Category Archives: UK Articles

Review: Buckingham-McVie album is nearly all Fleetwood Mac | Daily Mail (UK)

Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie, “Lindsay Buckingham Christine McVie” (Atlantic)

The first duet album from Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie is nearly Fleetwood Mac, with only Stevie Nicks missing from the band’s classic lineup.

Its development began even before McVie rejoined the band after 16 years for the 2014-2015 “On With the Show” tour, when Buckingham recorded several songs with the Mac rhythm section of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, who also contribute to the finished album.

More layers were added when Buckingham worked on snippets of chords, lyrics and melodies he was sent by McVie and a couple of their writing collaborations – the vocals-soaked pop of “Red Sun” and “Too Far Gone,” with a Knopfler-esque, bluesy guitar riff and pounding drums – are among the highlights of the self-titled album.

“Game of Pretend” is a trademark McVie piano-led ballad which starts with great promise but turns to mush on the refrain. The other track she penned alone on the 10-song album is the excellent closer “Carnival Begin,” her best vocal wonderfully framed by Buckingham’s production touches and his typically yearning guitar solo that fades away too soon.

If the album was meant to be part of a full Fleetwood Mac comeback at some point, the Buckingham tunes have more of a solo album feel.

Still, the track sharing a name with the last Mac tour reveals both the beauty and apparent inescapability in the life of a musician like Buckingham – “As long as I stand, I will take your hand, I will stand with my band/There’s nowhere to go, but on down the road, let’s get on with the show.”

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Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham: ‘I said to Christine, ‘You can’t leave again’ | The Guardian (UK)

30 minutes with…
Peter Robinson
Thurs 1st June 2017
The Guardian

The guitarist talks about how Christine McVie – with whom he has recorded a duet album – rejoined the band

Lindsey Buckingham: ‘Christine told me she had some rough ideas … I, of course, took great liberties with them in my studio.’ Photograph: ACE/Rex/Shutterstock

Hello Lindsey. Where are you? I’m in London and it’s quite hot.
I’m in Los Angeles and you’d think it would be hotter, but it’s actually quite cool.

What have you done so far today?
I’ve got three kids who are all in the last couple of weeks of school so my wife and I got up, had coffee and breakfast, and got the kids off to school. I went out and took my morning walk up a hill and down to get the blood going, then had a shower, and immediately got on the phone to do interviews.

Now here we are.
Here we are. A little bit later, I’m off to rehearsals. We’ve got a couple of Fleetwood Mac festival shows, but they’re interspersed with Christine and I doing a few dates – we’re starting off by doing 20 or so shows.

Let’s talk a bit about your new album with Christine [1] before I subtly manoeuvre the conversation on to demanding information about the new Fleetwood Mac album. A lot of it was done remotely, is that right?
Well, only initially. It was done in stages – before Christine decided to rejoin Fleetwood Mac, Mick Fleetwood, John McVie and I had gone into the studio, just the three of us, to cut some of my songs. We put that material on the shelf. A year after that, Christine phoned up Mick and was nosing around about wanting to rejoin the band.

“Nosing around”?
Yes! I don’t think she assumed we’d necessarily be OK with it — we had been doing quite well as a four-piece. I think she was trying to nose around to see if there was any openness to it before she got too assertive or specific about it. [2] I had to have a conversation with Christine and say: “Well, we’d love you to come back, but you can’t leave again.” She told me she’d been reconnecting with her creative muse and had some rough ideas she sent to me – I, of course, took great liberties with them in my studio. And she was interested in these songs I’d been working on, and Mick and John thought it would be good to bring her over early and cut tracks on some of these things. It was unbelievable. We only expected to do it for a couple of weeks but we stayed for a month. Nobody was saying it was a duet album – we didn’t care what it was!

So riddle-me-ree: given that this album has involvement from so many members of the band, how many songs could have been Fleetwood Mac songs?
That’s sort of a question you can’t answer …

Have a go.
Well, defining something being a Fleetwood Mac song is calling it a Fleetwood Mac song, you know? Nothing becomes Fleetwood Mac until that’s what you call it. The thing that defines this duet album as being a duet album is that it has elements of what I’ve learned over the last 15 years and brought to my own work, which is away from the palette of Fleetwood Mac. But there’s also a heart that exists by the symmetry of being only the two of us.

