Category Archives: Tour Info

‘We were never too stoned to play’ Fleetwood Mac: the comeback interview | The Times

The Mac are back, with live shows, songs and a re-release.

Will Hodgkinson meets Mick Fleetwood and Christine McVie
The Times

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 It is 36 years since Rumours, the soft-rock masterpiece by Fleetwood Mac, became the soundtrack to separation. Songs such as Go Your Own Way, The Chain and You Make Loving Fun articulated the new rules of relationships for the baby boom generation, capturing the reality of affairs, tensions, betrayals and break-ups and selling more than 40 million copies in the process. For much of the 1980s, arguing over who got the copy of Rumours was as much a part of divorce as lawyer’s fees and pretending to like each other in front of the kids.

MAC-MAINn_1665500aFleetwood Mac – from left, John McVie, Christine McVie, Mick Fleetwood, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks – at the time of Rumours

Sam Emerson

Rumours hit a nerve because it came from a place of truth. Fleetwood Mac’s keyboardist Christine McVie was divorcing its bassist John McVie. The singer Stevie Nicks was splitting with her childhood sweetheart, the band’s guitarist Lindsey Buckingham. Stuck somewhere in the middle was the drummer Mick Fleetwood, who was recently divorced from his wife. Everyone dealt with the situation in the only way rock stars in the 1970s knew how: by taking huge amounts of cocaine. Continue reading ‘We were never too stoned to play’ Fleetwood Mac: the comeback interview | The Times

Mick Fleetwood: ‘Rumours is who we are’ – Telegraph

Telegraph.co.uk
Thursday 07 February 2013
Neil McCormickBy Neil McCormick

With their 35-year-old album back in the charts, the Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood talks to Neil McCormick about its stormy story and long legacy.

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Don’t stop… Mick Fleetwood behind the kit in 2009  Photo: REX

‘It’s good therapy,” says Mick Fleetwood, settling back to talk about Rumours,
an album released 35 years ago that continues to haunt the lives of everyone
involved. “There’s still a fascination about it, it’s who we are and what we
are, the reason why we made all that music. It forces you to think about
yourself, how you’ve developed or undeveloped, screwed up or not, what you
learnt from that, and whether you have truly moved on from the hurt, fear
and loathing.”

Fleetwood Mac’s classic 1977 album is back in the charts, a reissued expanded
edition going straight in at No  3 this week. “It’s this mutant thing, with
a life of its own,” says Fleetwood about the enduring appeal of an album
that has already sold more than 40 million copies. “It shaped me as a
person, because we went through a damage, making that album,” admits the
tall, hirsute, elegantly attired 65-year-old drummer. “I know it sounds
like, ‘Oh my God, when will those people grow up?’ Well, the reality was
maybe we didn’t actually ever grow up. But it’s never too late. We’re not
finished yet.” Continue reading Mick Fleetwood: ‘Rumours is who we are’ – Telegraph

Mick Fleetwood: We miss Christine.. I’m hoping I can get her to rejoin

The Sun
By JACQUI SWIFT
Published: 01st February 2013

IT was one of the top-selling albums of the Seventies which turned Fleetwood
Mac into the biggest superstars in the world.

 

But with all the broken hearts, tempestuous affairs and excessive drink and
drugs, the making of 1977’s Rumours came at a price.

This week, almost 36 years after the seminal record hit shelves, an expanded
and deluxe version of the album is released including original B-side Silver
Springs, unreleased live recordings, outtakes, and documentary The Rosebud
Film.

Rumours was huge, selling more than 40million copies, and made the entangled
lives of Brits Mick Fleetwood, husband and wife John and Christine McVie and
US couple Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, one of rock ’n’ roll’s
legendary stories.

Songs such as Don’t Stop, Go Your Own Way, You Make Loving Fun, The Chain and
Dreams are as popular as ever today. With a world tour opening in the US in
April and a UK tour planned for September, Fleetwood Mac are winning over a
new generation of fans as well as their hardcore devotees. Continue reading Mick Fleetwood: We miss Christine.. I’m hoping I can get her to rejoin

Fleetwood Mac ‘coming to UK in September’

Fleetwood Mac ‘coming to UK in September’

NME.com
January 29, 2013 10:24

Mick Fleetwood confirms band will play UK shows and also hints at new album plans

2011MickFleetwoodPA150312Fleetwood Mac are to play live shows in the UK in the autumn, Mick Fleetwood has confirmed.

