Tag Archives: Unleashed

Yesterday’s gone, but you would never know it | The Times

Pete Pahides
Oct 10, 2009

Fleetwood Mac
Copenhagen
*****

Fleetwood Mac hardly need to be made aware of the fact, but hindsight can have a way of teasing you into your dotage. Thirty-three years after the group’s classic line-up released the 20-million-selling album Rumours, it has long become clear that – contrary to what arguably its most well-known song would have you think – going your own way is somewhat more easily said than done.

As Fleetwood Mac’s Unleashed tour finally reached Europe, it took Lindsey Buckingham all of three songs to address the “fairly convoluted emotional history” of the group who knew no equals when it came to alchemising their complicated hotel-room arrangements into FM pop gold.

Buckingham and his ex-partner Stevie Nicks have since sporadically ventured into solo territory, but even in a characterless hangar on the outskirts of Copenhagen it became clear that the on-stage dynamic between Buckingham and Nicks still exerts a fascinating hold.

With no new studio album to promote, a ruddy, red-shirted Buckingham suggested that band and audience were bound by no greater motive than to “have fun”. In the case of the 61-year-old Nicks – who delivered star turns such as Gypsy and Dreams with all the wistful gauziness you remembered from their recorded counterparts – that was easy enough to believe.

On a thrilling sprint through The Chain, drummer Mick Fleetwood showed a level of facial commitment that looked more like something out of the Jim Henson workshop than a rock show. However, anyone who has seen Buckingham perform will know that fun, in the straightforward sense, isn’t a concept you would apply to the 60-year-old’s stage manner. Far from being a problem, however, it accounted for many of the evening’s most gripping spectacles. On the tribal paean to paranoia that was Tusk, from 1979, he was a picture of demonic intent.

Left alone altogether to perform the group’s 1987 hit Big Love, Buckingham was revelatory. By the time he navigated the song from an intricate folk-picking whisper to a finger-shredding climax, all residual chatter from the back of the hall had dissipated.

Lest we had dared forget, of course, Fleetwood Mac’s success in the years predating Buckingham and Nicks was partly predicated on the brilliance of their troubled guitarist, Peter Green.

Paying tribute to his predecessor, Buckingham turned his attention to Green’s own pièce de résistance Oh Well – while, behind him, Fleetwood and John McVie locked effortlessly into the song’s piledriving blues. If Buckingham, on several occasions, looked close to stealing the show, it was to Nicks’s credit that she seemed happy to allow him.

Even when occupying the spotlight for Sara, the female singer — dressed in figure-hugging black – left her microphone and ambled over to Buckingham.

As the song finished, she hugged him and, sweetly, he simply allowed his head to rest on her shoulder. Time may have healed old wounds but, in the case of certain songs, it made little difference to the pride that Fleetwood Mac took in showing them off.

Nicks, ceremonially donning a top hat, grandly returned to her mike stand for Go Your Own Way. As ever, her performance was an object lesson in poise and control, while Buckingham’s was about the absence of those qualities. Minutes later, hindsight issued another tease – a valedictory Don’t Stop, complete with the exhortation “Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone”. Few noticed, less still cared.

Tour begins Glasgow SECC, October 22

(www.fleetwoodmac.com)

Lindsey Buckingham: Getting Fleetwood Mac Back Together for One Last Tour

image-1
By Andy Threlfall
September 10, 2009
BlackBook

The tangled web that’s the story of Fleetwood Mac is easily one of rock and roll’s, well, quirkiest. A once-quintessentially English blues band came to be the sound of California dreaming in the mid-70s when, seemingly washed up and on the verge of permanent disbandment, drummer Mick Fleetwood asked L.A. husband and wife singer-songwriting team Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks to join the group in one last desperate throw of the musical dice. The rest was multi-platinum history; Rumours still boasts a place a place in the top-ten selling albums ever. But while the songs have endured, the addictions, the divorces, the petty band politic chipped away at their legacy for 30 years. Here, a reflective Lindsey Buckingham tries to find new meaning in those lost days of summer, and how being lucky enough to survive them has allowed Fleetwood Mac to get on stage one more time for their 2009 World Tour. Continue reading Lindsey Buckingham: Getting Fleetwood Mac Back Together for One Last Tour

Fleetwood Mac UK Arena Tour

Rumours? No it’s all true
ROBIN MURRAY / Clash Magazine

NEWS / 02 · 06 · 2009

One of the best selling groups of all time Fleetwood Mac are set to re-unite for a very special UK arena tour.

fleetwood_mac

Emerging from the British blues boom, Fleetwood Mac would go on to dominate the pop market with some of the most popular albums ever released. The band perhaps peaked with the spectacular success of ‘Rumours’, and the line up that crafted this album is set to gather for an extremely rare tour.