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Continue reading Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham: ‘I said to Christine, ‘You can’t leave again’ | The Guardian (UK)

Christine McVie reveals why she returned to the spotlight with new duet album | Daily Express

By CLAIR WOODWARD
PUBLISHED: 00:01, Sun, May 28, 2017
DAILY EXPRESS

FLEETWOOD Mac star Christine McVie reveals why she returned to the spotlight with her band… and a new duet album.

Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie return with a new duet album

The new album from Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie feels like a big, warm hug.

The great melodies, intimate harmonies and terrific arrangements are instantly recognisable as coming from two of the band’s songwriters yet they’re new and intriguing enough to make it more than just another side project from an iconic group.

And for Christine, 73 – the understated genius behind the keyboards in Fleetwood Mac and writer of some of their most recognisable songs (Don’t Stop, Little Lies, Say You Love Me, Hold Me and Everywhere) – the sensation of reconnecting with old friends was the inspiration behind the new collaboration.

She officially retired from the band in 1998, after stepping away from touring a few years earlier, and it was her return to it for the 2015 reunion tour that sparked the collaboration with Lindsey.

“We’ve always had a particular musical relationship since he first joined the band – it was immediate,” Christine explains in her warm, honeyed tone.

“The whole band was just chemistry abounding but Lindsey and I, me being the piano player and him the guitar player, understand each other musically without saying anything.

“We’ve always worked well together over the years but never thought about doing an album together until recently and now we wonder why we didn’t think about doing it before.

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Continue reading Christine McVie reveals why she returned to the spotlight with new duet album | Daily Express

Why I’ve gone my own way: On the edge of 70, Stevie Nicks addresses a few rumours… head on! | Daily Mail

By Craig McLean
Daily Mail
May 27th, 2017

Turning her back on Fleetwood Mac. Teaming up with Chrissie Hynde. And ditching drugs with a little help from Prince. The rock icon confronts all those rumours

Now this is a treat. It’s Saturday night in a cavernous rehearsal facility in the San Fernando Valley, over the hills from Hollywood, and I’m enjoying a private concert from rock ’n’ roll’s greatest woman – a living, breathing, dancing, sunglasses-indoors legend. Ahead of an American tour, Stevie Nicks is running through a selection of hits from her multi-million-selling career as a solo artist and as frontwoman with Fleetwood Mac.

Rhiannon, Gold Dust Woman, Stand Back, The Wild Heart, Edge Of Seventeen: these are some of the best-loved songs of the past 40 years. And the woman who wrote them – more used to wowing arenas – is standing a few feet away, singing them to me, bashing a tambourine as if her life depended on it, swirling in a vision of black scarves and drapes.

Stevie Nicks has had her own well-publicised battles with addiction in the Seventies and Eighties

During a break, I sit down with Nicks and, as she cradles her beloved terrier Lily, she talks. And talks. At the age of 69, this warm, witty woman remains as irrepressible as ever. As is usual in the world of Fleetwood Mac, there’s a lot to discuss. One topic is her upcoming US shows with fellow icon Chrissie Hynde, in support of Nicks’ 24 Karat Gold album. Another is rumours of a Fleetwood Mac tour – a tour that’s possibly a farewell one.

But more pressing is the imminent release of Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie. It’s ostensibly a duo album from Mac guitarist Buckingham and keyboard player/singer McVie. In the set-up and billing, it feels like a successor to Buckingham Nicks. This legendary ‘lost’ 1973 album was made by Stevie and Lindsey – then a couple – before the Californians joined a mouldering English blues band led by drummer Mick Fleetwood and assisted by bass player John McVie.

Their duo act didn’t last, and neither did their relationship. But Nicks’ and Buckingham’s songwriting contribution – not to mention their split, as famously documented in their songs on 1977’s 40-million-selling album Rumours – helped rocket-power Fleetwood Mac to Seventies rock’s mega-league.

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Continue reading Why I’ve gone my own way: On the edge of 70, Stevie Nicks addresses a few rumours… head on! | Daily Mail

Lindsey Buckingham & Christine McVie Review | MOJO Magazine

Lindsey Buckingham & Christine McVie ****
Lindsey Buckingham & Christine McVie
EAST WEST. CD/DL

Fleetwood Mac’s new not-quite Fleetwood Mac album

The party line is that Stevie Nicks’ solo commitments have forced Fleetwood Mac to put their next album on hold. But as the recent Tango In The Night reissue proved, Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie were often the band’s great unsung partnership.