The band are due to embark on a world tour from April of this year, with US dates already in place. However, there are yet to be concrete plans for any shows in the UK announced. Speaking to BBC 6Music, Fleetwood confirmed that the group are heading across the Atlantic, most likely in September or October. “We’re doing a big world tour that starts in April. We’re coming here [the UK] in September, October and maybe a bit longer. We’re doing a lot of work here so we are coming,” he said.

The drummer also revealed that there is a new Fleetwood Mac album in the pipeline and that new songs will be released online in the coming months. “We decided, myself and Lindsey [Buckingham], went into the studio and created a calling card for Stevie (Nicks) letting her know we wanted to make new music. We had the greatest time and we made some really good music. Then her mother died and it wasn’t time for her to be singing. Just recently though she has sung on three of them and we’ve recorded one original song of hers. So, we’re going to go crazy and there will be something out that we will play onstage and that might become part of a long term plan over the next year. Our wish is going to come true and we will finish an album. I hope there is a demand for it, after we throw two or three songs out on the internet, and we might make an album.”

FleetwoodMac1PA160712It was long rumoured that Fleetwood Mac would perform at this year’s Glastonbury Festival. However, the booking of a number of US dates on the same weekend in June appears to rule that possibility out.

Meanwhile, a reissued version of the band’s classic album ‘Rumours’ was released this week to coincide with its 35th anniversary.

Back with Second Hand News: Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours

The Oxford Student Online
By Oliver Hancock

I remember reading an issue of Rolling Stone a few years ago about the ‘100 Greatest Albums of All Time’, and thinking about how these countdowns might differ in different magazines – NME’s top 10 will almost certainly not be the same as Kerrang’s.article-0-0B078D75000005DC-182_306x327

Getting down to the top 10, all the usual candidates I would expect in modern music magazines were there (The Beatles, Stones, Dylan etc.), but the number 4 on the list was an album I’d never really heard of: Rumours by Fleetwood Mac. I wondered how an album considered canonical by one of the world’s biggest music magazines could have passed me by; why all the ‘Top 100…’ articles I’d read in British magazines could have ignored Rumours in the top bracket. The album itself was popular and critically acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic, unsurprising given the Anglo-American core of the band, and yet an avid reader of British music magazines in the 21st-century might never consider Fleetwood Mac’s seminal LP in the same bracket as many of the well-trodden ‘classic’ albums. Continue reading Back with Second Hand News: Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours

Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours: Why the under-30s still love it

Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours: Why the under-30s still love it

Telegraph.co.uk

Ahead of the release of a special boxset edition of the Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, James Lachno argues that the 1977 album has survived better than its punk rivals.

 

Rumours is beloved by twentysomething partygoers, and the hippest bands around all want to sound like Fleetwood Mac

This Monday, a three-disc, 35th anniversary boxset of Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 masterpiece Rumours will be released. There’s never been a better time to celebrate the band and their gorgeous 11th album, both of which are more
popular and fashionable than ever. Continue reading Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours: Why the under-30s still love it

35 years of Rumours: Will a reissue add to Fleetwood Mac’s classic album?

Scotmans.com
Sunday 27 January 2013
STUART BATHGATE

It’s 35 years since the release of Rumours, but will yet another version add anything to the classic, asks Stuart Bathgate, or are reissues just a cynical ploy by record companies to capitalise on our memories?

Photo by Sam Emerson
Photo by Sam Emerson

YOU bought the record. You’ve got the CD. Perhaps, in the early days of the Walkman, you also had it on tape. All in all, you might well reckon you’ve done your bit by Rumours, Fleetwood Mac’s classic 1977 album. Bought it, bought it again, bought it a third time and given at least two versions to the charity shop.

Ah, but you don’t have the expanded or the deluxe 35th anniversary edition, do you? And you want them, don’t you? Or at least, that’s what the band and their record company hope.

More than 40 million copies of Rumours, in its various guises, have been sold to date, and now the aim is to shift a few more when those two new versions are released on Monday. Which, incidentally, as you may have noticed, is almost a month after the 35th anniversary ended. They always did take their time getting projects finished, Fleetwood Mac, and this one has been no different. Continue reading 35 years of Rumours: Will a reissue add to Fleetwood Mac’s classic album?

