Fleetwood Mac kicks off the European leg of its 2013 world tour tonight at the O2 in Dublin, Ireland. Concert goers will be treated to a refreshed, two-and-a-half hour set list of Fleetwood Mac classics (“The Chain,” “Dreams,” and “Go Your Own Way”), a sprinkling of new material (“Sad Angel”), and some surprises.
Stevie Nicks is back on tour with Fleetwood Mac. Steve Adams chats to her about what fans should expect.
Rock legends Fleetwood Mac are back on the road for their first UK shows in four years and the buzz is that keyboardist Christine McVie — who quit the band in 1998 — will rejoin other members of the band’s classic line-up for at least a couple of performances.
The move has delighted singer Stevie Nicks as much as the fans, as she formed an instant bond with the band’s only other female member when she joined in 1975 alongside guitarist Lindsey Buckingham.
“I knew from the beginning when Lindsey and I joined Fleetwood Mac, that Christine and I had to really stand our ground,” says the enigmatic singer.
“We had to be a force of nature or we would be considered second-class rock stars. And between the two of us that was never gonna happen!
“We made a pinky swear pact – ‘we will never, ever walk into a room that’s full of rock stars and not be treated as if we’re not as good as them.
“Because we are as good as them.’”
The duo more than proved their point, writing many of the band’s biggest hits, including a huge chunk of seminal album Rumours, which has now sold a staggering 45 million copies worldwide. Nicks has also enjoyed a successful solo career alongside her four decades in and out of Fleetwood Mac — the band have a habit of splitting and reforming — but is happy to be back performing, even though the recent US tour schedule was gruelling.
“For me it’s not such a big deal because I stay up really late every night anyway. But for Lindsey, Mick (Fleetwood) and John (McVie), they go back to their rooms and go to sleep.”
The singer believes the effort has been worth it though, rating the shows as some of the best they’ve played.
“When people in Britain see the show they’re gonna be blown away!” she says.
“Honestly, rock bands that are 30 years old would baulk at this schedule, the amount of songs we’re doing and the length of the show. They would go, ‘you are kidding? Two hours and 40 minutes a night?’”
(Ian West / PA Wire)
The gigs also include the band’s first new music in a decade, after they released an EP earlier this year. The music was recorded just after Nicks’ mother died last year, which left her so devastated she was unable to go to the studio.
“I didn’t want to go anywhere,” she admits. “I didn’t leave the house for almost five months. I worked on the edit of my documentary about the making of (solo album) In Your Dreams, and then I got pneumonia.
“I watched the entire first season of Game of Thrones — so that was great! That certainly took my mind off everything.”
Not surprisingly the almost ethereal pop star is quite a fan of the fantasy show.
“The author (George RR Martin) is my age and it blows my mind that he’s able to create this vast, interlinked world,” she says.
“As a songwriter I write little movies. But I can’t imagine sitting down and writing even one small book. I would love to write some music for Game of Thrones. I’ve written a bunch of poetry about it – one for each of the characters.”
* Fleetwood Mac perform at the LG Arena in Birmingham on September 29. For tickets, call 0844 338 8000.
Congratulations to the following European fans! You have each won a copy of the Rumours 3xCD Expanded edition, courtesy of Warner Bros. Records, for correctly answering the contest question and submitting your entry.
The European tour kicks off tonight at the O2 in Dublin, Ireland. Check back often for the latest tour photos and videos!
Winners
Carolien Bekker
Thom Clarke
Sharon Curran
Niamh Dixon
Carolyn Corrin
Marita Hansen
Emily Potts
Emma Remmeau
Paul Smith
Ron Toczynski
Question
In what year was Rumours first released?
Answer
1977
Please allow up to 4 weeks for delivery. (Most packages will arrive within 7 business days.)
Fleetwood Mac’s reunion with Christine McVie at the beginning of their European tour is another regeneration for this musical soap opera, says Bernadette McNulty.
For a band that have had more than their share of “not before hell freezes over” moments, the news that Christine McVie would be reuniting with Fleetwood Mac on stage in London for two nights this week has still managed to raise eyebrows. Only last year Stevie Nicks declared that there was little chance of the Brummie songwriter returning after she walked out 15 years ago.
