Behind His Solo Songs And Whether He’ll Ever Rejoin Fleetwood Mac | Stereogum

Leave a comment

Scott Lapatine
Streogum.com
December 10, 2018

“It certainly has been … a surprising year,” Lindsey Buckingham joked from the stage at Manhattan’s Town Hall last week. Fleetwood Mac’s erstwhile singer and guitarist is playing shows in support of Solo Anthology, a career-spanning collection that’s somehow his first-ever hits package 37 years into a successful solo career.

The just-released 6xLP version of the set marks the first time some of his most beloved songs have been available on vinyl, too. But the big surprise this year is that Fleetwood Mac are also on tour, without him.

Buckingham and his fans were shocked when, following an all-star tribute concert in January, he was unceremoniously kicked out of the band via a phone call from manager Irving Azoff at Stevie Nicks’ behest. Neil Finn and Mike Campbell were hired to replace him and consequently Fleetwood Mac shows now include songs by Crowded House, Split Enz, and Tom Petty. The silver lining is that Buckingham was freed up to do this solo tour featuring some tunes he had never before played live.

From 1981’s Law And Order to last year’s collaborative LP with Mac bandmate Christine McVie, along with a handful of movie soundtrack contributions, Solo Anthology is an overdue showcase for the more adventurous side of Fleetwood Mac’s principal songwriter and arranger, not to mention his blazing fingerstyle guitar work. While he was in NYC, I sat down with the 69-year-old father of three at a restaurant near Central Park to learn the stories behind a selection of his solo tracks, get an update on his lawsuit against Fleetwood Mac (he revealed it was settled a few weeks ago), and find out what’s next for one of rock’s most gifted guitarists.

“Trouble” (1981)

STEREOGUM: “Trouble” was your first solo single. You played basically everything on Law And Order, but “Trouble” had George Hawkins on bass and a drum loop from Mick Fleetwood.

BUCKINGHAM: It was probably a departure from much of that album, and much of what I am not as much a fan of about it now is that it was kind of a reaction to the political climate in a post-Tusk environment. In a moment when I realized the only way I was going to explore the left side of my palate was to do solo work, Law And Order was a bit, shall we say, sarcastic as a body of work, a bit camp, maybe a bit too camp, almost verging on a comedy album in some ways in terms of the irony that was there and the sensibility. “Trouble” was a song that was very absent of that, and that’s probably one reason that they picked it out as a single. Continue reading Lindsey Buckingham Reveals Stories Behind His Solo Songs And Whether He’ll Ever Rejoin Fleetwood Mac | Stereogum →

Fleetwood Mac, Original Content, Reviews, UK Articles

Music Review: 50 Years – Don’t Stop from Fleetwood Mac

Leave a comment

A new career-defining set from Fleetwood Mac that spans their 50-year existence, released in multiple formats on Nov 16th, 2018.

This career spanning collection from Fleetwood Mac has been released as a single CD, three-CD set, 5-LP vinyl set, digital download and streaming edition and is a fine collection of songs that make up the career of Fleetwood Mac from the blues era of the late 60s, to the transition period of the early 70s, the later adult orientated rock era of the late 70s and 80s, to the final set of songs that make up the swansong of the band’s recording output. Each album is represented on this set, including one song from the  2013’s ‘Extended Play‘ release.

The set is chronological in sequence except for the streaming edition (of which I will cover off later in the piece) and most tracks have been remastered for this collection and sound extremely nice and bright. The highlighted of this set for me is the single mix of ‘Fireflies’ and the first-ever physical release of ‘Sad Angel’ from the 2013 ‘Extended Play‘ release, whereas most other tracks have been made available in remastered form on recent deluxe editions of Fleetwood Mac, Rumours, Tusk, Mirage and Tango In The Night, special mention should be made for the early to mid 70s songs that have also been remastered and should appeal to casual observers of the band who would not be familiar with these tracks. Continue reading Music Review: 50 Years – Don’t Stop from Fleetwood Mac →

Lindsey Buckingham, Release Info, Reviews

Lindsey Buckingham Gets Anthologised By Rhino | Popmatters

Leave a comment

CHARLES DONOVAN
25 Oct 2018

Can’t the members of Fleetwood Mac ever bury their differences and forge a lasting friendship? Even in their dotage, they fall out with each other at the most terrible junctures – on the eve of tours or just after the completion of albums. At one point, it seemed as if we might get another studio album from the classic lineup. It would have been the first since 1987’s Tango in the Night. Christine McVie had finally come back into the fold. Before quitting, she had held down the fort during the troubled era of Behind the Mask (1990) and Time (1995), when first Lindsey Buckingham fled, followed by Stevie Nicks. After live reunion album, The Dance (1997), McVie retired to England, peeping out briefly to issue a so-so solo album in the early 2000s. It was left to Nicks and Buckingham to front the good-ish double-album, 2003’s Say You Will. Then, no sooner was McVie back behind the piano and ready to record, Nicks proved reluctant to enter the studio. Consequently, a 2017 studio album came out under the band-name Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVie, even though Mick Fleetwood and John McVie played on it.

Now it’s Buckingham’s turn to be out in the cold, and there are conflicting reports as to why. Slowly, the PR-buffed narrative about scheduling issues is giving way to one of malice, toxicity, ill will, and bad blood, of insurmountable dislike and antipathy, and Nicks giving the band a him-or-me ultimatum. A lawsuit looms while Fleetwood Mac tour with a lineup plumped out by musical everyman, Neil Finn, plus Heartbreaker, Mike Campbell. Oh dear. The sorry mess does, however, mean that Buckingham is suitably placed for touring behind and promoting this three-disc (six on vinyl) anthology and by all accounts, a solo album will follow.

Continue reading Lindsey Buckingham Gets Anthologised By Rhino | Popmatters →