The Fleetwood Mac icon will return to the capital in July
Stevie Nicks has been announced as the latest headliner for
London’s BST Hyde Park 2024 – find all the details below.
The Fleetwood Mac legend is due to play a solo set as part of the summer concert series on Friday, July 12. She’ll be joined by a host of special guest support acts who are yet to be confirmed.
“Anything that draws me back to London – and therefore to England – fills my heart with joy. And to be able to visit and make music… is always a dream come true,” wrote Nicks in a statement.
The singer-songwriter last performed at BST Hyde Park back in 2017 when she opened for Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers.
He also added that his replacement in the line-up “disrespected the legacy” the band had built
Lindsey Buckingham has reflected on his time in Fleetwood Mac and revealed that he would rejoin the line-up “in a heartbeat”.
The comments from the artist arose during a new interview with Conan O’Brien for SiriusXM, in which Buckingham recalled the legacy of the band and his departure from the line-up in 2018.
Currently, the future of Fleetwood Mac hangs in the balance, following the death of longtime member Christine McVie. The singer, songwriter and keyboardist died in November 2022 aged 79 “following a short illness”. It was later revealed that her death was primarily caused by suffering an ischemic stroke.
The musician had also been diagnosed with “metastatic malignancy of unknown primary origin”, meaning cancer cells had been detected in her body.
While it remains uncertain whether or not the band will continue without McVie, Buckingham has said that he would be open to the idea if the opportunity arose.
Vinyl editions of Stevie Nicks’ ‘Street Angel’ album from 1994 and ‘Trouble In Shangri-La’ album from 2001 were released on 26 January 2024 in the UK, this is the first ever time that standalone editions of these albums that have been made available outside of the career-spanning set ‘Complete Studio Albums And Rarities‘ that was released in limited quantities last year, however you may never know of these releases….
There has been no press release, no social media announcements, nothing posted on official websites and nothing from Rhino or Dig about these releases, I assume that these releases are limited to the UK for now and that announcements will be made for an international release later, but maybe not!
[edit] On further review, it seems as though releases are packaged up as part of Rhino’s ‘Start You Ear Off Right 2024‘ campaign, the albums from Stevie are also available in North America and Europe.
So, to try and make up for the lack of announcements, here is what we know….
The two albums went on sale on Friday 26 January on the UK and are available from independent record shops and are listed on Amazon UK on the affiliated links below:
STREET ANGEL 30th Anniversary
Limited Edition 2-LP 140g Transparent Red vinyl
30th Anniversary Edition of Stevie Nicks’ fifth studio album, pressed on transparent red vinyl. Originally released in 1994, the album peaked at #45 in the US, and #16 in the UK. The Gold-certified album features the singles “Blue Denim”, “Maybe Love Will Change Your Mind,” and “Street Angel” featuring David Crosby.
Tracklist
A1
Blue Denim
A2
Greta
A3
Street Angel
B1
Docklands
B2
Listen To The Rain
B3
Destiny
C1
Unconditional Love
C2
Love Is Like A River
C3
Rose Garden
D1
Maybe Love Will Change Your Mind
D2
Just Like A Woman
D3
Kick It
D4
Jane
TROUBLE IN SHANGRI-LA
Limited Edition 2-LP 140g Transparent Sea Blue vinyl
Stevie Nicks’ sixth studio album pressed on Transparent Sea Blue vinyl. Originally released in 2001, the album reached #5 on the Billboard 200 and has been certified Gold by the RIAA. The album features the hits “Sorcerer,” “Every Day,” and “Planets Of The Universe,” which reached #1 on Billboard’s Hot Dance chart.
Tracklist
A1
Trouble In Shangri-La
A2
Candlebright
A3
Sorcerer
B1
Planets Of The Universe
B2
Every Day
B3
Too Far From Texas
C1
That Made Me Stronger
C2
It’s Only Love
C3
Love Changes
D1
I Miss You
D2
Bombay Sapphires
D3
Fall From Grace
D4
Love Is
If anyone from the record company wants to provide some further information on these releases, please contact this website on the social media links provided.
Dan Perfect, nephew of Christine McVie and co-producer of her final solo album, ‘In The Meantime’, tells Dig! how the record came together.
“This was therapy,” Christine McVie said, in 2022, of recording her 2004 album, In The Meantime. “I was coming out of a relationship and just got it all off my chest.” McVie’s third and final solo album was underheard and underappreciated on release. Now, with In The Meantime freshly reissued both on vinyl and in a gorgeous new Dolby Atmos mix, the time is ripe for its reappraisal – as Dan Perfect, McVie’s nephew and the album’s co-producer/co-writer, tells Dig! in this exclusive interview.
