Category Archives: Reviews

Fleetwood Mac Return Without Leaving | CREEM Magazine

Creem Magazine
September 1987
by J. Fordosh

Up in the hills of Bel Air is Lindsey Buckingham’s house, Lindsey Buckingham’s croquet-perfect lawn, Lindsey Buckingham’s pool, Lindsey Buckingham’s radio-controlled toy submarine that’s busted, but could be fun in the pool, Lindsey Buckingham’s home studio, The Slope-where the final work on Fleetwood Mac’s Tango In The Night was done-and, indeed, Lindsey Buckingham himself.

Lindsey, like everyone in Fleetwood Mac, will tell us something of this latest record-and something of this immensely popular band. Their times and their troubles, stuff like that.

Fleetwood Mac’s saga has been a strange one: since Lindsey and Stevie Nicks joined up in 1975, the band’s made five studio albums, including Tango. The first four have sold something like 33 million copies-about 20 million of those courtesy of 1977’s monstrous Rumours.

You can perceive that, despite their relatively sluggish output, this band has a lot of fans. As I write this, Tango is safely ensconced in the Top 10, where it may well remain for eternity or the next Fleetwood Mac album, whichever comes first. But, coming almost five years after Mirage, we can correctly assume that there’s a story behind the story, so let’s start here . . .

Continue reading Fleetwood Mac Return Without Leaving | CREEM Magazine

Lindsey Buckingham: Go Insane Review | People Weekly

People Weekly, Oct 1, 1984
Go insane. (sound recording reviews)

GO INSANE by Lindsey Buckingham

lindsey_buckingham_-_go_insane_-_front

Buckingham–along with his former girlfriend, Stevie Nicks, and Christine McVie–provided the composing talent that boosted Fleetwood Mac to such overwhelming success in the ’70s.

Go Insane, Lindsey’s second solo album, is a manifesto of his intent to remain a rock ‘n’ roll force, even while the group itself seems to be a tabled proposition. The record is studded with power pop gems such as the title cut and I Want You, as well as Slow Dancing and Loving Cup. All of these continue in the tradition of songs that sold 35 million Fleetwood Mac albums after Buckingham joined the group in 1974. (Kind of makes you wonder why Mick Fleetwood has filed for bankruptcy.)

Lindsey flies off the handle of mainstream appeal with D.W. Suite, a seven-minute eulogy of Dennis Wilson that mixes Beach Boys-influenced harmonies with elements of prayer and traditional Irish music. There is also Play in the Rain, which closes out one side and continues as the opening cut on the other. An off-the-wall composition, it begins with high-tech surrealism before hitting a funk groove tinged with Indian sitar sounds. Those are, however, the only indications that Buckingham is indeed going off his commercial rocker.

Review Grade: A-

Christine McVie Album Review | People Weekly

People Weekly, March 19, 1984
Christine McVie. (sound recording reviews)

CHRISTINE McVIE by Christine McVie
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There’s a loose, good-time feeling to this album. The tunes, most of them written by McVie and sometime Hall and Oates guitarist Todd Sharp, are snappy and full of rhythmic rock and roll hooks. The production by Russ Titelman is slick. For all that, there’s not much excitement in McVie’s first solo album since 1970 (shortly after she’d left the British group Chicken Shack to join then-husband John McVie in Fleetwood Mac). The subtle harmonic skills that make McVie a peerless ensemble singer and musician with Mac don’t necessarily translate into a solo act.

Her singing seems colorless at times and her keyboard work is overshadowed by her sidemen. Mac mates Lindsey Buckingham and Mick Fleetwood sat in, as did Eric Clapton, Elton John, drummer Ray Cooper and rock ‘veteran Steve Winwood. McVie, in fact, calls Winwood “my idol,” and their vocal duet on One in a Million is the LP’s most striking track, though the no-frills rock tune Got a Hold on Me has become its hit single.

Maybe McVie’s heart wasn’t totally in this project–“It had reached a point where this record was expected of me,” she has said–but if nothing else, she has it out of her system.

Review Grade: B

Stevie Nicks Steals the Show – Atlanta Journal Review, 1980

Atlanta Journal
August 11, 1980
By Andrew Slater

Standing in a backstage room at the Omni, Stevie Nicks stared longingly at a bowl of Cheetos cheese balls. “I love these things,” she said as a small group of anxious post-concert party guests waited their turn to talk with Fleetwood Mac’s lead singer. “These are great to eat when you’re not on a diet.”

“However,” she added with a sardonic whine, “I am on one, so keep me away from them.”

That was not a difficult task for Ted Cohen, the Warner Bros. Press liaison who is travelling with the group and who acted as ringmaster for Fleetwood Mac’s Friday night gathering. At this reception, following the band’s first Atlanta performance in almost two years, Miss Nicks was the centre of attention, after strolling into the room fashionably later than the other band members.

Manager/drummer Mick Fleetwood, bassist John McVie, and vocalist/keyboardist Christine McVie had been milling about the room, talking with members of local radio stations and Atlanta representatives from Warner Bros. Records. The trio has served as the muscular rhythm section and spinal chord for three incarnations of Fleetwood Mac: the first during the late ’60s, when the group was a British blues band with guitarist Peter Green; the second as early ’70s melody makers with California guitarist Bob Welch; and now with their most successful aggregation, featuring third-generation Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and Miss Nicks.

