Category Archives: UK Articles

Stevie Nicks, UK Articles

Stevie Nicks – On The Wings Of A Dove | Classic Rock

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Classic Rock Magazine
Issue 288, June 2021
By Bill Demain

Forty years ago, Stevie Nicks stepped out from the chaos and control of Fleetwood Mac with a hit-laden debut solo album that showed she could fly just as high on her own.

It’s September 1980. From the deck of the Pacific Palisades home that Stevie Nicks was sharing with her new boyfriend, producer Jimmy lovine, you could hear the hypnotic push and pull of the ocean. Inside, among the tropical plants, Persian rugs and paintings of dragons and gypsies, there was the even more alluring sound of three siren voices dovetailing in perfect harmony. Stevie and Lori Perry and Sharon Celani, her two closest friends, would spend hours around the upright piano, singing everything from old country and western covers to Stevie’s new songs. It was here that the seeds took root for Bella Donna, the breakout solo record that forever changed both the dynamic in Fleetwood Mac and Nicks’s life as an artist.

Exhausted from the previous two years of high-stakes drama around the recording and touring of Fleetwood Mac’s epic double album Tusk, the 32-year-old singer welcomed the laid-back etting and easy camaraderie with her girlfriends.

“In Fleetwood Mac there’s always a chaos,” Nicks told me in 2003. “It’s not easy for us. It never will be. It hasn’t ever been. Whenever we get back into a room together and start working, we don’t agree on a lot of stuff. And we’ve fought through every single record we have ever made.”

Part of that fight was getting songs on a record. Having three songwriters in Mac meant that after six years in the band Nicks had built up a backlog of unused top-drawer material. “When we’d do an album, they’d hear fifteen of my songs and invariably pick the two that were my least favourite,” she complained. “Some of my favourite songs wouldn’t get used.” Continue reading Stevie Nicks – On The Wings Of A Dove | Classic Rock →

Fleetwood Mac, Mick Fleetwood, Release Info, UK Articles

Mick Fleetwood: ‘You’re talking to the dude who never gives up. We’re still a band’ | The Times (UK)

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Will Hodgkinson
The Times

The drummer talks about the soap opera that has been Fleetwood Mac since 1967 — and the all-star tribute to bandmate Peter Green

Mick Fleetwood at last year’s London Palladium concert
ROSS HALFIN

For the past 54 years Mick Fleetwood, 73, has kept Fleetwood Mac going in the face of insurmountable odds. When the guitarist Lindsey Buckingham was fired from the band in 2018, in part linked to his former girlfriend Stevie Nicks announcing that she could not bear to share a stage with him again, it was just the latest hurdle for the soft-rock stadium fillers who have faced everything from divorces to affairs to drug-induced breakdowns.

The problems began when Peter Green, the band’s founder and one of the greatest guitarists, took LSD at a commune in Munich in March 1970 and never recovered. He left Fleetwood Mac a few months later.

“He was a lot of fun, right up until the day he walked out of the band,” says Fleetwood down the line from his home in Hawaii. “He had a real sense of ambition about what he wanted to do. You can listen to Man of the World now and hear the signs [in 1977 Green was diagnosed with schizophrenia], but I thought Peter had just written a sad song about a feeling.”

Perhaps that hindsight helped to spur Fleetwood on to put together a remarkable concert, which took place at the London Palladium on February 25, 2020 — just before the pandemic hit the UK — in honour of Green. Everyone from Fleetwood Mac’s keyboardist and singer Christine McVie to Pete Townshend to David Gilmour joined in, alongside some rather surprising Peter Green fans. Continue reading Mick Fleetwood: ‘You’re talking to the dude who never gives up. We’re still a band’ | The Times (UK) →

Fleetwood Mac, UK Articles

Drug abuse, violence, and the making of Fleetwood Mac’s Tango In The Night | Classic Rock

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Forget Rumours: Fleetwood Mac’s craziest album was Tango In The Night

(Image credit: Barry King/Getty Images)

In December 2012, three members of Fleetwood Mac cried together, in public, at the memory of something that had happened all of 25 years previously.

Singer Stevie Nicks, guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and drummer Mick Fleetwood were doing a round of media interviews to announce the band’s 2013 tour when they were asked about the events of 1987, when Buckingham quit the band following the release of the album Tango In The Night.

