They were back — and talking to each other as well. But despite the hits, fine musicianship and Stevie Nicks’s array of shawls, there was still one thing missing

O2, London
Tuesday, 24 September 2013
*** 3 out of 5 stars

You’re looking at your watch, consulting the set list from a recent Fleetwood Mac gig in Dublin and thinking: it has to happen soon. We’re running out of songs.

But we’re 20-odd tunes into the first of the band’s three-night London run and the icing on the cake made of soap has not materialised. We’ve endured Mick Fleetwood’s mammoth drum solo on World Turning, one that has lasted eight minutes at previous stops on this world tour. Tonight it clocks in at four. We’ve had Don’t Stop, one of this outlandishly successful band’s most galumphing hits, the song where you assumed It Would Happen. But no. The Mac have gone off, and come back, and Stevie Nicks is trilling Silver Springs, and there is no sign of the return of the second of Fleetwood Mac’s two Macs. That Mac is not back.

One of the major draws of these gigs — their first in the UK since 2009 — has been the rumour that Christine McVie might appear as a special guest. The Birmingham melodicist retired from the band in 1998, technically for the second time, citing a fear of flying. Touring with her ex-husband, bassist John McVie, and weariness of the long-running dramas of her band might well have been contributing factors.

But the USP of this umpteenth Fleetwood Mac reunion is that everyone is getting along quite swimmingly. Indeed this Gordian sexual knot of a group have long since put their libidos and coke habits behind them, and tonight are even mining the residues of the chemistry for laughs (and sniffles). Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, the California duo who joined the blues-rock outfit in 1974 and turned it into gold dust, are holding hands, hugging at the end of Sara, and singing at one another. Mick Fleetwood — an increasingly jester-like figure, sitting worryingly near a gong — affectionately clasps hands with Nicks at the end of one song. Their affair in 1977 complicated an already star-crossed love polygon that has defined this band as much as their mellifluous soft rock.

Still, despite all the lovely closure, Christine does not show (although she does the following night). Anyone hoping to hear Little Lies, or the barbed You Make Loving Fun (written about Christine McVie’s relationship with the band’s lighting guy), or even Hold Me, the band’s later-period US hit about another McVie conquest, Dennis Wilson, is going home a little disappointed tonight.

Probably not by much though. This nearly three-hour set is nothing if not generous value, packing in significant swaths of Rumours, the band’s most famous album. It has sold something like 40m copies, a figure that, in all likelihood, no one album released in the 21st century will ever match. Its reissue entered the UK charts at No 3 last February. Of its vast riches, Go Your Own Way remains a sulky gem. It ends the band’s first set with Buckingham mock-chasing Nicks around the stage and letting the front rows paw at his guitar.

It’s salutary to be reminded what a fine player Lindsey Buckingham is. He’s lithe and leather-jacketed, full of thoughtful song preambles. Hearing him playing Big Love solo — hollering the words, plucking at his hollow-bodied electric — is one of the unexpected highlights of a set that can sometimes feel like a rewrite of history.

It seems unthinkable now, but there was a time when not everyone thought Fleetwood Mac were cool, or survivors, or ripe for homage by Haim or Florence and the Machine. Indeed, if you were alive in the 1980s, Fleetwood Mac were the grown-ups’ music, and as such as attractive as uncooked liver. Mac songs seemed pat, mid-tempo affairs with needless, false harmonies. (They all hated each other!) It wasn’t just a question of age — the Rolling Stones were old — it was that Fleetwood Mac’s music felt fluffy and smug. At least it did from the vehement hauteur of the spiky, directional 80s.

Now, though, 30 years on, one of their newer songs, Sad Angel, is pacier than you’d imagine. And there is widespread respect for Fleetwood Mac’s awkward, angry Tusk album of 1979. Tonight the title track exudes bitterness, evil laughter and deranged keyboard horns: there is nothing pat about it.

Arguably it was Courtney Love who first rehabilitated Fleetwood Mac — or at least Stevie Nicks — thanking “Rhiannon the Welsh Witch” on the sleeve of Hole’s Pretty on the Inside album (1991), and often declaring Nicks her hero. At the O2 Nicks recalls being Buckingham’s “hippie girlfriend”, accepted into the Mac package when Fleetwood hired Buckingham.

She is the sort of woman who paints angels, and wants to set Welsh epic The Mabinogion on the screen with the help of the Game of Thrones creator, but down to earth with it. Tonight her buddy Christine may not be here, but Nicks’s throaty husk sounds masterful on Gold Dust Woman. And — living up to billing quite spectacularly — she has a different shawl for nearly every song.

Kitty Empire / The Guardian / Saturday, September 28, 2013

* * * (3 out of 5 stars)

Thirty-six years after Rumours became the soundtrack to the age of divorce, four of the five people that made it are reliving their personal dramas once more. With their soft rock masterpiece from 1977, Fleetwood Mac articulated the new rules of relationships, capturing the reality of affairs, tensions, betrayals and break-ups and selling over 40 million copies in the process.

They also documented their own reality. Singer Stevie Nicks was splitting up from guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, songwriter Christine and bassist John McVie were getting divorced, drummer Mick Fleetwood was stuck in the middle, and they dealt with it all in the best way Seventies rock stars in Los Angeles could: by taking huge amounts of cocaine. Now all but Christine McVie have come back for more. Without the cocaine.

Buckingham said that Rumours “brought out the voyeur in everyone”. It also spoke to millions: the emotional truth of the music jumped out of the grooves. Judging by the hordes filling a packed O2 arena, it still does. Floaty scarves hung from Nicks’ microphone, but beyond that the stage was bare: fitting for a concert dedicated to an album defined by its simplicity.

Nicks channelled her inner hippy witch in a black sequinned ensemble, emerging from the shadows to launch into Second Hand News, one of the many songs on Rumours expressing the bitterness of being a cast-off lover. Then it was time for The Chain, the most starkly autobiographical song about the love tangle, its irresistibly simple beat sounding as fresh as ever.

After all these years, it was strange to watch Nicks singing Dreams as Buckingham, Fleetwood Mac’s resident tortured artist and the subject of the song’s words, played guitar next to her. Fleetwood, cocooned behind an enormous drum kit, looked, with his flat cap, black tights and lolling tongue, like a cockney jester on day release.

“Every time we come back together it’s different . . . it appears there are still a few chapters left in the story of Fleetwood Mac,” said Buckingham, before giving the audience their cue to rush to the bar: a new number. In the event, Sad Angel was a pretty decent slice of California rock, and Nicks followed it up with Rhiannon, her song about a Welsh witch that put her on the map. Her throaty delivery was perfect for the song’s combination of spooky mystery and Top 40 appeal.

Buckingham gave himself a metaphorical pat on the back when he introduced a few songs from Tusk, the non-commercial follow-up to Rumours and very much his album.

“I’d like to have been a fly on the wall when Warner Brothers first heard Tusk,” he chuckled, before celebrating his uncompromising genius by singing It’s Not That Funny.

“That electric crazy attraction between Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks never dies,” Nicks said recently. Whether Buckingham, married with kids, would agree with her is debatable, but the pair did play a touching, tender version of Landslide together. Buckingham managed to silence the arena with a solo acoustic rendition of Never Going Back Again.

As a testament to the power of mainstream rock, it was hard to beat. And after Fleetwood played a drum solo while muttering something unintelligible, the band launched into Don’t Stop, proving there is nothing more powerful than a perfect song.

Expert views on the best of the performing arts, Times2, page 11

Will Hodgkinson / The Times (UK) / Wednesday, September 24, 2013