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

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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I spoke to Christine last year and asked her where this Fleetwood Mac album is: Mick had said he wants to make another one, Stevie [Nicks] said it was unlikely, Christine said seven tracks were done. What’s going on?
I don’t know! There’s nothing going on. You make it sound like there’s some sort of hidden secret. There’s nothing there. We get together, we tour … If there’s any idea that we want to do at some point, obviously we’ll do it. But I don’t think anyone feels a great need to do that at this point.

Christine told me it was half done. TO MY FACE. [3]
What’s half done? [At this point Lindsey’s publicist comes on the line and suggests quite strongly that we focus on the Buckingham/McVie album] I don’t know what Christine was talking about. I think she was mis-speaking there …

You’re holding a guitar on the cover of this album. I would suggest that by this point people have got the idea you’re quite good at guitar. What did you want people to know about you?
We were taking photos and someone said: “Why don’t you hold a guitar?” And I said: “OK.” You always have to do what the photographer says and sometimes it works for the shot. It wasn’t about some deep-seated insecurity about trying to let people know I was a guitarist.

Can we talk about Holiday Road please? [4]
Sure.

WHAT A SONG.
Well, thank you.

Do you look back fondly on it?
I look back briefly on it … It was just one of those things that happened to work very well for that movie.

How much do you think you’ve saved on plectrums over the years? [5]
Jeez. Well, luckily, plectrums aren’t that expensive. I’ve never really thought about that. I’d say easily hundreds of dollars.

Look after the pennies and the pounds look after themselves, right? Thanks for your time.
You’re welcome.

Footnotes

[1] Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie have recorded an album, which is called Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie. It’s quite perky in parts.

[2] In the 1970s Fleetwood Mac’s penchant for “nosing around” had connotations that extended far beyond concepts of reticence and in fact prompted behaviour that was quite the opposite.

[3] “We have a fantastic variety of songs and I’m very, very pleased with what’s happened so far.” That’s one of the things she said.

[4] Lindsey wrote and performed the song Holiday Road, WHICH IS A STONE COLD BANGER, for the Chevy Chase film National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983).

[5] Buckingham famously uses his fingers to play guitar, and anyone who doesn’t is a lightweight.

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