Admittedly, as reunions go it’s fairly perfunctory. McVie won’t accompany the tour beyond London, apparently down to her fear of flying, and she will only join her former band mates on stage for one song. That the number will be Go Your Own Way, however, does sound like the band at least have a sense of humour.
This, of course, is just another plot twist in the life of a band that has regenerated itself as often as a Time Lord. While they are most often portrayed as a baby boomer soap opera in two acts — the respected but struggling British blues combo of the Sixties who merged with the American couple Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks in the early Seventies to become multi-million selling soft-rock behemoths — the mutation of the band has been constant. Fleetwood Mac were a band born out of a splintering from the Bluesbreakers, and they continued to fuse and split with a kind of nuclear energy throughout the next four decades.
That they were strongly rumoured to be headlining both Coachella and Glastonbury festivals this year — and have been already mooted for the lineup next year — also reveals their cache with a younger generation raised on T4 and YouTube rather than The Old Grey Whistle Test. The likes of Florence and the Machine and Haim routinely channel their tousled-haired heroine Stevie Nicks’s raw-throated holler and Buckingham and McVie’s folk rock harmonies. Even more astoundingly, the 35th anniversary reissue of their album Rumours went back into the UK charts this February at number three.
To the punks and electro kids who rode rough shod over the soft rock dinosaurs of the Seventies, Fleetwood Mac epitomised all that was wrong with music — coke-addled guitar solos and lyrical nonsense from fake hippy rich kids reeking of pachouli oil. But to successive generations the glamour, grit and seduction of their classic pop has emerged as a much stronger influence.
This would undoubtedly please the band, who under Buckingham’s technical ambition had their sights set on being as innovative and harmonically complex as the Beatles and the Beach Boys. But the studio sheen they perfected was only made transcendent by that very punk emotion of anger, reaching its zenith with the rock operatic, warring-couples maelstrom of Rumours.
Other bands might find performing songs from one of the most painful personal periods of their life tortuous, but Fleetwood Mac seem to wear their baroque musical battle scars with increasing pride.
Set lists from the US leg of the tour show the band playing the lion’s share of Rumours with smatterings from Tusk, Fleetwood Mac and only one, Big Love, from their 1987 album Tango in the Night. It’s a recipe that should please the generations but sadly skirts over the depths of their back catalogue, particularly from their earlier incarnations, and the mercurial brilliance of Peter Green and Danny Kirwan. Hell would really have to see a temperature drop to see either of those two rejoin the team but with Fleetwood Mac, the skeletons in the cupboard often sing as loud as the survivors on stage.
Fleetwood Mac play the O2 London Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, then touring. See fleetwoodmac.com
Bernadette McNulty / The Telegraph (UK) / Thursday, September 19, 2013
We lived in two different worlds,” says Nicks about her relationship with Prince. “That’s when I was totally a drug addict and Prince is the other side of drug addict.”
Return of the Mac: Stevie Nicks talks Fleetwood Mac, feminism and romancing Prince ahead of O2 gigs
FLEETWOOD Mac are back touring for the first time in four years and heading for the O2 arena for three dates at the end of the month. The classic line-up includes iconic members Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Christine McVie is rumoured to join up with her old band. Singer Stevie Nicks explained now was right to bring the band back.
She said: “I thought Fleetwood Mac should stay off the grid for three years. It’s a good idea; it’s just smart to keep us out of the spotlight for three years. Everyone went along with it. We were gone long enough that it was us coming back. I told the press last year that 2013 was going to be the year of Fleetwood Mac. And I was just hoping with all my heart that this big statement was gonna come true.”
And the show is not to be missed, the singer said. “When people in Britain see the show they’re gonna be blown way,” she said. “Honestly, rock bands that are 30 years old would baulk at this schedule and at the amount of songs we’re doing and the length of the show. They would go, ‘you are kidding? Two hours and 40 minutes a night?’”
The 65-year-old, who joined the band in 1975 for its most successful period, was one of the first female rock icons. She said: “We were feminists, and we fought for the feminist movement. And I see that starting to be lost a little bit now. I see women being more willing to be put in their place today. I can’t exactly put my finger on it, what it is. But I see something changing, and I see girls being not quite as willing to take a stand.”