To gather the roots of Fleetwood Mac would take a box set. Formed by guitar hero Peter Green, the band used some of the finest musicians from the British blues scene. However Green would depart in 1970 after a period of mental decline, leaving the band to battle on.

Centred on the rhythm section pairing of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, Fleetwood Mac would later gather the twin talents of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks.

The group would later inter-marry, but the pressures of success took their toll on the relationships with the band divorcing just a few years later. The inter-band politics seemed to drive them on to greater artistic endeavours, crafting the massively successful album ‘Rumours’.

To date the album has sold over 25 million copies, and spawned the classic hits ‘Go Your Own Way’, ‘Dreams’ and ‘Don’t Stop’.

In total, the band have sold a staggering 100 million albums making them one of the most popular rock acts ever. Subsequent albums such as ‘Tusk’ and ‘Tango In The Night’ would enhance Fleetwood Mac’s reputation as a supreme artistic outfit, yet full scale tours are few and far between.

Fleetwood Mac have only played two full scale tours in more than twenty years. In fact, it is over a decade since the band’s last appearance in public together.

Hell, even solo appearances are hard to come by. Since the release of a live album in 1998 the band members have taken time off, with Mick Fleetwood said to be the lynchpin behind getting the group to reform.

More than thirty years on from the release of ‘Rumours’ Fleetwood Mac remain one of the most popular groups on the planet. A rare chance to catch this band in the live arena, make sure you don’t miss out!

Fleetwood Mac are set to play the following dates: Continue reading Fleetwood Mac UK Arena Tour

Fleetwood Mac will tour in 2009

Fleetwood Mac are definitely reforming for live dates to take place next year, the band’s guitarist Lindsey Buckingham has said.

The legendary band will reform for a tour in early 2009, their first since 2003, and they are also planning on making a new studio album too, once they have played together for a while.

Buckingham has said in an interview with US publication Billboard.com: “I think maybe there was even a sense that we would make a better album if we went out and hung out together first on the road …Maybe even sowing some seeds musically that would get us more prepared to go in the studio rather than just going in cold. It takes the pressure (off) from having to go in and make something cold.”

As previously reported here on uncut.co.uk, Buckingham has enlisted the help of Fleetwood Mac members Mick Fleetwood and John McVie for two tracks on his forthcoming solo album ‘Gift of Screws’, due for release on September 16.

Fleetwood Mac Plots Return — With Or Without Crow

Fleetwood Mac Plots Return — With Or Without Crow

Billboard
March 25, 2008, 2:25 PM ET

Gary Graff
Detroit
Fleetwood Mac — with or without Sheryl Crow in tow — is planning to be active again.

Singer/guitarist Lindsey Buckingham — who’s just released a new concert DVD, “Live at the Bass Performance Hall,” from his 2006-07 solo tour — tells Billboard.com that the group is “looking at the idea of touring sometime in the first half of 2009,” possibly with some new material to play.

In recent weeks Crow, who’s friendly with Mac’s Stevie Nicks, has talked about joining the band, which Buckingham acknowledges is a possibility, though he adds, “I don’t think anything is written in stone yet.”

“I think we were all a little surprised (Crow) was announcing that to the world with such certainty,” Buckingham says with a laugh. “We have talked about the possibility of bringing another woman into the scene to kind of give Stevie a sort of foil and shake it up a little bit. (Crow) was certainly a name that has come up. We’ll have to see.”

Nicks has been the group’s sole female member since Christine McVie retired from the band in the late ’90s. Buckingham says that he has “a ton of new stuff” that could be used for a new Fleetwood Mac album, though he adds that he might want to step back from the production role he’s had in the band.

“I don’t think I want to produce again ’cause it takes so much,” he explains. “Whatever happens we’ll all sit in a room and make something work as a group. a little more like we used to, sort of try to open it up and get everyone sharing the activity a little more.”

Buckingham, meanwhile, is also planning another solo album — the follow-up to 2006’s “Under the Skin” — for this summer. Recorded with members of his touring band as well as Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, it “has a little more of a rock feel to it” than “Under the Skin,” according to Buckingham. “It’s just another group of tunes that hopefully will translate to stage, and hopefully we can get some more (solo) dates this summer.”

Formerly signed to Reprise, Buckingham says he’s a “free agent” now, without a label deal as a solo artist. “We’re gonna figure out who wants to put it out,” he says of the as-yet untitled album. “I’m keeping an open mind. People need to hear the music and we’ll see what they think and what the best situation for it will be.”

Originally posted on Billboard.com