Tag Archives: Extended Play

Fleetwood Mac: Don’t Stop | UNCUT Magazine

Don’t Stop!
Mick Fleetwood Interview in Uncut Magazine
Oct 2013 Edition
Words: Andy Gill
Photo: Sam Emerson

MICK FLEETWOOD is musing upon the gloriously chequered career of Fleetwood Mac. “We were blessed with finding some uniquely important people at the right time, he says, with typical modesty. “You can thank the angels for that, really.” Genial and self-deprecating, Fleetwood always plays the diffident associate, ascribing his band’s success to fellow bandmates, both past and present. For years now, he’s given the impression of being just a happy crew member, glad to keep cruising along. Yet it’s clear that Mick is the backbone of Fleetwood Mac, the self-confessed “nutcase driving force” who’s kept the vessel afloat through stormy waters and lengthy doldrums alike, lubricating the sometimes clashing gears of the band’s creative elements. As the Mac sails serenely through a world tour occasioned by the success of the 35th Anniversary reissue of Rumours, he considers the qualities behind the band’s enduring appeal. “Fleetwood Mac’s history is very spotted, not everyone’s cup of tea all the way through,” he says, “but it’s never been a bunch of people pretending to do something that’s been done before.”

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UNCUT: How’s the tour going?
MICK FLEET WOOD: We’ve been touring all over the States, so with rehearsals and stuff, we’ve been at it for the better part of six months. It’s going incredibly well. We’re halfway through the tour we’re coming to Europe, as you know, in about eight weeks or less, finishing around December 15 Continue reading Fleetwood Mac: Don’t Stop | UNCUT Magazine

Mick Fleetwood: Excess all areas

The Sunday Times
18th Aug 2013
Matt Munday

Mick Fleetwood has survived nearly 50 years in rock’s most dysfunctional band, Fleetwood Mac. Now they’re back on the road

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Mick Fleetwood looks like a bohemian Santa with his bushy white beard, pastel shirt, black waistcoat and flat cap. Not all his tales from the rock’n’roll frontline are as jolly as his appearance, though. At one point he has to choke back tears of regret. He has lived a life of such abandon that he admits he is lucky to still be here. “I’ve inherited some good genes,” he explains.

It is often reported that Fleetwood put $8m of cocaine up his nose, and though this is an exaggeration, he says, if he hadn’t stopped consuming the drug so vigorously “the next stop would have been a wooden box”. His former bandmate in Fleetwood Mac, Christine McVie, had earlier told me that the men in the band used to rack out lines of coke like “blooming great rails” – whereas she and Stevie Nicks, the female contingent, would restrict themselves to “ladylike” portions, carried around their necks in jeweled buckles that had dainty silver spoons inside. “It was the 1970s,” she shrugged. “There was a lot going around.”

“I’m not advocating cocaine at all, but the truth is, I had a good time,” says Fleetwood. “But then, without realising it, you’re getting too out of it. You’re sleeping for three days, or you’re up for nine days or whatever. And eventually you don’t feel good at any time.” Continue reading Mick Fleetwood: Excess all areas

Brit Music: Lindsey Buckingham

Anglotopia.com
July 29, 2013 By 

Fleetwood Mac released their first new material in a decade in the form of their imaginatively-titled extended play, “Extended Play.” And if Lindsey Buckingham is any indication, there will be more to come.

 

 

Quote Buckingham: “It’s safe to say there is more than these four songs that you’re going to hear from Fleetwood Mac. It’s just a question of how and when, you know? When I was growing up, EPs were all over the place. When I was growing up, albums were not really an art form; the single was the thing, and in some ways it has gotten back to that a little bit. The whole thing is just kind of wide open now, and it really is tantalising to be able to put together just a few things, three or four songs on an EP. There is something quite effective about that, for sure. I have no preconceptions one way or the other in terms of what Fleetwood Mac will do or even what Fleetwood Mac should do. You just do what you can do and what makes sense logically – and politically.Buckingham continued to insist that Christine McVie, who hasn’t been part of the group since 1998, will not rejoin, but she did spend time at a dinner in LA.