Buckingham did not respond directly to the interviewer. Instead he turned to Nicks and Fleetwood and reiterated his reasons for leaving the group at a critical stage of their career: foremost among them, his sense that Nicks and Fleetwood had lost their minds and souls to drugs.

“What Lindsey said in that interview was very moving,” Fleetwood says. “He told us: ‘I just couldn’t stand to see you doing what you were doing to yourselves. Did you ever realise that? You were so out of control that it made me incredibly sad, and I couldn’t take it any more.’ It was really powerful stuff. This was someone saying: ‘I love you.’ It hit Stevie and me like a ton of bricks. And we all cried, right there in the interview.”

It was a moment that Mick Fleetwood describes as “profound”. But even after all these years, his memories of that time in 1987 are still raw. For when Lindsey Buckingham walked out on Fleetwood Mac, he did not go quietly. When Buckingham told the band he was leaving, it led to a blazing argument that rapidly escalated into a physical altercation between him and former lover Nicks, in which she claimed she feared for her life. Continue reading Drug abuse, violence, and the making of Fleetwood Mac’s Tango In The Night | Classic Rock →

Fleetwood Mac, Mick Fleetwood, UK Articles

Mick Fleetwood wants a Fleetwood Mac reunion with “everyone who’s ever played” in the band | NME

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By Will Richards
26th March 2021

“I’m not done. And if I can get John McVie off his boat, he’s not done either!”

Mick Fleetwood, Christine McVie, Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, and John McVie of Fleetwood Mac arrive at the 60th Annual GRAMMY Awards on January 26, 2018 in New York City. CREDIT: Steve Granitz/Getty Images

Mick Fleetwood has shared his desire for a full Fleetwood Mac reunion, and “everyone who’s ever played in Fleetwood Mac would be welcome”.

The news comes after Fleetwood revealed this month that he has reconciled with former bandmate Lindsey Buckingham – and would like to think a reunion could happen.

Guitarist Buckingham, who first left the band in 1987 before returning in 1997, was fired by the band in 2018, with Fleetwood adamant until now that his former bandmate would never be allowed to rejoin the band. Last year, he maintained his stance ruling out a reunion.

Elsewhere in Fleetwood Mac’s revolving door of band members, Stevie Nicks left in 1991 before returning alongside Buckingham in 1997, while Christine McVie rejoined the band in 2014 after retiring. The band’s latest tour in 2018 saw Buckingham replaced by Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers’ Mike Campbell and Crowded House’s Neil Finn on guitars.

NEW YORK, NY – OCTOBER 07: Mick Fleetwood and Lindsey Buckingham perform at Madison Square Garden on October 7, 2014 in New York City. (Photo by Kevin Mazur/WireImage)

Asked who he thinks will be a part of Fleetwood Mac when the band next tours in a new interview by the Los Angeles Times, Fleetwood said: “I hope the whole fucking lot of them! I’m not done. And if I can get John McVie off his boat, he’s not done either!

Continue reading Mick Fleetwood wants a Fleetwood Mac reunion with “everyone who’s ever played” in the band | NME →

Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, Fleetwood Mac 2018/19, John McVie, Mick Fleetwood, UK Articles

Christine McVie doesn’t think Fleetwood Mac will tour with Stevie Nicks again | NME

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Feb 9, 2021
By Sam Moore
NME Online

She also expressed doubt about going back out on the road again

Christine McVie, Stevie Nicks, and Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac perform onstage during the 2018 iHeartRadio Music Festival at T-Mobile Arena on September 21, 2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Picture: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for iHeartMedia)

Christine McVie has said that she doesn’t expect Fleetwood Mac will tour with Stevie Nicks again in the future.

The keyboardist and vocalist was asked about the band’s future plans in a new interview with BBC Radio 2’s Johnnie Walker.

Speaking on Sounds Of The 70s (listen to the full interview here at the 1:13:20 mark), McVie said that the question of touring with Fleetwood Mac was currently “an impossible question to even answer”.

“If we do, it will be without John [McVie] and without Stevie, I think,” McVie said. “I think I’m getting a bit too old for it now, especially having had a year off. I don’t know if I can get myself back into it again.

