The Insider’s Louis Aguirre took to social media to report that he hung out with Fleetwood Mac during their tour rehearsals at Fox Studios.
“Just hangin’ w @FleetwoodMac Christine McVie. After a 16 year break she’s back! The fab five back on tour. #OnWithTheShow kicks off 9/30! (at Fox Studios)”
A Tumblr site has posted the alleged setlist for Fleetwood Mac’s upcoming “On with the Show” tour. According to the site, the concert setlist includes 23 songs. Fleetwood Mac rehearsed, but dropped the following songs: “Sara,” “Over My Head,” “Hold Me,” “Monday Morning,” and the unreleased “On with the Show.”
The tour begins on September 30 in Minneapolis.
Fleetwood Mac has added another show to its 2014 “On with the Show” tour schedule, listing a December 7 date at the Honda Center in Anaheim, CA. Ticket presales start on Monday, September 8.
General ticket sales start on Monday, September 15 at 10:00am PST.
Christine McVie looks into the camera and asks, “How does it feel being a sex symbol in rock ’n’ roll?” Hanging out backstage on Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 world tour, McVie, the band’s keyboardist, looks as if she’s had a few vodka tonics (and if this night was like most on the Rumours tour, probably a fair amount of cocaine, too). She pauses for the perfect comedic beat, then delivers: “I don’t know; ask Stevie Nicks.” Her blond shag and shiny caftan shake as she emits a husky laugh. “Oh, listen, Stevie’s gonna know I’m kidding,” she says in her proper English accent. The two women of Fleetwood Mac have always been friends. There’s no need for competition when their roles are so clear: Nicks in front, twirling seductively in her shawls; McVie in back, stealthily ruling the keyboards. If Nicks is the band’s witchy goddess, McVie is its warrior queen, strong and steady. She’s also one of its key creative forces, having written half the songs on the band’s Greatest Hits album.
And so in 1998, McVie sent Fleetwood Mac into a midlife crisis of sorts when she announced she was quitting the band. After 28 years of late nights, she was done living out of a suitcase, finished with recording studios and sold-out arenas. She was also increasingly scared to fly. A few years earlier, she’d bought a rambling old manor in the English countryside, and, at age 54, the quiet life beckoned. “I did my last show, got everything shipped out from the house in L.A., went to catch my last flight back to London,” she says, “and didn’t look back.”
Until now. At age 71, after almost 20 years out of the spotlight, McVie has returned. She’ll crisscross North America with Fleetwood Mac on a 40-city megatour this fall, playing Katy Perry–size venues from Boston to Portland. “Serendipity is the only word I can think of to describe it,” she tells me over coffee and salmon-and-cream-cheese sandwiches at her London pied-à-terre. It’s in a modern building overlooking the Thames but made cozy with an overstuffed sofa, a leather chair, lots of Persian rugs, and keyboards pushed up against the floor-to-ceiling windows. McVie looks decades younger than her years and exudes well-earned rocker cool. She wears a simple tank top and jeans with a silver-plate belt and a tangle of bracelets. Her shaggy blond hair is almost identical to her Rumours-era cut, her skin so tan it’s as if she never left California.
“Since she’s been back, I’m already feeling the steadying effect of her presence,” says Mick Fleetwood, Fleetwood Mac’s drummer and jovial father figure. “There is no doubt that there was a void in the chemistry of the band. The band rose successfully to the creative withdrawal, but emotionally…the balance was challenged.”
Though the band has had a rotating cast throughout its history, the five who will tour this fall—McVie, plus Nicks, Fleetwood, Lindsey Buckingham, and John McVie—are what Christine McVie calls “the Rumours Five,” a group so tight-knit they describe themselves as a family, albeit an incestuous one: McVie was married to bassist John McVie for eight years and had an affair with the band’s lighting director—who later had an affair with Nicks, who was Buckingham’s ex-girlfriend and who also had an affair with Fleetwood.
All of this is ancient history, but the champagne-drenched drama did inspire Fleetwood Mac to create its most haunting harmonies and driving guitar anthems. Today it’s almost impossible to imagine an album inciting the frenzy that Rumours created upon its release in 1977. It sold 10 million copies in its first year, becoming the top-selling album in history at that time. The group toured for a solid year, playing to sold-out 10,000-seat arenas each night. And perhaps because of the suddenness of it all, the band also closed ranks, each buying mansions in Bel-Air and Malibu and mainly hanging out with one another. For Christine McVie, some 5,000 miles from her family in England, Fleetwood Mac was her whole world.