A mainstay of Fleetwood Mac throughout many of the band’s ever-changing line-ups, Christine McVie had not been a prolific solo artist. She had released one self-titled album in 1970 (Christine Perfect, issued under her maiden name) and another in 1984 (Christine McVie). Her incredible career in Fleetwood Mac, alongside the demands of touring with the band, had left her without much time and energy for writing and recording music under her own name.
McVie left the group in 1998. “I was tired of living out of a suitcase, tired of travel, plus I had a fear of flying,” she said in 2017. “I’d been doing it longer than Stevie [Nicks] and Lindsey [Buckingham], and I’d just had enough. Plus, my father was really sick and I wanted to come back to England and rediscover my roots, and I was quite adamant that this was what I wanted to do.”
Dan Perfect remembers how his aunt begin considering a return to recording. “Chris, in the late 90s, she pretty much thought she’d retired,” he tells Dig! “She came back to England, bought a country house, and got the dogs. The reality of it was that she was bored out of her brains. And it took her quite a bit of time for her to really realise that.” Continue reading ‘In The Meantime’: Christine McVie was “as revealing as ever”, says Dan Perfect | Dig→
Fleetwood Mac’s not-so-secret weapon held the group together through breakups and freakouts, ruptures and reinventions, blizzards of drugs and booze, until even she could take no more. But without her voice, her songs, and her sanity, they were only ever half the band. Mark Blake pays tribute to Christine McVie.
On her way: Christine McVie, AKA Chicken Shack singer Christine Perfect, April 16, 1969.
IN AUGUST 1987, LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM TOLD Fleetwood Mac he wouldn’t be touring their new album, Tango In The Night. The shows were already booked and a furious Stevie Nicks chased him up and down the corridors of Christine McVie’s Beverly Hills mansion, hurling insults. Eventually, the couple ended up outside, physically threatening each other, among the manicured hedgerows and expensive cars.
“I remember saying, ‘Please don’t kill each other on my driveway,’” said McVie, displaying her flair for understatement.
Christine McVie passed away on November 30, 2022 after a short illness. Descriptions such as “the quiet one” and “Fleetwood Mac’s secret weapon” appeared in several obituaries; “referee” could also be added to the list. Really, McVie’s contribution was neither quiet nor secret.
McVie composed or co-wrote eight of the group’s 16 US Top 20 hits, including Don’t Stop, You Make Loving Fun, Everywhere and Little Lies, and was the creative glue binding the original blues band, comprising drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie, with the Californian influx of Buckingham and Nicks.
This writer was fortunate to interview her three times. She was always candid and considered, with a highly-tuned bullshit detector. McVie was also a musical giant, steeped in blues, pop and rock’n’roll, and adored and respected by the rest of Fleetwood Mac; even the notoriously single-minded Buckingham deferred “to Chris”. Yet it took her 15-year hiatus from the group and, finally, her death, for McVie’s contribution to be more fully, and broadly, acknowledged.
McVIE WAS BORN CHRISTINE ANNE PERFECT IN Bouth, Cumbria, on July 12, 1943, and never liked her surname: “Teachers would always say, ‘I hope you live up to it.’” Raised in Smethwick, on the grey border between Birmingham and the Black Country, she was the second child of music tutor and concert violinist Cyril and his wife, Beatrice, a medium and faith healer.
Growing up, McVie was wary of her mother’s interest in the occult. Though she recalled Beatrice once placing a finger on a wart under her nose and promising her it would be gone by morning: “And it was. Though I still have a slight scar there.”
A talent for art was spotted early, and McVie was barely in her teens when she was fast-tracked into Moseley Junior Art School. But music was a parallel passion, nurtured by her father and her older brother John. McVie played piano and cello, and discovered the blues aged 15 when John showed her Fats Domino’s piano songbook. Domino’s seesawing left hand on Ain’t That A Shame – “the boogie bass” as McVie called it – would reappear in several of her signature hits.
Classic Rock Magazine, Feb 2023 Words: Bill DeMain
A ground-breaking artist and the calm eye of the decades-spanning storm that was Fleetwood Mac, she brought elegance and soul to the band’s sound through her voice, keyboard playing and some of rock’s most enduring hits.
