Category Archives: UK Articles

Christine McVie, Release Info, Solo Activity, UK Articles

‘In The Meantime’: Christine McVie was “as revealing as ever”, says Dan Perfect | Dig

Leave a comment
JEANETTE LEECH
03 November 2023

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 →

Christine McVie, UK Articles

The Queen Of Hooks – Christine McVie 1943-2022 | MOJO

Leave a comment

MOJO Magazine
March 2023

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.

Continue reading The Queen Of Hooks – Christine McVie 1943-2022 | MOJO →
Christine McVie, UK Articles

Christine McVie | Classic Rock

Leave a comment

July 12, 1943 – November 30, 2022

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.

Continue reading Christine McVie | Classic Rock →
Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, Obituary, UK Articles

Christine McVie obituary | The Times (UK)

Leave a comment

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) →

Lindsey Buckingham, Tour Info, UK Articles

Lindsey Buckingham cancels rest of UK and European tour due to “ongoing health issues” | NME

Leave a comment

NME
ByWill Richards
3rd October 2022

The dates were already rescheduled from earlier in 2022 when they had to be postponed due to positive COVID cases

Lindsey Buckingham cancelled the remainder of his UK and European tour dates due to “ongoing health issues”.

The former Fleetwood Mac guitarist and singer was currently midway through a run of rescheduled UK gigs, which were due to be played earlier this year before he was forced to postpone the tour after he and members of his live band and crew contracted COVID.

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

Continue reading Lindsey Buckingham cancels rest of UK and European tour due to “ongoing health issues” | NME →

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, Solo Activity, Tour Info, UK Articles

Lindsey Buckingham announces rescheduled UK and Ireland dates | NME

Leave a comment

Check out the new autumn show dates here

By Charlotte Krol

Lindsey Buckingham has confirmed his rescheduled UK and European shows.

The former Fleetwood Mac guitarist and singer was in May forced to postpone the tour after he and members of his live band and crew contracted COVID.

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

Continue reading Lindsey Buckingham announces rescheduled UK and Ireland dates | NME →

Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey Buckingham, Release Info, Solo Activity, UK Articles

“Applaud my genius, Bemoan my failings” | The RC Interview with Lindsey Buckingham

Leave a comment

Record Collector Magazine
April 2022
Terry Staunton

Musicians with careers as long and as successful as Lindsey Buckingham’s tend to have a wealth of stories to tell, but few have involved quite so many plot twists. From relatively unassuming beginnings as a recording artist via a sun-kissed album made with his then-girlfriend Stevie Nicks, he was catapulted into the white heat of superstardom with Fleetwood Mac, as a creative linchpin of the makeover that brought them global acclaim. A solid, parallel solo career garnered more plaudits, if not the same sales, but there have been myriad pitfalls and problems along the way Oddly, despite the stratospheric success, he remains, in a sense, a cult artist, “I was determined to avoid becoming a caricature,” he tells Terry Staunton.

Lindsey Buckingham opens with an apology. While happy to be grilled about any and all aspects of his professional and private life, he’s concerned some events may be trickier to recall than others: “I want to say sorry in advance, in case I draw a blank on some of your questions. There may be memory lapses, especially during those years we weren’t behaving ourselves.”

The misbehavior he alludes to is a frequently referenced component in the story of Fleetwood Mac, a band whose appetite for frowned-upon substances has, in some quarters, defined them as much as any of their million-selling albums. The same can be said about the unraveling of in-house romantic entanglements that inform the contents of their most iconic work, the “musical soap opera”, Rumours. Released in early 1977, three months before Star Wars opened in US cinemas, more than one subsequent magazine article about its songs and the star-crossed lovers who made them has headlined May Divorce Be With You.

Quick-fix shorthand aside, however, Buckingham’s is a musical CV distinguished by daring, by taking risks, by refusing to zig and relishing a zag. He may have been the co-architect of the perceived pinnacle of soft rock (with worldwide sales north of 40 million), but he was also the driving force behind the often wilfully radio-unfriendly Tusk.

When the boundaries of the Fleetwood Mac blueprint were no long a workable (or welcome) fit for his spirit of musical adventure, he embarked on a parallel solo career that, while retaining many of the melodic hallmarks of the band, allowed him to scratch a relentless itch for pushing envelopes. His 2021 self-titled collection is a continuation of the sonic explorations of its six predecessors, of a hunger to remix the paints on what he refers to in this interview as his “artistic palette”.