And yet, once her mind was made up, McVie says it wasn’t that hard to put the rock ’n’ roll life behind her—at first. She dug into her new life and kept busy remodeling the crumbling manor. “You get into your wellie boots and your Range Rover and, walking around with six inches of mud on your shoes, you get to forget about that more polished lifestyle,” she says. McVie’s second marriage, to fellow keyboardist Eddy Quintela, ended shortly after she left the band, so it was just her and her dogs knocking around that big house.
“It worked out all right for awhile, but then you start to think, Okay, now what? Start to bake some cookies for the—what is it? The YMCA?” she says with that throaty laugh. “I just started getting bored.” She made a solo album, 2004’s In the Meantime, with her nephew Dan Perfect, a musician who lives nearby. But McVie didn’t tour to promote it: Her once minor fear of flying had become a full-blown phobia. The very thought of getting on an airplane made her heart race and palms sweat. It was a fear of losing control, she says now, acknowledging the irony: The inability to fly, in turn, confined and controlled her.
Still, “She seemed happy in her life,” Fleetwood says. “But I did always find it odd and somewhat worrisome that someone as creative as Chris was so utterly divorced from music in general.” While she continued to jot down ideas for songs, for years she barely touched the piano. Then, she realized, “If I don’t do anything about this flying business, I’m never going to go anywhere or do anything.”
And so the woman who wrote the lyrics “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow” found herself looking forward once again. She began seeing a therapist to overcome the flying phobia. Now she’s oddly nonchalant about what was once so debilitating. After months of talking out her fears, the therapist asked, “Where would you like to go if you could fly somewhere?” “Maui,” she replied, which is where Fleetwood now lives. The therapist told her to buy a ticket. She didn’t have to get on the plane—just buy the ticket. As it turned out, Fleetwood was coming to London, and they agreed to fly to Hawaii together. “We took off, and the feeling was, ‘God, I’m free!,’ ” McVie says. In Hawaii, she played a small gig with Fleetwood’s blues band, then the two of them flew to Los Angeles, where they had a dinner with Nicks, John McVie, and Buckingham—the Rumours Five, together again. “That was the beginning of how the whole thing started,” McVie says of the upcoming tour. “The chemistry between us is just so magical.”
In her absence, the band had continued to play live; they still performed “Don’t Stop,” which McVie wrote about her divorce from John. But Fleetwood Mac had crossed most of the McVie-written songs off its set list—they just didn’t sound the same without her voice. When she returned to England, where no one besides the dogs were waiting, “I thought, No, I’ve got to make some decisions,” she says. “I either sit here and wait for my dogs to die or kick-start my life again.” She called—and shocked—each of her bandmates, asking: What if I came back?
Nicks was thrilled. John McVie and Fleetwood were onboard too. Buckingham was cautiously optimistic: Could the out-of-practice McVie deliver night after night? “You would really have to commit,” he told her. “You couldn’t just be popping in and popping out.”
She told him it wouldn’t be a problem —and it’s clear she’s taking the promise seriously. Both McVie and Fleetwood enlisted personal trainers to get them into shape. (Her flat is littered with dumbbells and a large blue exercise ball.) “The aim is to be fit enough to stand up for two and a half hours balancing on one foot, which is what I do,” she says, playing an air keyboard to demonstrate her stage position. “I’m all occupied.”
Unlike the old days, they’ll travel by private jet, and McVie will have a few personal attendants along. “I’m going to have someone that packs for me,” she says. Nicks has long had wardrobe assistants, but this is new territory for McVie, who lives in jeans and T-shirts. Also new: “I want to go out and do things [on days off], not just stick around having room service for two days,” McVie says. “I feel like I know where I’m going now, and I want to enjoy this.”
She’s been in the studio writing with Buckingham too. At one point she was stuck on a lyric, and he suggested, “Just write about sex.” Today, McVie—quick to insist that she writes about love—has about a half-dozen tunes that have a shot at making it onto Fleetwood Mac’s next album (though there’s no word yet on when to expect it).
I ask whether any of her songs were inspired by her years in the country. “You mean the nunnery?” she jokes, before clarifying. “I was by no means a nun.”
These days she’s single, but the sparkle in her blue eyes reminds me of the tales I’ve read about her past: about the liaison with British musician Spencer Davis, the whirlwind romance with a German DJ, and the multiyear relationship with the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson, who once dug a heart-shape garden in her backyard to profess his love. So, is there much action in the English countryside?