Quote Buckingham: “It was a trip, because she was the same old person I’d always known, and she was cracking me up. We’d always had just a great chemistry, the two of us, and we just kind of hit the ground running as soon as I saw her, which was kind of amazing. If she wants to come up and do ‘Don’t Stop’ with us when we’re in England, I’d love to see that. But beyond that I think there’s not too much you can make out of it – although I’m sure people will try.”

Fleetwood Macs Lindsey Buckingham on his mythology with Stevie Nicks

What is holding up a new album and the latest on Christine McVie

BY MELINDA NEWMAN MONDAY, MAY 13, 2013 2:31 PM
HitFlix Music

lindsey-buckingham-stevie-n_article_story_mainFleetwood Mac is having tremendous success on its current sold-out tour. The band is playing its classic hits with verve and enthusiasm, plus, since the recent release of 4-song EP,  “Extended Play,”  the quartet has new material to sink its teeth into.

Guitarist Lindsey Buckingham spoke to HitFix about the current state of Fleetwood Mac, the delight he takes in his still dynamic connection to Stevie Nicks, the latest on a full album from the band, and if Christine McVie will join her former band mates when they play London in the fall.

Hitfix: I saw the band two weekends ago at Jazz Fest in New Orleans and it seemed like you were on fire. The band was playing in daylight without any of the bells and whistles of an indoor arena show and no one missed them at all. 

Buckingham: There’s a lesson there. We’ve all come to feel that we need to rely on the constructions of quite elaborate set design and the backdrop that changes from song to song and, really, this band, because we are a band of musicians and a great singer, we could go up there and with a couple of spotlights prevail probably just as well. It should be about the music first and, of course, with us, it is.

“Extended Play,” a four-song EP with your first new music in 10 years, came out on April 30 and landed in iTunes top 10.  How gratifying was it that people were so eager to hear new music?

I haven’t paid too much attention to how things are going with it because, really, Mick [Fleetwood] and John [McVie]  and I got together last year and we cut a bunch of tracks and then Stevie came to the table later. Even early on,  Mick and John and I felt that the songs that we were doing were some of the best stuff we’d done in quite a while. Continue reading Fleetwood Macs Lindsey Buckingham on his mythology with Stevie Nicks

Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham confirms that they’ll continue to release new material | NME

May 11, 2013 10:13
NME.com

Guitarist says it’s ‘just a matter of how and when’ they follow up the ‘Extended Play’ EP…

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Photo: PA

Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham has confirmed that they plan to continue releasing new material.

The recently reformed band put out their first new material in 10 years with their ‘Extended Play’ EP and, in an interview with Billboard, Buckingham said it was “safe to say” that they would be releasing more new songs in the future.

He said:

It’s safe to say there is more than these four songs that you’re going to hear from Fleetwood Mac. It’s just a question of how and when, you know?

 

Buckingham went on to add: “When I was growing up, EPs were all over the place. When I was growing up, albums were not really an art form; the single was the thing, and in some ways it has gotten back to that a little bit. The whole thing is just kind of wide open now, and it really is tantalising to be able to put together just a few things, three or four songs on an EP. Continue reading Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham confirms that they’ll continue to release new material | NME

Fleetwood Mac, ‘Sad Angel’ – Song Review

Earlier today (April 30), Fleetwood Mac released a four-song EP, ‘Extended Play,’ their first new studio material since 2003′s ‘Say You Will.’ While the EP is available for purchase exclusively at iTunes, you can stream the lead track and first single, ‘Sad Angel,’ below.

Written by Lindsey Buckingham, ‘Sad Angel’ opens with some typically kinetic, percussive Buckingham rhythm guitar before his vocals come in, and joined later by the whole band. The rhythm section of John McVie and Mick Fleetwood chug along in typical no-nonsense, muscular fashion, with some keyboards and a few layers of guitars to fill it out.

Even though she sings in tandem with Buckingham for all but the opening 15 seconds, Stevie Nicks is largely invisible. She takes her lines well and the two still blend together very well, but there’s little of her trademark personality on display. Maybe that’s a little harsh, but for a band that has traded so frequently on the duo’s history together, ‘Sad Angel’ doesn’t offer much in the way of tension between its two lead singers.

Not that that’s a bad thing, of course. Throughout the run-up to the release of ‘Extended Play,’ we’ve heard about how those past issues are behind them – note how they’re posed in the press photo above – so what better way to prove it than with a nice, poppy song that is, lyrically, light years removed from their famously autobiographical work.