It’s an album we should have heard when it was completed in 2018, were it not for a sequence of events no one saw coming on the last day of its recording. A request to extend his sabbatical from the group in which he’d served for a total of 43 years was met with an unceremonious sacking, and while still licking his wounds from that bolt-out-of-the-blue news, Buckinghamham was rushed to hospital to undergo triple-bypass surgery.

While recuperating and redrafting plans to take the new record to market, his private life also went into a tailspin with headlines that the man whose name was synonymous with hign-profile breakups in the rock biz, was getting a divorce from Kristen Messner, his photographer and interior designer wife of 21 years. The ending of that particular chapter has yet to be written, and the now 72-year-old Buckingham is candidly philosophical about what the future might hold.

Today he has a European tour (including his first-ever solo shows in the UK) to promote, while looking back at the highs and lows of a life in music that started with playing acid rock bass at school in the San Francisco suburb of Atherton. Continue reading “Applaud my genius, Bemoan my failings” | The RC Interview with Lindsey Buckingham →

Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, Release Info, UK Articles

Fleetwood Mac star Christine McVie announces new solo album | Retro Pop

Leave a comment

Christine McVie will release a new solo album this summer.

The singer-songwriter helped take Fleetwood Mac to the top of the charts with classic hits such as Say You Love Me, You Make Loving Fun, Everywhere and Little Lies.

Now, she’s set to revisit some of her best-loved compositions for a compilation album of reimagined recordings.

She told Gary Barlow’s ‘We Write The Songs’ podcast: “I’ve just finished an album, which is a compilation of my biggest hits, but they’ve all been produced again by Glyn Johns, Vince Mendoza on strings – who does this fantastic version on Songbird.

“So that’s gonna be released – but they all sound completely different.”

Elaborating on the new recording of the group’s classic piano ballad, she said: “We’ve just now actually re-cut it with a complete string orchestra and it sounds beautiful.”

Christine released her self-titled first solo album ‘Christine Perfect’ in 1970 and, 14 years later, returned with ‘Christine McVie’, featuring the UK Top 40 hits Got a Hold on Me and Love Will Show Us How.

Two decades later, she released its follow-up ‘In The Meantime’, and in 2017 collaborated with Lindsey Buckingham on their eponymous duets album.

While there’s new music in the pipeline, Christine is less certain about the future when it comes to returning to the road.

Asked whether there are plans for live shows, she confessed: “That, I daren’t comment on yet. I’m very cagey about things like that.”

While firm release details have yet to be confirmed, the album is due in June.

Retro Pop
27/03/2022

Lindsey Buckingham, Release Info, Solo Activity, UK Articles

Lindsey Buckingham | Classic Rock

Leave a comment

Interview: Bill DeMain
Classic Rock Magazine, Dec 2021, Issue 296

Ousted from Fleetwood Mac, the guitarist/vocalist bounced back with one of our albums of 2021. While happy to continue as a solo artist, he’s still hopeful that he can make one more record with the Mac.

We had this legacy that was all about rising above our difficulties,” Lindsey Buckingham tells Classic Rock. “That was always the subtext of Fleetwood Mac – that we stayed together through thick and thin.” Buckingham is reflecting on his lingering disappointment over being forced out of the band in 2018. It couldn’t have been fun seeing the Mac then tour without him, even if it did take two guitarists to fill his absence. “I didn’t see the show, but looking at the set list I thought: ‘Hmm, it’s like a covers band.” Add to that his triple bypass heart surgery, a vocal cord scare and covid, and it’s been a tumultuous few years for the singular 72-year-old-musician and producer. All of which helps make his brilliant new self-titled solo album such a triumph. Deeply personal songs, artful vocal arrangements and fiery guitar work – it has all his trademark touches, and also, as he describes below, a weird prescience about it.

This record totally upends the cliché of a seventy-something artist and diminishing returns and having your best work behind you.

Thank you, that’s very kind. I think a lot of it is about the choices you make along the way, and somehow not losing your perspective, you know? I’ve seen a lot of people do that. I’ve seen people in Fleetwood Mac do that, allowing themselves to be defined by external forces and expectations rather than their inner beliefs and the soul of where all this stuff should come from. Staying creative takes work and not getting distracted by the task of that, for sure.

Continue reading Lindsey Buckingham | Classic Rock →