Confusingly, this duets album also includes bass guitarist John McVie and drummer Mick Fleetwood, making it essentially Fleetwood Mac, minus Nicks.

McVie brings the sing-song pop (Feel About You, Red Sun) and the slightly cloying Game Of Pretend; Buckingham, the whispered vocals and fingernail-splitting guitar solos on Sleeping Around The Corner and Love Is Here To Stay, plus the album’s best song: the nagging and melancholy In My World.

Does it miss Stevie Nicks? Yes, just as the last Fleetwood Mac album, 2003’s Say You Will, missed Christine McVie. But until all parties can sync their calen-dars, this will do nicely.

Mark Blake

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The MOJO Interview: Christine McVie

A graduate of Birmingham’s blues clubs, her songwriting and harmonic joy helped make Fleetwood Mac one of the biggest acts in the world. Then, she withdrew. “I just shut myself off,” admits a fully returned Christine McVie.

Interview by ANDREW MALE
Portrait by TOM SHEEHAN
June 2017, MOJO Magazine

I’M SORRY,” SHOUTS CHRISTINE McVIE FROM the kitchen, as she rummages for mugs under the I sink, “it’s a rented flat, and everything’s still in storage.” They’re words that conjure up a cheerless one-bedroom studio with wipe-clean beige walls and collapsed sofa bed, but for Christine McVie, 73-year-old singer-songwriter and on-off veteran of Fleetwood Mac, one of the biggest-selling bands of all time, the flat is a penthouse in Belgravia, decorated with antique Turkish carpets, giant African drums and, hanging in the drawing room, Edward Reginald Frampton’s 1898 Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece, – Saint Cecilia With Angels. “It looks like she’s playing a Hammond B3, doesn’t it?” smiles McVie, pointing at the spinet in the painting, a nod to her own early years, when as art student Christine Perfect she played keyboards in late-’60s Brummie blues outfits Sounds Of Blue and Chicken Shack.

Today, McVie’s look is a designer variant on Brumbeat beatnik; grown-out blonde bob, blue jeans, white T-shirt and black leather jacket, and her Smethwick drawl is still audible beneath a warm, measured voice with the same low blue tones that have coloured such soulful Mac belters down the years as Say You Love Me, Don’t Stop and Little Lies.

Indeed, Mac history is all around us, McVie’s walls bedecked with early photos of herself with band founder and drummer Mick Fleetwood, and bassist and one-time husband John McVie. There’s tour posters from the early-’70s Bob Welch years, and a plethora of platinum record updates on the 30-million-plus sales of the band’s 1977 LP Rumours. Recorded with LA conscripts Lindsey Bucking-ham and Stevie Nicks, the album set in motion 20 years of infra-band dance, dalliance and excess, and finally ended for McVie when she walked away from the group in 1998, exhausted and disillusioned, with a dream of living quietly in the Kent countryside.

Today she positively beams when discussing the band, especially her surprise return to the fold at the 02 Arena in September 2013 that led to the On With The Show world tour (“There was nothing bad about that tour. Everything was a joy!”) and the resultant reunion sessions with Buckingham, Fleetwood and McVie that have resulted in a buoyant new “duets” album, Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVie, recorded in Studio D at Village Recorders in Los Angeles, the same custom-designed annex the Mac had built, at ludicrous expense, for the recording of Tusk, some 39 years ago. “Lindsey gets me,” says McVie, happily, “and I love working with him. As with everything in Fleetwood Mac, it’s chemistry. I feel like I’ve come home. The prodigal daughter returns.”

So, how did Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVie come about?
I’d rejoined the band, after being retired for 16 years, and I had a phone call from Lindsey saying, “If you’re going to do that Chris you gotta commit.” He’s very hardline. I said, “I’m committing!” And I did. I worked out, I started writing songs, I sent Lindsey some demos, and he did his magic on them. It never occurred to us anything would happen in terms of an album. Then we thought it was a good way of getting me back into the swing of things for the upcoming Fleetwood Mac tour. We got some studio time, Lindsey brought in some songs he’d recorded with John and Mick a few years back, and before we knew it we had, like, six or seven songs. We shelved them, because we had to rehearse to go on the road, then we just pulled them back out a few months ago and decided to make it a proper duets album.