Or is it? The ambiguous lyrics could be Buckingham acknowledging that he and Nicks need each other, and are never better than when they’re together. “We fall to Earth together / The crowd calling out for more / Hello, hello sad angel / Have you come to fight the war?” they sing in the chorus. It’s hard to tell, because we usually associate Nicks with gypsies or witches, not angels.

If ‘Sad Angel’ is about her, then it’s a nice peace offering as the two of them prepare to write the newest chapter in their incredibly long history together. If not, then it’s still a welcome return to form for one of rock’s most enduring bands.

Fleetwood Mac release new four-track EP on iTunes without warning

Fleetwood Mac have unveiled their first new music in a decade. Without fanfare or a marketing campaign, the band released their four-song EP direct to iTunes on 30 April.

The release, simply titled Extended Play, comprises a quartet of tunes: three originals by Lindsey Buckingham and one by Stevie Nicks, written in 1973 when the pair were still the duo Buckingham Nicks. This is hardly a set of sexagenarians’ basement tapes: Without You – not be confused with the Danny Kirwan-written Mac song of the same name – and Sad Angel are as shiny as Rumours, and even the lonely piano ballad, It Takes Time, has a dramatic synths/strings coda.

Buckingham revealed plans for the EP at a gig in Philadelphia earlier this month – the band have been performing some of the new songs on their current tour. “It’s the best stuff we’ve done in a long time,” he said, promising that the record would be out “in a few days”. It took a few weeks, instead, but within hours of appearing on iTunes, Extended Play had appeared in the digital shop’s top 10 chart, though it has since dropped.

“We all felt that it would be great to go into the studio and record new material before embarking on this tour and the result has been remarkable,” Buckingham said in a statement. Nicks has previously indicated that Fleetwood Mac would only record another full-length if she felt certain fans would buy it. “Big, long albums don’t seem to be what everybody wants these days,” she told Billboard in February. “[Let’s] see if the world does want more music from us … If we get that feeling, that they do want another 10 songs, we can reassess.”

One of Buckingham’s new songs is an explicit response to Nicks’s musical reticence. “At the moment [Sad Angel] was being written, I was really thinking about the fact that [Stevie] and I were not agreeing on the idea of an album,” he recently told MSN. “The chorus is, ‘Hello, sad angel, have you come to fight the war?’ It goes on to talk about ‘the crowd’s calling out for more’ … [Sad Angel and Miss Fantasy] are songs about Stevie and me.”

Prior to Extended Play, Fleetwood Mac’s most recent new recording was the 2003 album Say You Will. That record reached No 6 on the UK album charts, and achieved gold sales, but fell well short of the band’s commercial peak from 1975 to 1987. The band have sold more than 100m albums worldwide.

Fleetwood Mac are currently in the midst of a North American tour, with plans to visit the UK and Europe this fall.

Fleetwood Mac Release ‘Extended Play’ EP

Four-song set marks the band’s first new music in 10 years

April 30, 2013 9:55 AM ET
Rolling Stone
stevie-306v-1367328618Fleetwood Mac have returned with their first batch of new music in 10 years. Extended Play, available now exclusively on iTunes, contains the new tracks “Sad Angel,” “It Takes Time” and “Miss Fantasy,” penned by Lindsey Buckingham. It also includes “Without You,” a rediscovered and revamped track originally written by Stevie Nicks from the pair’s Buckingham Nicks project.

 

Extended Play is Fleetwood Mac’s first studio release since the 2003 LP Say You Will. Buckingham promised the EP was on the way earlier this month during a concert in Philadelphia. In January, he talked to Rolling Stone about how his relationship with Stevie Nicks has developed over the years.

“It’s still evolving, and that’s the beauty of it too. I’ve known Stevie since high school. We were a couple for many, many years, and we’ve been a musical couple forever,” Buckingham said. “After all this time you would think there was nothing left to discover, nothing left to work out, no new chapters to be written. But that is not the case – there are new chapters to be written.”

Fleetwood Mac are currently on a North American tour. Their next show is tonight at the Sprint Center in Kansas City, Missouri. For full tour dates, visit the band’s website.