Continue reading Stevie Nicks Steals the Show – Atlanta Journal Review, 1980

Fleetwood Mac – Can’t Go Home Again | Trouser Press

April 1980
By Chris Salewicz

Of course, Fleetwood Mac is the American Dream. The band’s success story is the stuff of which the mytho-logy of modern day America is made: Mick Fleetwood, John and Christine McVie, down on their luck in the Oulde Country, make the decision to move to the Promised Land. Traveling as far west as possible, these humble immigrants settle on the most advanced technological frontier in the world, Los Angeles.

Operating within rock ‘n’ roll’s picaresque tradition, a surprise encounter teams up the three Britishers with two down-and-out American natives, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. Within a year, following closely the WASP work ethic, their fortunes change for the better.

Within three years of moving to America they have become part of the aristocracy to which you are granted entry in the United States by virtue of your material rather than your blood. In Washington Fleetwood Mac is invited to the White House for social chit-chat with President Jimmy Carter.

By now they are so rich that Mick Fleetwood tells a friend he knows he need never work again in his life. It’s like a good made-for-TV movie!

Continue reading Fleetwood Mac – Can’t Go Home Again | Trouser Press

Go Your Own Way  to Californ-i-ay | Rolling Stone

Fleetwood Mac blooms in the sun

Rumours – Fleetwood Mac
Warner Bros. BSK 3010

By John Swenson
Rolling Stone Magazine
21 April 1977

Rock & Roll has this bad habit of being unpredictable. You never can tell when a band will undergo that alchemic transmigration from lead to gold. The medium of transformation is almost always a hit single, but such turnarounds often swamp a band in notoriety it can’t live up to.

But in Fleetwood Mac’s case the departure of guitarist Bob Welch who’d reduced the band to recutting pointless and pretentious versions of old standards amounted to the biggest break they ever had. With that and the addition of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, Fleetwood Mac suddenly became a California pop group; instead of laborious blues/rock jams they started turning out bright little three-minute singles with a hook in every chorus.

Christine McVie now leads a classic vocal group working out of the oldest popular tradition, love songs. Vocal harmonies are the meat and potatoes of California’s pop identity, and Fleetwood Mac is now one of the genre’s main proponents, with three lead singers of comparable range and tone. Taken individually, only McVie’s voice has much character, but she anchors their vocal arrangements, since Nicks’ low range and Buckingham’s high range approximate her dulcet, evenhanded timbre.

Despite the interminable delay in finishing the record, Rumours proves that the success of Fleetwood Mac was no fluke. Christine McVie sounds particularly vital, on ‘You Making Loving Fun,’ which works for the same reason ‘Over My Head’ was a smash. The formula is vintage Byrds: Christine sings the verse simply, with sparse instrumental background, and the chorus comes on like an angelic choir high harmonies soaring behind her with 12-string electric guitar counterpoint ringing against the vocals.

This Byrds touch is Lindsey Buckingham’s province, and it’s used most successfully on the single, ‘Go Your Own Way,’ which employs acoustic guitar backing throughout, with best effect on choruses. Mick Fleetwood’s drumming adds a new dimension to this style. Fleetwood is swinging away, but not in the fluid roll pattern most rock drummers use. Instead of pushing the rhythm (Buckingham’s acoustic guitar and John McVie’s bass playing take care of that) he’s punctuating it, playing against the grain. A touch like that can turn a good song into a classic.

Buckingham’s contribution is the major surprise, since it appeared at first that Nicks was the stronger half of the team. But Nicks has nothing on Rumours to compare with ‘Rhiannon,’ her smash from the last album. ‘Dreams’ is a nice but fairly lightweight tune, and her nasal singing is the only weak vocal on the record. ‘I Don’t Want to Know,’ which is pure post-Buffalo Springfield country-rock formula, could easily be confused with any number of Richie Furay songs.

Buckingham’s other two songs here are almost as good as ‘Go Your Own Way.’ ‘Second Hand News,’ ostensibly about the breakup of his relationship with Nicks, is anything but morose, and completely outdoes the Eagles in the kiss-off genre. Again the chunking acoustic guitar rhythm carries the song to a joyful chorus that turns average voices into timeless pop harmony. It may be gloss, but it’s the best gloss to come along in a long time. ‘Never Going Back Again,’ the prettiest thing on the album, is just acoustic picking against a delightful vocal that once again belies the bad-news subject matter.

Fleetwood Mac’s change from British blue to California folk-rock is not as outlandish as some might think. The early Sixties blues scene in England had as much to do with rural American folk music as the urban blues sound, which was predominantly a guitarist’s passion anyway. Christine McVie is much closer to a singer like Fairport Convention’s Sandy Denny than to any of England’s blues shouters. Without altering her basic sensibility McVie moves easily into the thematic trappings of the California rock myth. She’s always written love songs, and sings her ballads with halting emotion. ‘Songbird,’ her solo keyboard spot on Rumours, is elevated by its context from what would once have been referred to as a devotional blues into a pantheistic celebration of love and nature.

So Fleetwood Mac has finally realized the apotheosis of that early Sixties blues crusade to get back to the roots. It’s just that it took a couple of Californians and a few lessons from the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and the Eagles to get there.

(article sent to me by Dark Angel, with thanks)