And the songbirds are singing, like they know the score
Mick Fleetwood once called her “the steadying presence” of Fleetwood Mac. And in the days following her death at age 79, tributes to Christine McVie often reached for similar phrases – the hidden strength, the cornerstone, the heart and soul – to describe the role she played for more than 50 years in rock’s most tempestuous soap opera.
“I don’t like being centre stage, I never have,” she told Uncut in 2022. “I like to be part of a group.” Watching her in concert, whether during the band’s heady late-70s era or what would be their final tour, in 2019, she was all business, more serious musician than rock star. Blue grey eyes peering out from behind blonde fringe, swaying and singing confidently at her keyboards, aligning herself with the rhythm section of Fleetwood and ex-husband John McVie, while Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham basked in the spotlight. But that cool reserve couldn’t alter the fact that Christine was the group’s most dependable and successful songwriter. When you look at their world-conquering statistics – eight multi-platinum albums, more than 130 million copies sold (the perennial Rumours alone responsible for 40 million) – at the centre are her evergreen hits like Over My Head, You Make Loving Fun, Don’t Stop, Little Lies and Everywhere. “I suppose I must be good with hooks,” she once reasoned modestly.
For all her success, it was always art and music that drove McVie. Born Christine Perfect in Bouth, a Lake District village, in 1943, she was the younger of two children. Her father was a violinist and college music professor, her mother a psychic healer. She began classical piano lessons at 11. A few years later she discovered her elder brother’s Fats Domino songbook inside the piano seat. “It was goodbye Chopin,” she said. She got hooked on the New Orleans-style boogie-woogie blues, and at 16 wrote her first song. That rolling-river left-hand feel would stay with her, lending a funky current to many of her best songs in the years ahead. “It always comes back to the blues,” she would often say of her writing style.
On a scholarship, she studied sculpture, needlecraft and dress design in art college. “Perfect for a future career in Fleetwood Mac,” she joked. But her heart wasn’t in it.
Reserved, intelligent singer and songwriter for Fleetwood Mac whose album Rumours was one of the biggest-selling of all time
Christine McVie in 1979: she wrote many of the band’s most famous songs RANDY BACHMAN/GETTY IMAGES
Under normal circumstances, when Christine and John McVie divorced, they would have gone their separate ways. There were no children to consider and nothing to keep them together — except that they were trapped in the same band, forced to see each other each day and share a stage together every night as they toured the world with Fleetwood Mac.
To rub salt into the wounds, after separating from her husband, Christine had started an affair with the group’s lighting director while at the same time two other members of the band, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, were also breaking up and Nicks began an affair with the fifth member of the group, drummer Mick Fleetwood.
If one had been writing a rock’n’roll soap opera, the emotional maelstrom of this torrid plot would surely have been rejected as too preposterous. Yet for the participants it was all too real and they dealt with the fallout in the only way they knew how. They wrote songs to each other about their collective trauma.
The songs became the 1977 album Rumours, which went on to sell more than 40 million copies worldwide and became one of the biggest-selling albums of all time.
Christine’s compositions for the album included You Make Loving Fun, addressed to her new lover, and Don’t Stop, a message to her husband, which was later famously adopted by President Bill Clinton as his campaign theme tune. On both of them, the jilted ex-husband played bass without missing a beat. Continue reading Christine McVie obituary | The Times (UK)→
After playing the London Palladium on Saturday night (October 1), Buckingham shared a message on his social media the following day, revealing that the remainder of the dates – including a show set for tonight (October 3) in Glasgow – are now cancelled.
The message said: “Due to ongoing health issues, Lindsey is regrettably having to cancel the remaining shows on his current European tour.
“Refunds will be available from the point of purchase. Lindsey sends his deepest apologies to all of his fans who were planning to attend and hopes to return to Europe in the future.
See the message and the cancelled tour dates below.
OCTOBER 2022 03 – Glasgow, SEC Armadillo 04 – Liverpool, Philharmonic Hall 06 – Dublin, Helix
★★★★☆
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.
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.
A statement at the time read: “This is heartbreaking for Lindsey, he was so excited to come to Europe for the first time as a solo artist this spring.”
Buckingham will now play shows in Dublin, Glasgow, Liverpool and London between October 3 and October 6, 2022.
The UK run follows rearranged gigs in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Norway and Germany. Original tickets are valid for all the corresponding new dates.
Lindsey Buckingham’s UK and European tour dates 2022:
OCTOBER Saturday 01 – London, London Palladium Monday 03 – Glasgow, SEC Armadillo Tuesday 04 – Liverpool, Philharmonic Hall Thursday 06 – Dublin, Helix
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