With a tempestuous relationship with one of her band mates leading to one of the biggest-selling albums of all time, Rumours, Stevie knew not to mix the personal and professional a second time.
She said: “I wanted to work with Prince. And I was smart enough to know that if you start having a relationship with somebody, you’re never gonna work with them. Prince is such a strange and beautiful guy. He wanted to be my friend; I don’t know if he wanted any more than that. But I know that he wanted to hang out. We lived in two different worlds. That’s when I was totally a drug addict and Prince is the other side of drug addict – Prince is straight as an arrow. He would bring me cough medicine when I was sick and then I’d ask for another spoon of it, and he’d go, ‘I didn’t come here to start you on a new drug!’ So I realised that that was not gonna work out. We’re two really famous rock’n’roll stars, and I’m a drug addict, and he’s not, so these paths are not gonna meet ever well. But if I needed Prince I’m sure he would come and help me.”
Fleetwood Mac are at the O2 on September 24 to 27. Go to theo2.co.uk
Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks opens up about the psychiatrist she blames for ruining her chances of having a family.
Soul of the party: Stevie poses with Marissa Montgomery and her mother Martine Montgomery.
She was as famous for her drugs battle and rock and roll lifestyle as for her distinctive voice during the height of her fame with Fleetwood Mac.
And as Stevie Nicks returns on tour with the band, she reveals that she holds a 20-year grudge against the psychiatrist she claims prevented her from marrying and having children when he treated her for over eight years in her thirties.
The 65-year-old star accused her psychiatrist of being a gossip-hungry groupie who fed her high doses of valium to keep her coming back into his surgery.
Miss Nicks became addicted to cocaine for 10 years but following her treatment at the Betty Ford clinic in America in the 1980s she then started seeing a psychiatrist.
She said: ‘When I came out of Betty Ford I was in great shape and then I went to see the psychiatrist that everybody was seeing at that point and I think he was just a groupie.
‘He just wanted to put me on something that would bring me into his office whenever I was in town, once a week for an hour, so he could get all the scoop on what was going on in the rock and roll world.’
The star has been married once – to her best friend’s widower Kim Anderson after his wife, Robin, died from Leukaemia, however the couple split after eight months and she has not re-married.
The singer, who once had a brief relationship with band mate Mick Fleetwood, said she blames the doctor for her lack of a family.
Speaking on the Radio 4 Woman’s Hour programme, she said: ‘I say to people I’ve chosen not to have a boyfriend, I’ve chosen not to have kids, I’ve chosen to be an artist and follow my muse and all that and blah blah blah.
‘But during those eight years, that was late thirties to 45, who knows what might have happened during those eight years? I might have met someone, I might have even had a baby.
‘So I will go to my grave angry at that man [the doctor] for that, because he took eight years of the prime of my life away.’
In April, the band, whose only original member is Mick Fleetwood, began its first tour in three years with a concert in Columbus, Ohio.
On Monday Stevie appeared at the Fleetwood Mac party at The Arts Club, London alongside Mick Fleetwood and former Eurythmics musician David Stewart.
She dressed in her signature ethereal style, wearing a floaty sheer black top with cut-out shoulders teamed with chain-trimmed boots, leggings and turquoise gemstone jewellery.
Miss Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac in 1974 – three years before the release of the band’s best-selling album Rumours, which sold more than 40 million copies worldwide.
The four-piece band, which comprises Miss Nicks, Fleetwood, Buckingham John McVie, will perform three gigs at the London O2 Arena from September 24.
Stevie also confirmed that singer Christine McVie is also set to rejoin Fleetwood Mac at two unspecified shows on their forthcoming European tour.
Fleetwood Mac have opened up about their upcoming reunion with former keyboardist Christine McVie at their upcoming London shows. Watch our video interview with Stevie Nicks and Mick Fleetwood above.
The rock icons are currently on a critically acclaimed world tour that reaches the UK at the end of the month. Speaking to Gigwise at the London premiere of frontwoman Stevie Nicks’ new movie documentary about her new solo album, In Your Dreams, we asked band members about the hotly-anticipated London shows where McVie has been confirmed to rejoin the band on stage.
