John McVie: This might be my final tour

Two years after pulling the pin on their 2013 Australian tour following bass player John McVie’s cancer diagnosis, Fleetwood Mac’s most famous and most successful line-up landed in Sydney this week ahead of what McVie has indicated might be his last tour with the band that bears his name.

Founding member Mick Fleetwood, 68, was respectful when he spoke of McVie’s recent health crisis during a sound check at Allphones Arena yesterday.

“I raised a toast the other night with Christine (McVie). He’s well as well, absolutely (in) tip-top health and that’s pivotal. And outside of it, it’s great to be here and playing.

“It’s a revisitation,” Fleetwood enthused of his 69-year-old creative partner with whom he founded the band in 1963.

“John’s very practical. He didn’t get into it (cancer talk) one way or the other. I’m an old drama queen but John just said, ‘OK, let’s get it fixed’ and that was that. Never heard any more about it and it was fixed, and we’ve been on the road ever since.”

In May, McVie said his playing days would soon be at an end: “How much longer can the Mac be a working band? Not much longer, for me anyway. It’s not the music. It’s the peripherals, the travelling. Mick will go on until they put him up against a wall and shoot him.”

The return to the line-up of McVie’s ex-wife, singer and keyboardist Christine, 72, who parted ways with Fleetwood Mac in 1998 and was retired from the music business, has been described by guitarist Lindsey Buckingham as “really beautiful”. Buckingham also quit the band for 16 years from 1987 to 2003.

“(Christine) just sort of woke up and said, ‘I’m not done. I want to be more alive’,” Fleetwood said.

Fleetwood acknowledges relations within the band, which includes three ex-couples — Buckingham, 66, and singer/songwriter Stevie Nicks, 67, the McVies and Fleetwood and Nicks — are still fiery 40 years after the most famous Mac five first collaborated in 1975.

“I don’t think Lindsey and Stevie will ever not be able to suppress various emotive buttons that exist. One lives in hope, as I think they do,” he said of the former lovers, who started working together at 16.

“Having Chris back is hugely amazing. I think Stevie’s loving it and Chris is, too.

Touring the world was “sort of” easier today, added Fleetwood, whose battle with cocaine addiction is the stuff of rock legend. (He once estimated that laid end to end, the cocaine he consumed during his life would stretch seven miles).

‘‘Those, looking back on it, were sort of a bit harder. Harder to juggle feeling good and being professional. Those days are long gone.’’

Fleetwood says this time there will be only just the occasional “little jug” of wine during this tour.

The band plays Allphones Arena on October 22, 24 and 25.

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Annette Sharp / The Daily Telegraph / Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood takes pride in being part of one of music’s greatest soap operas, the band’s landmark 1977 album Rumours.

“The album is a chronicle of everything that happened with us on a personal level, which became a story almost too out of control, but the quality of the way we ­approached that album sonically, it’s very natural,” Fleetwood, 68, said in Sydney yesterday.

The drummer, a founding member of one of the world’s most successful and enduring rock acts, will be joined by Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, John McVie and Christine McVie on stage in Sydney tonight as the veteran band begins its On With the Show Australian tour.

The shows, which come at the end of a world tour, mark the return to the Australian stage of Christine McVie, who quit the band in 1998, but rejoined at the beginning of last year. Her return reunites the line-up whose fractious relationships formed the lyrical backbone of the Rumours album and shot them to international superstardom.

“She is a dear friend to all of us,” said Fleetwood, “even when she wasn’t in the band, so to have her back and with such a level of enthusiasm is a joy to see. It’s fair to say that Stevie is happy to not just be surrounded by a bunch of ex-boyfriends.”

Nicks was in a relationship with Buckingham when they both joined Fleetwood Mac in 1975, but after they split she had an affair with Fleetwood, who was married at the time.

Fleetwood has been the only constant in the band since it began as a blues rock outfit in ­England in the 1960s and believes he has been partly responsible for keeping the group together through its many turbulent ­periods.

“I don’t write the songs, I don’t sing the songs, but in a way that has been my contribution to a bunch of wonderful, crazy people, present and past, that have come through Fleetwood Mac.”

The drummer, who has also toured Australia with his blues band, said that a new album would be forthcoming from Fleetwood Mac.

“There will be a new record,” he said.

“John and myself and Lindsey cut a lot of stuff about three years ago, which remains in our swollen archive. Much later we recorded with Christine. Whether Stevie becomes a part of that we’re not quite sure. I live in hope that it will work out.

“We’re not done yet, that’s the main thing.”

Iain Shedden / The Australian / Wednesday, October 22, 2015