“I know Mick [Fleetwood] would do it in a lightning strike,” she added. “But I couldn’t possibly say. We’re certainly not touring this year either.” Continue reading Christine McVie doesn’t think Fleetwood Mac will tour with Stevie Nicks again | NME →

Fleetwood Mac, Mick Fleetwood, UK Articles

Fleetwood Mac’s Mick Fleetwood says cocaine use left him with two-year memory gap | NME

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Feb 5, 2021
Nick Reilly
NME Online

“I remember not working for two years. I can’t even remember what I did”

Mick Fleetwood (Picture: Getty)

Fleetwood Mac‘s Mick Fleetwood has revealed that he can’t remember two years of his life, after previously battling a heavy cocaine habit.

The drummer explained that there was a period “way after” making the iconic 1977 album ‘Rumours’ when he didn’t work for two years and has no recollection of his life during the period.

He told Classic Rock magazine: “There’s no doubt we were well equipped with the marching powder. That’s a well-worn fairytale that gets more like a war story, that gets more and more aggrandised.

I’m not minimalising the fact that we were definitely partaking in that lifestyle.

“But these weren’t a bunch of people crawling across the floor with green froth coming out of their mouths, we were working, you know?

“That went on for a long, long time, Stevie Nicks has addressed it, so I’m not divulging anything that she hasn’t spoken about. Continue reading Fleetwood Mac’s Mick Fleetwood says cocaine use left him with two-year memory gap | NME →

Lindsey Buckingham, Reviews, Solo Activity, UK Articles, Video Clip

At Home with Lindsey Buckingham | Culture Sonar

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BY STEPHANIE HERNANDEZ
December 17, 2020

Editor’s Note: This is a review of a live stream event performed earlier this month by Lindsey Buckingham. It consisted of a Q&A ahead of the concert, then an intimate show performed from his home studio in L.A.

***

Question and Answer Session:

When can we expect new music, and where will you be touring
The album that we will be releasing in the near future is something that has been waiting in the wings for about three years now. For now, we are talking about the United States, Europe, and Australia, which is more than I’ve ever done as a solo artist.

Future collaborations?
Maybe a duet album with a younger female artist, yet to be determined. Even Mick Fleetwood and I were talking about doing a project together, so who knows? There’s still lots of time.

Do you have a favorite song that you do live where you really like to “shred” it?
There are two kinds of shredding. I always love doing something like “Big Love” or “Never Going Back Again,” which represents the full orchestral style with just one instrument. Then there’s lead guitar shredding. I always love “I’m So Afraid.” Those three songs have been re-envisioned and re-engineered for the stage.

How did you create your guitar style?
I was completely self-taught, so there was nobody there to tell me that I had to use a pick. It comes down to the music I happened to be exposed to, but probably more importantly because I made my own way and made my own rules.

What was your biggest contribution to Fleetwood Mac?
I just saw what my role needed to be. They needed a musical visionary and leader, they needed someone who could organize, and produce. I somehow was able to hold the line with the role I needed to fulfill for the band. Continue reading At Home with Lindsey Buckingham | Culture Sonar →

Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, UK Articles

Mick Fleetwood thinks it’s unlikely that Lindsey Buckingham will rejoin Fleetwood Mac | Metro UK

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Patrick Dane
November 21, 2020
Metro UK

Fleetwood Mac’s Mick Fleetwood has spoken about playing with former lead guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, calling the possibility a pipe dream.

The band’s de facto leader has said it’s unlikely that Lindsey Buckingham will return. (Picture: Getty Images)

Fleetwood Mac’s Mick Fleetwood has spoken about playing with former lead guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, calling the possibility a pipe dream.

Fleetwood, who founded the band in 1967, has acted as the de facto leader of the band since its inception. In a new interview, he talked about the messy breakup with Buckingham in 2018, saying that reunion will be unlikely.

Buckingham was notoriously fired from the group for a disagreement on the direction and scope of a tour, while a spat with band member Stevie Nicks has also been cited as reason for the departure.

The guitarist and singer then sued the band for a breach of oral contract, with the case eventually settled out of court.