“I think she’s going to come and do the last two shows in London,” said drummer Mick Fleetwood. “It’s going to be great – Christine’s music is so much part of Fleetwood Mac. She’s been gone now for many, many years and she’s like my sister.
“We’re going to make her feel comfortable and have fun and I think people will love it. She’s always honoured by the nature of her songs and the depth of that. When she decided to leave 14 or 16 years ago, we were sad and thought that maybe she’d come back, but she made that choice.”
He continued: “A lot of people are saying ‘is she going to come back?’ and the answer to that is that she would be welcome, but that would be her choice. We will see. At some point we’re going to knock it on the head, I’m not sure when, but in that context it would be something that would be entertained.”
Frontwoman Stevie Nicks added: “She’s coming to do two nights here and probably do ‘Don’t Stop’. I’m not sure, but she’s coming to Dublin to rehearse whatever song she’s going to do. We never wanted her to leave, so for us it’s amazing that she is going to come.”
Stevie Nicks’ In Your Dreams will be released on DVD in November. The 4CD box set ‘Fleetwood Mac: 25 Years – The Chain’ is out now.
The UK leg of the tour starts in Dublin on September 20 and wraps up in Glasgow on October 3. Tickets are on sale now. For more information, visit Gigwise Gig Tickets.
Full UK tour dates:
September 20 – Dublin, O2
September 24, 25 & 27 – London, O2 Arena
September 29 – Birmingham, LG Arena
October 1 – Manchester, Manchester Arena
October 3 – Glasgow, The Hydro
Andrew Trendell / Gigwise / Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Stevie Nicks has told Digital Spy that Fleetwood Mac are “thrilled” Christine McVie will rejoin the band for a special appearance in London.
McVie, who last performed with Fleetwood Mac in 1998, will rehearse with the band in Ireland this week. She is tipped to appear at two shows in the capital later this month.
Nicks told DS at the UK premiere of documentary Stevie Nicks: In Your Dreams that McVie had approached Fleetwood Mac about joining up with them again, explaining: “Well, she said she’d do it. She did not say she would do it on the last two tours.
“So, she offered and we were thrilled, and it’s great to have her back and to do a song. She’s been very, very missed, so even to have her back for a little while is going to be good.
“And it will be good to see her, I mean, we never see her, you know? We’re all so far away. I mean, London to California is far. So it’s really great that she’s decided to hang out with us for a little bit.”
McVie and Mick Fleetwood joined Nicks at the Curzon cinema in Mayfair on Monday night (September 16) for a screening of In Your Dreams, which was directed and produced by Nicks and Dave Stewart.
Nicks previously hinted that McVie may join up with the band for ‘Don’t Stop’.
Fleetwood Mac’s European tour starts in Dublin this Friday (September 20).
Stevie Nicks: In Your Dreams will be released on DVD in November. The 4CD box set Fleetwood Mac: 25 Years – The Chain is out now.
Kate Goodacre / Digital Spy / Tuesday, September 17, 2013
The cameras were flashing for this highly anticipated event: Christine McVie reuniting with members of Fleetwood Mac. On Monday evening, McVie and fellow guest Mick Fleetwood attended the UK film premiere of Stevie Nicks and Dave Stewart’s In Your Dreams documentary. McVie looked charming as she smiled and posed alongside Dave Stewart and her former Fleetwood Mac bandmates.
McVie’s confirmed guest appearances at two London shows is also highly anticipated. McVie, who will rehearse with Fleetwood Mac later this week in Ireland, will perform with the band during “Don’t Stop.” The European leg of the tour starts on Friday in Dublin, Ireland.
In September, Stevie took to the British airwaves to promote her documentary In Your Dreams, the making of her seventh solo album. She spoke with different radio personalities on a series of BBC Radio programs, discussing the documentary, her relationship with Lindsey Buckingham as it stands today, and the upcoming European tour with Fleetwood Mac.
BBC Radio 2: Steve Wright in the Afternoon
Friday, September 13, 2013
BBC Radio 6: Lauren Laverne
Friday, September 13, 2013
BBC Radio 4: Woman’s Hour
Monday, September 16, 2013