“Well, not much action,” she says. “But some.” Enough to inspire six good love songs, at least.
This article appeared in the September 2014 issue of ELLE magazine.
Ann Friedman / Elle / September 25, 2014
So far, Christine McVie is having a pretty good year. First, the former Fleetwood Mac member announced she was rejoining the band for a major fall tour, and now, she’s been honored with a prestigious award in the U.K.
According to the BBC, Thursday in London, Christine received a lifetime achievement trophy at this year’s Ivor Novello Awards, which celebrate the best in British songwriting. Some of the classic tunes she’s penned for the band over the years include “Don’t Stop,” “Little Lies,” “Everywhere,” “You Make Lovin’ Fun,” “Hold Me,” “Say You Love Me,” and Fleetwood Mac’s first U.S. radio hit, “Over My Head.” The awards ceremony was held at Grosvenor House Hotel in London.
Accepting her award, Christine reiterated what most fans already know: new Mac music is coming. “We are in the process of making another studio album, which should be out next year,” she said. What fans may not know is how excited McVie is about performing her old Fleetwood Mac songs when the band reunites for a world tour, starting on September 30 in Minneapolis. Giving a sneak preview of the set list, McVie told Darren Haynes, Head of BASCA Marketing, Communications & Member Events, that Tusk-era deep cut “Brown Eyes” would be included among her songs.
Other winners at the ceremony include Chic’s Nile Rodgers, who received a special International Award. Not only has he scored hits with Chic, but he also played on Daft Punk’s hit “Get Lucky,” and produced classic albums for David Bowie and Madonna. “I can’t believe I get to do this and get paid,” said Rodgers, according to the BBC.
Another winner was Passenger. His song “Let Her Go” earned him a trophy for Most Performed Work, meaning it was played the most on radio and TV over the past year.
ABC News Radio / Thursday, May 22, 2014
The most interesting narrative of Fleetwood Mac — one every music writer hopes to chronicle and every fan dreams about when reading between the lines of Rumours — involves romance and adultery. The stories behind lyrics of heartbreak and betrayal and love and acceptance are well-documented, but in recent interviews with Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie, the bandmates assert that the past is just that.
Fleetwood Mac released its best-selling album Rumours 40 years ago; Christine McVie left the band 16 years ago. Now, the original five members have reunited for an album and an international tour, “On With The Show.”
“It’s been the most profound experience of my entire life,” Christine McVie said of returning to the group in an interview with HuffPost Entertainment. “The chemistry between the band is stronger than it ever was.” In March of this year, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie joined Buckingham and Christine McVie at Studio D in the Village Recorder in Los Angeles, where they made 1979’s Tusk. (Nicks was unable to be there due to prior scheduling conflicts, Buckingham and McVie said.) They laid the groundwork for eight tracks, mostly written by Christine McVie and began to reestablish the legacy and future of Fleetwood Mac.
“She felt a need to pare down her life,” Buckingham said when asked about McVie’s 1998 departure, which she attributes to a horrible fear of flying. “I think she felt a need to burn a lot of bridges. None of us ever thought she would come back. I think somehow that became something she needed to do in order to re-emerge as a creative force with that much more strength.”
“I sing about love. I try to say I love you in a million different ways. That’s what I do best.”
McVie said she spent most of her off time hanging out with her dogs and her Range Rover, making solo, non-commercial music in the English countryside. But last year, something snapped and she decided to go through therapeutic treatment to get over her fear. She reached out to Fleetwood, and said she was ready to get on a plane again. She wanted to meet him in Hawaii, where both he and John McVie live, so they flew from England together and performed with his small blues band in Maui. The concert made international news when Fleetwood told the audience McVie would rejoin the group. “There’s something magical about Fleetwood Mac, about Lindsey, about Stevie, about Mick and John, that compelled me to think, ‘Well is there any possible chance that they would want me to ever rejoin the band?’” she said.
McVie started trading notes with Buckingham over the phone before she came to Los Angeles to record in March. There, she and Fleetwood rented a house in Santa Monica Canyon– “it was a magical place” — and went on a health kick to get in shape for the tour. She, Fleetwood and Buckingham are what McVie calls the “studio junkies” of the band. “We accomplished more than I thought possible in eight weeks,” Buckingham said. According to McVie, “It’s all grown up.”