Album review: Fleetwood Mac, Rumours: Super Deluxe Remastered Version (Rhino)

Album review: Fleetwood Mac, Rumours: Super Deluxe Remastered Version (Rhino)

ANDY GILL
FRIDAY 25 JANUARY 2013
THE INDEPENDENT UK
star number 1star number 2star number 3star number 4star number 5
Pitch-perfect pop before they went their own way
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It speaks volumes about the enduring quality of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours – here repackaged in an expanded heritage edition comprising, in its most lavish format, four CDs, one DVD and audiophile vinyl album – that not even the twin taints of appropriation as Top Gear theme and political anthem have managed to diminish its appeal. It remains one of pop’s most impervious generational touchstones.

Rumours represents, along with The Eagles Greatest Hits, the high-water mark of America’s Seventies rock-culture expansion, the quintessence of a counter-cultural mindset lured into coke-fuelled hedonism. Its very sound, with those winsome melodies, those West Coast harmonies, and that rhythm section lagging fractionally, imperceptibly behind the beat conjures a fantasy world of luxurious, liberal excess and Californication, captured with sleek perfection.

The album’s story is well-known now, rock’s premier case of strife bringing forth sweetness, as Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham batted the tattered remnants of their relationship back and forth in song. She had only to refer to “thunder” in “Dreams”, for him to snipe back “You can roll like thunder” in “Go Your Own Way” – but both songs are equally sublime, as too are Christine McVie’s attempts to cheer the troops up in songs like “Don’t Stop” and “You Make Loving Fun”.

Heaven only knows how they managed to remain focused (and civil) enough to bring the project to such glorious fruition, a process here sketched out across two CDs of revealing demos and outtakes, the best of which may be Buckingham’s exquisite “Brushes” – the original demo for “Never Going Back Again” – on which his delicate, lace-like threads of multi-tracked guitar intertwine with the crystalline sparkle of dulcimer or harp.

Hearing the band develop its definitive voice in these performances, one’s interest is sharply piqued for the imminent reformation tour: it may not be as intriguing as Bowie’s comeback, but there’s a peculiar magic in operation here that deserves treasuring.

Fleetwood Mac: Rumours | The Times

Fleetwood Mac: Rumours

Will Hodgkinson
January 25 2013

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Thirty-five years after its release, we can revel in the most accomplished slice of adult contemporary rock ever made

Rumours is unique in being a 20th-century masterpiece that did more damage to rock’n’roll than any other album in the history of music. It’s impossible not to revel in the songcraft of Christine McVie’s Songbird. Lindsey Buckingham’s Go Your Own Way is the ultimate drivetime anthem. The Chain is the last word in soft rock excitement and the slick studio sophistication of Don’t Stop is too tasty to resist. But Rumours is also the 30 million-selling monster that, by making it OK to be a moaning, self-obsessed rock star peddling commoditised emotion to the record-buying public, set in motion a terrible chain of events. We can blame Rumours for the vast majority of horrific middle-of-the-road rock that blighted the 1980s, not to mention any number of bland singer-songwriters aiming to sound intimate while also wishing to appeal to the widest demographic possible, and we can thank it for helping make punk happen as a reaction to it.

Now, 35 years after its release, on a three-CD special edition or, better still, a 45rpm vinyl double album that expands the clarity of this exercise in sonic science, we can revel in the simple pleasure of listening to the most accomplished slice of adult contemporary rock ever made. Continue reading Fleetwood Mac: Rumours | The Times

It’s still MACnificent! 35 years on, classic Fleetwood Mac album Rumours is back with a twist

Daily Mail Online
By ADRIAN THRILLS
24 January 2013

FLEETWOOD MAC: Rumours (Rhino, Expanded and Deluxe editions)
Verdict: Rock’s greatest soap opera revisited    Rating: 5 Star Rating

article-0-0B078D75000005DC-182_306x327Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 album Rumours wasn’t so much a rock record as a fully fledged soap opera.

Fuelled by drugs and  tangled romances, it chronicled the five members’ raw emotions with classic songs like Don’t Stop, Go Your Own Way and Dreams.

Keyboardist Christine McVie described the sessions as a ‘nightly cocktail party’ while drummer Mick Fleetwood said they were ‘crucifyingly difficult’.

But the Anglo-Americans pressed on to finish ‘the most important album we ever made’.

On Monday — 35 years after its original release — Rumours is back.  The landmark album is being re-issued in two packages with bonus material, out-takes and live recordings to mark the band’s reunion tour (UK dates are expected to be in late September).

A three-CD version, selling at around £12, contains the original album, bonus tracks and the live material. For Mac maniacs, a ‘deluxe’ edition, close to £50, is  bolstered by further outtakes, a DVD and copy of Rumours on vinyl. Continue reading It’s still MACnificent! 35 years on, classic Fleetwood Mac album Rumours is back with a twist