MUSIC
FLEETWOOD MAC ★★★1/2
Rod Laver Arena, November 2
Like superheroes. Five mysterious individuals with unique powers, reunited against incredible odds to save the free world one more time. Like Kiss with better tunes, Fleetwood Mac is a band inseparable from its own mythology.
There’s mad uncle Mick Fleetwood in his eccentric country gentleman’s attire, biting bearded lips with bug-eyes rolling. He’s an inseparable bloc with his “truly dearest friend” John McVie, quietly plucking bass in the shadow of a flat golfer’s cap.
Messianic ringleader Lindsey Buckingham and witch-fairy Stevie Nicks are another unit: eternal king and queen of the Heartbreak High prom, playing up the sexual tension through misty eyes in the whispers of Landslide then re-enacting the finger-pointing rage in “Go Your Own Way.”
Then there’s Christine McVie, returned at last to quietly steal the show with “You Make Loving Fun” and the gentle coda of Songbird, as if the 22 songs preceding hadn’t already made their case for one of the most fertile hit factories of the modern age.
Sure, some of the moves may have felt a little stilted. “Tusk” wasn’t quite the climactic eruption with its marching band horns caged inside a synthesiser. Nicks did duck out of few high notes in “Dreams” and elsewhere.
But from Buckingham’s psychobabbling song introductions and anguished six-string pyrotechnics to Fleetwood’s nutty crowd-baiting drum solo, to nearly every damn track plus B-sides of that album, Rumours, the world felt as harmonious as it’ll ever be.
Michael Dwyer / Sydney Morning Herald / Tuesday, November 3, 2015