“Because of Stevie’s absence, there’s been a very strong link musically between Lindsey and I, where we’ve actually been able to concentrate and co-write,” McVie said, before assuring HuffPost Entertainment that Nicks will eventually have a large part in the album. “Some of the results of those fresh ideas were sort of unusual for me and Lindsey to co-write, anyway. We’ve done it together in the studio this time and have got some fantastic, quite profound, quite surprising emotions out of it. It knocked my socks off completely.” They hope to have the record out before summer 2015.
As Fleetwood Mac prepares for the upcoming tour (rehearsals start in August), Buckngham said that the real novelty is that McVie is back in the fold. Most of the sets will cover the band’s greatest hits, saving new material for another international tour the guitarist is already starting to think about.
The dirty laundry — and there has to be something sordid left to tell — is tucked out of sight for now, probably hidden a layer or so deep within Buckingham and McVie’s new tracks. “My relationship with Stevie is one of respect,” Buckingham said. “One of sort of caring for her at a distance, perhaps, is a good way to put it.” Their shared history is longer than the band’s, alive in old gossip columns and in lyrics. McVie spoke of her ex-husband and bassist John McVie similarly. “John and I have no baggage whatsoever,” she said. “We dropped that several years ago.” She spoke of his battle with cancer and how he’s winning it, how they are both so pleased with his treatments. “I’m sorry to be so boring … but they’re my musical family.”
Asked what her new music is about, McVie said, “What I always write about: sex and love. I try to say I love you in a million different ways. That’s what I aspire to do. That’s what I do best. I don’t sing about politics or anything like that. I sing about love. That’s what I know about.”
After working in the studio with Fleetwood Mac, Buckingham spent a day in downtown Los Angeles, hanging out with Empire of the Sun, an electronic-indie duo from Australia, known for its neon, feather-coated costumes and warrior-like face paint. They asked Buckingham to write with them, just out of the blue. “I went down there and it was two guys and these other people part of their support system,” Buckingham said. “It just blew my mind, the level of trust and community in the room. I said to them, ‘Geez, why couldn’t I have been in this band?’”
Watching another group come together in a studio with such ease was a contrast to the bizarre and powerful way in which Fleetwood Mac made its most popular music. “We always went to our separate corners and did what we did,” he said. “I guess you could say dysfunction of a sort has been the norm.”
Jessica Goodman / Huffington Post / Wednesday, May 21, 2014
Christine McVie has joined Facebook, according to Fleetwood Mac’s official Facebook page. Fleetwood Mac announced McVie’s foray into social media on the legendary keyboard’s official Facebook page Thursday evening. The announcement is the latest development in Fleetwood Mac’s highly anticipated fall plans to reunite with McVie, which include a full-scale concert tour. McVie had left the band 16 years ago for a quieter life.
The latest development comes on the heels of last week’s exciting news that Fleetwood Mac had completed 75% of the work toward creating a new album. “We got eight tracks very far along,” fellow bandmate Lindsey Buckingham told Rolling Stone. “It just played out really organically in a way that seemed appropriate.”
Christine McVie now returns home to England, where she will hit the media circuit to promote her return to Fleetwood Mac.
Fleetwood Mac launches a fall tour, dubbed the On with the Show Tour, in Minneapolis on September 30. The tour will run through North America until the end of the year and continue with expected tour dates in Australia and Europe in 2015.
For more tour information, visit FleetwoodMac.com.
It appears that Christine McVie will be returning to Fleetwood Mac to do more than play some old songs in concert. The group — sans Stevie Nicks, who was busy with “some other commitments,” according to Lindsey Buckingham — has just finished a nearly two-month run in Studio D at the Village Recorder in Los Angeles, where Fleetwood Mac made 1979’s Tusk album, working on a batch of new songs by McVie and Buckingham.
“This has kind of been a project in slow motion, that’s the only way I can put it,” Buckingham tells Billboard. “We got in the studio not knowing what to expect, and the chemistry was just unbelievable… We got eight tracks very far along, like, 75 percent done. It just played out really organically in a way that seemed appropriate.” Buckingham says the new songs came from ideas McVie brought into the band, and coupled with material he worked on previously with Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, the group has “about 14 or 15 things, and some other things we want to get to down the line” even before Nicks begins making contributions.
“We’re all very excited about it. Knowing me, I’m going to be pushing for a double album,” Buckingham says with a laugh.