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Continue reading The MOJO Interview: Christine McVie

In Fleetwood Mac nothing fits into any formula | The Times

26th May 2017
The Times

Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie have got back together to sing duets, they tell Will Hodgkinson

Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie: “It was clear early on that this wouldn’t be Fleetwood Mac”

Just when you have a handle on the Fleetwood Mac drama, the principal characters go way off script and do something nobody could have predicted. First, the songwriter and pianist Christine McVie makes a surprise return in 2013 after a 15-year absence. Now McVie has recorded a duets album with Lindsey Buckingham, the guitarist associated, through good and bad times, with the other woman in the group: one Stevie Nicks.

“This is a band where nothing fits into any formula,” says Buckingham, on an atypically stormy afternoon in Los Angeles. He is at the Beverly Hills office of Fleetwood Mac’s manager, Irving Azoff, where I have just heard a handful of songs from the forthcoming duets album. From Buckingham’s sweet, fairytale-like In My World to McVie’s breezily romantic Feel About You, the album features classic Fleetwood Mac-style soft rock, which isn’t surprising given that Mick Fleetwood and John McVie form the rhythm section. The only Maccer missing, in fact, is Nicks.

“Oh, she’s fine about it,” insists Buckingham, on what Nicks makes of her old boyfriend recording an album with her one-time ally in the male-dominated world of 1970s rock. “She was off on her own thing [a solo tour], she knew what we were doing, and it was clear early on that this wouldn’t be Fleetwood Mac. You can look at it cosmically. The universe was speaking to Christine and me, even to Stevie, for this to be a duets album.

“Doing a duets album with Lindsey was the last thing I expected,” says McVie. “We don’t hang out in the way Stevie and I do, but we do work well together, and we ended up with all this material while Stevie was off doing other things. It started when I was in LA to rehearse for the tour and it developed from there. It’s just another splinter off the tree.”

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Fleetwood Mac: The Saga Continues. Meet… Buckingham McVie | Uncut Magazine

Uncut Magazine
Stephen Deusner
May 2017

Go Your Own Way

Fleetwood Mac should be preparing for their farewell tour but, true to form, their epic saga has taken on another complicated turn. Introducing, then, the dynamic duo of Buckingham McVie  – “a nice splinter off the main artery of Fleetwood Mac.” In this exclusive interview, Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie reveal all to Stephen Deusner about their unexpected side project, and about how it fits into the storied past, present and future of Fleetwood Mac. “It’s that umbilical cord that can’t be broken,” says Christine. “It just pulls you back.”

“THERE WAS SOMETHING COSMIC about it.” says Lindsey Buckingham. He’s sitting at the head of a long table in the brightly lit conference room of an anonymous office building in the Westwood neighbourhood of L.A, talking about Buckingham McVie, the new album he wrote and recorded with his Fleetwood Mac bandmate Christine McVie. Even as they are preparing for a Fleetwood Mac farewell tour in 2018, these two members have emerged as intimate collaborators proving there’s still a lot of life left in the band. “She and I kept saying to each other, ‘Why did it take us so long to think that it would be cool to do a duets album?’ I guess it was logistics – just getting to the point where the stars all aligned.” It’s a record with a lot of history behind it: more than 40 years of hook-ups and break-ups, marriages and divorces, drug abuse and recovery, departures and returns, hits and misses. It’s a story that begins with pub gigs in the late 1960s and a fateful Tex-Mex dinner meeting in the early 1975 and ends with a final arena tour in the late 2010s, spanning nearly every continent (even Antarctica, if you count the band’s penguin mascot) and almost every style of rock, including Buckingham’s early acid-rock and McVie’s beloved blues. And yet, these two musicians, both so embroiled in their own dramas, never really had any drama between them.

“The idea of us working together wasn’t about what kind of album we were making, at least not initially. It was just about getting together and finding some common ground. The fact that she had stuff she wanted to work on was really intriguing, and as soon as we got in the studio – maybe a week in – we looked at each other and were like, Holy shit, this feels like… something… I don’t want to say a ‘duets album’, but it felt like something substantial. It had never occurred to us to pursue anything like that.” As he speaks, Buckingham glances out the window, which offers a perverse panorama of L.A swallowed up by low clouds. “It’s been raining for a while,” he says, “but we need it.” That might be an understatement. The city with which he and Fleetwood Mac have long been associated is under siege: it’s been pouring for hours, with a strong wind coming in off the ocean. Meteorologists call it a bombogenesis, or a weather bomb. Streets are flooding all over town. Traffic lights are going out. Fallen trees are blocking roads. There are reports of sinkholes opening up and swallowing cars whole. The scene is apocalyptic – if California is ever going to sink into the Pacific, today might be the day.