Buckingham was later replaced by Mike Campbell and Neil Finn. Continue reading Mick Fleetwood thinks it’s unlikely that Lindsey Buckingham will rejoin Fleetwood Mac | Metro UK →

Fleetwood Mac, Release Info, Stevie Nicks, UK Articles

Stevie Nicks: “In Fleetwood Mac, Christine McVie and I were a force of nature” | NME

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Greg Wetherall

On the eve of her new concert film, the Fleetwood Mac singer talks new solo material, Trump’s response to COVID-19 and the chances of a ‘Rumours’-era reunion

SACRAMENTO, CA – DECEMBER 13: Stevie Nicks performs during her “24 Karat Gold Tour” at Golden 1 Center on December 13, 2016, in Sacramento, California. (Photo by Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images)

Nothing will slow Stevie Nicks down. When Fleetwood Mac concluded their year-long world tour at the end of 2019, the 72-year-old singer songwriter decamped to her Santa Monica home with the intention of taking the year off from touring. Like the rest of us, she didn’t expect to be holed-up for quite so long. “I’ve been quarantined solid since March,” Nicks tells NME. “I figured that I’d probably do about ten gigs and then I was just going to work on a miniseries for Rhiannon but then the door slams and we have a pandemic.”

Out of these dark days, Nicks has kept a busy schedule. ‘Show Them The Way’, worked upon remotely with the help of Dave Grohl, is her first single in six years. She has also helped produce 24 Karat Gold The Concert, a spellbinding concert film from the 2016/7 tour of the same name, which in cinemas for two nights later this month featuring staples such as ‘Edge of Seventeen’ and ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’ alongside unreleased gems and deep cuts.

Whilst a viral TikTok video may have drawn headlines and pushed her song ‘Dreams’ back into the charts recently, the two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Famer had other things on her mind when we caught up with her, including her issues with Trump, the lost ‘Buckingham Nicks’ album and why she is fatalistic if ‘Rumours’–era Fleetwood Mac are to never play together again.

Your first single for six years and the 24 Karat Gold The Concert film – this is turning into a very busy time for you…

“In a million years, I never thought I’d have two projects coming out within two weeks of each other. It’s been a lot of work over the last two months, let me tell you. I’m pretty excited and really proud of everything. I think the film is the closest anyone is going to get to a real, serious concert until the pandemic is over. And I think the song is ‘right now’ with what’s going on in our country. Our country is so divisive. We have gone back so far. It is very sad and very scary.” Continue reading Stevie Nicks: “In Fleetwood Mac, Christine McVie and I were a force of nature” | NME →

Release Info, Stevie Nicks, UK Articles

Rock Goddess Stevie Nicks On Insomnia, Inventing Her Own Style, And Her White Knight Harry Styles | Vogue

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BY KERRY MCDERMOTT
14 OCTOBER 2020

© Fin Costello

Stevie Nicks had a call from a surprising white knight during the lockdown. Just as people in the UK were offering up their spare tins of tomatoes or dropping off prescriptions for vulnerable neighbours, that same sense of community spirit was flourishing in LA. But when the Fleetwood Mac singer picked up her phone to an offer of help, it was Harry Styles on the line. “He called a couple of times and said if you guys need anything, I can drop by,” says Nicks, 72, who was isolating at her Spanish Colonial home in Santa Monica with one goddaughter, one roommate, one assistant and three dogs.

Of course, Stevie and Styles go back. She’s previously joked that the 26-year-old is “Mick [Fleetwood]’s and my love child”, while he called her “a magical gypsy godmother”. Their love-in continued last year, when the Gucci muse inducted Nicks into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (her second time), and joined her on stage for a rendition of “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around”. So perhaps it’s no wonder that, when the over-70s were instructed to stay at home in March, it was Stevie that Styles thought of on his Erewhon run.

On stage in her signature look, which she scribbled down on a “stick girl” for designer Margi Kent. © Richard McCaffrey

“He is an amazing man,” says Nicks over the phone from California. “He’s so talented, he is a really, really great artist, and he’s so funny. He could actually have a TV show, like James Corden or Johnny Carson – he could do that. When you’re with Harry Styles, you’re not with a famous person, he’s just Harry.” Continue reading Rock Goddess Stevie Nicks On Insomnia, Inventing Her Own Style, And Her White Knight Harry Styles | Vogue →