Describing the new songs — which include “Carnival Begin,” “Red Sun” and “Too Far Gone” — McVie says, “There’s a wide variety, starting from sort of blues-based songs to very commercial songs. It’s very, very exciting. We get chills when we hear them. They sound really fresh. There’s an element, I guess, that hasn’t really existed so much in the past although it has been there in the fact Lindsey and I have been collaborating more. We’ve been working very closely together, so there is a freshness and obviously there are parts for Stevie to sing on all of these songs, which she will do eventually.”
When the rest of the world hears them remains up in the air, however. Fleetwood Mac released a four-song digital EP in April of 2013, and Buckingham and McVie say they don’t expect to have a new album ready before the group’s upcoming tour starts September 30 in Minneapolis.
“We haven’t finished what we’ve done here,” McVie explains. “these are just tracks with some overdubs, and they’re certainly not finished. I go back to England now until the beginning of rehearsals, which is the end of July, and then we’re rehearsing and then we’re touring, so we won’t really have time to (finish the songs). There’s some talk about some time next year. Fleetwood Mac always take a long time to make a record — you know what.”
Buckingham concurs, though he acknowledges that there may be a bit of clamor for the new music once word of the sessions leaks out, which may effect the timetable for the material’s release. “We want to plant some seeds of awareness about what we’re doing,” he says. “We won’t want to pretend it doesn’t exist. We’re very proud of it, and we do want to get the word out. But we’ll have to see how much clamor there is by the time we get into rehearsal and we have some time to let these seeds grow and see what kind of interest there is. That may inform our decisions one way or the other.”
Buckingham, meanwhile, says he’s particularly stoked that making new music is part of McVie’s return after a 16-year absence. “It just took on a life of its own for sure,” he says. “For years I was telling everybody, ‘Y’know, she’ll never be in the band again. She’s gone.’ I really believed that. But right now the whole thing has really got such a circular feel to it. And if you’re talking about one more act for this play or whatever you want to call it, I can’t think of a better way to do it.”
Fleetwood Mac formally announced McVie’s return in January after she joined the group on stage in London last September. McVie — who released one solo album, 2004’s “In the Meantime,” during the interim but mostly spent her time as “a retired lady of leisure with the Range Rover and the Dogs” in rural England — has gone through therapy to overcome a fear of flying that was one of the reasons he left the group. And she promises that she’s back in Fleetwood Mac “for perpetuity, yeah. For as long as I’m around. I’m here. I’m committed.” And she adds that returning to the studio with the group was like getting back on the proverbial bike.
“I thought I was going to get nervous coming in the studio, but it’s felt very easy and natural,” she says. “Before I got to L.A. Lindsey and I had been ping-ponging ideas on computers and that; I’d send him my very, very rough, funky demos and he made some kind of sense out of them and sent them back to me with him playing guitar and they started to turn into really lovely ideas. I really missed playing with them and the chemistry of it all and started to really, really desire to start doing something again, and the only people I could think of that I would have any desire to do anything with would be them, Fleetwood Mac.”
Gary Graff / Billboard / Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Lindsey Buckingham talked to Classic Hits Mix 100.9 FM on Tuesday about the progress from Fleetwood Mac’s latest recording sessions at Village Studio in Los Angeles. He mentioned that the band had been in the studio for about two months, completing eight tracks, seven of which were co-written by him and Christine McVie. He added that they were able to complete 75% of the work towards a new album.
Fleetwood Mac will begin rehearsing for the On With the Show tour later this summer.
[jwplayer mediaid=”14805″]
Fleetwood Mac may soon join Live Nation and Yahoo’s roster of high-profile acts at the center of the two media behemoths’ ambitious plan to live-stream 365 concerts over a 12-month period, beginning sometime in the summer. The two companies announced their partnership on Monday during Yahoo’s “Newfront” advertisers’ presentation at New York’s Lincoln Center.
Live Nation, which annually promotes 60,000 concerts, and Yahoo, which receives 800 million monthly unique visitors, are hoping to scale the online live concert experience. The two companies join YouTube, Vevo, and Vice, vying for a piece of the highly lucrative advertising marketplace, valued at $20 billion spent on top-tier sponsorships for broadcast television, cable, and live events.
As one of Live Nation’s most successful touring acts of 2013 with a total domestic gross of $62 million, Fleetwood Mac remains a sure bet for advertisers looking to capitalize on the band’s enduring legacy, fueled by the band’s 1977 Grammy-award-winning album Rumours, one of the best-selling recordings of all time.
Live Nation hopes to build on that success by promoting Fleetwood Mac’s highly-anticipated fall On With the Show tour featuring returning band member Christine McVie, who left the band in 1998. The tour begins on September 30 Minneapolis.