“I’ve grown up since I last worked with her”
Lindsey Buckingham

Buckingham, by contrast, looks the model of a gracefully ageing Golden State rock star, tanned and animated, his grey-green eyes still lively and his salt-and-pepper hair still standing on end. He’s sporting a black leather jacket over a plunging black V-neck and blue jeans: something of a uniform for the singer-songwriter-guitarist, producer. His hands fidget at the table, as though he’d much rather be playing guitar than talking to a journalist. Who wouldn’t?

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Continue reading Fleetwood Mac: The Saga Continues. Meet… Buckingham McVie | Uncut Magazine

Memories of Meantime | Uncut Magazine

Christine McVie on her ‘lost’ third album

In September 2004, six years after retiring from Fleetwood Mac, Christine McVie released her third solo album, In The Meantime. It was a casual affair, Helped by her nephew Dan perfect and featuring contributions from former Fleetwood Mac member Billy Burnetts, ex-husband Eddy Quintela and singer-songwriter Robbie Pattern (with whom she wrote “Hold Me” in the early 1980s.

Recorded entilely in her garage in rural Kent, In The Meantime feature some of the strongest songs in decades, including the sweet opener “Friend” the globe-trotting travelogue “Bad Journey” and the devastating “So Sincere” (“Didn’t you like my love song darling? I was so sincere”). “It’s a great little record.” she says. “My nephew happens to be pretty handy with ProTools, and he plays a pretty good guitar. He did quite a bit of writing on it as well. He and I get on really well, I think because we share the same self-deprecating humour. It was a successful project inasmuch as it brought us closer together.

It was not a particular successful however, in other regards, and McVie blames herself and her fear of flying for the record’s failure to fine an audience. “I couldn’t even contemplate going on the road with it. I did fly to New York once, bit I had to get drunk to do it. So then album died a graceful death.

In retrospect, In The Meantime holds up surprisingly well, especially when compared to Fleetwood Mac’s more bombastic Say You Will, released the year before. It was the band’s first record in 36 years without McVie, and her love songs are greatly missed. “Even with John and Mick playing, it was a glorified Buckingham-Nicls album,” she says, referring to the duo’s pre-Mac release. “I think that element of me might have been missing, those love songs that are both intimate and commercial. So to be back in the band again is just magical.

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Fleetwood Mac: Tango In The Night Deluxe Edition Review | Classic Rock Magazine

The soundtrack to the Yuppie era in all its designer-suited finery.

There’s a reason that 1980s nostalgia has never really taken hold, and that’s because the 1980s generally sucked. Sure, interesting things were happening on the fringes, but mainstream culture was taking the express elevator all the way down to Yuppie Hell. And playing through the speakers in that elevator was Tango In The Night.

With 1977’s Rumours, Fleetwood Mac had accidentally invented the 80s in all its self-absorbed cocaine glory three years early. A decade on, the pharmaceutical vitality which gave that album its spirit had given way to the hollow-souled, million-dollar chintz of Tango In The Night. That it sold by the truckload tells you all you need to know about 1987.

This 30th-anniversary ‘deluxe’ edition is the musical equivalent of digging up a Blue Peter time capsule and finding the films of Sylvester Stallone on VHS. In both cases, you can’t help thinking: “Did people really like that shit?” As with Rocky IV and Rambo, Fleetwood Mac’s 14th album has not aged well. The twinkling keyboards and electronic drums that cling to Everywhere and Little Lies like an Exxon Valdez oil slick may have been state of the art in 1987, but then so was the Sinclair C5.

But the production isn’t the biggest problem here — the songs are. Whatever magic Mac once possessed had long since been dispelled by time and internal psychodramas. Lindsey Buckingham would once have dismissed Family Man and You And I, Part II for being too trite, Christine McVie’s Mystified is barely a breath away from lift music, while Stevie Nicks’ increasingly strangulated warbling has the emotional resonance of a goat being strangled by a goose.

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Continue reading Fleetwood Mac: Tango In The Night Deluxe Edition Review | Classic Rock Magazine