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Old 02-10-2018, 06:03 PM
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not sure whether this Christine interview was posted somewhere here already, if so i'm having trouble finding it so pasting:

https://www.cltampa.com/music/interv...d-stevie-nicks

Mostly Mac: Before Clearwater show, Christine McVie dishes on her new duet album and tour with Lindsey Buckingham

The show happens on Nov. 9 at Ruth Eckerd Hall.

BILL DEYOUNG OCT 31, 2017 11 AM

Lindsey Buckingham (L) and Christine McVie, who play Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater, Florida on November 9, 2017.
JOHN BERRY


Music’s longest-running soap opera took another dramatic turn with this year’s appearance of the album Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie. It’s the first, and only, time two members of the mighty Fleetwood Mac have stepped outside the mothership to make music together (and no, we’re not counting the 1973 record Buckingham and Stevie Nicks made before they were asked to join the band).

Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie is a simple, happy affair, offering state-of-the-art melodic pop from a pair of veterans who’ve worked together — and blended impossibly well — for more than 40 years. It brings to mind their earlier Mac collaborations like “Don’t Stop,” “World Turning” and the quirky-yet-endearing Tusk album.

In fact, with the rock-solid rhythm section of Mick Fleetwood (drums) and John McVie (bass) on most of the tracks, it might as well be a new Fleetwood Mac album.

Except, uh, Stevie’s not on it.

Cue the soap opera theme.

“There’s always that tension between Stevie and Lindsey,” explains Christine McVie, during the lead-up to a Buckingham/McVie appearance November 9 at Ruth Eckerd Hall. “That’s always going to be there.”

Nicks, who was in the middle of a solo tour, has for several years been ambivalent about going back into the studio with Fleetwood Mac. Was she asked to play on this one? McVie stops slightly short of saying no, she wasn’t.

However. “I can say that it was easier, and it didn’t take so long,” she’ll admit. “But you know, saying that, we all adore Stevie. Even Lindsey does. But I think the whole world knows about the tension between them; there’s no point in me denying it. It’s some kind of love/hate thing, I don’t know — we could never get to the bottom of it — but that’s not the reason that this became a duet album.”

(Just to catch us all up: Back in the ‘70s, singer/guitarist Buckingham and singer Nicks, Americans both, were a romantic item. That all ended right around the time they joined the very British Fleetwood Mac, which included the newly-divorced McVies. Then came Rumours, and seventy gajillion albums sold.)

Fast forward. Nicks’ most recent reference to her ex-boyfriend (from a 2009 BBC documentary): "Maybe when we're 75 and Fleetwood Mac is a distant memory, we might be friends.”


Fleetwood Mac has endured, despite the temporary departures of one or more of its key players. And it wasn’t the lure of a successful solo career that led to McVie’s exit in 2003.

“I’d been touring for so long, even before Stevie and Lindsey joined — and even before that, I’d been in another band, etcetera, etcetera — so I just felt my whole life I’d been living out of a suitcase,” she says. “I developed a fear of flying. And my father had been ill, in England, so I’d gone back home to visit him.

“He eventually died, and I thought ‘Well, it’s about time that I moved back home,’ and I bought a house in England. I had said to them, ‘Look, chaps, I’ve just about reached my Waterloo with being in the band. I think we’ll do this one last tour, and then I’m gonna leave.’ And that’s what I did. And on that tour, I was so terrified to fly.

“On the final flight to London, when I landed at Heathrow I swore I would never get on another plane. And I actually never did, for 15 years. I did all my traveling by rail or boat.”

A stint in therapy got rid of the airplane jitters. On her first flight after, from London to Maui alongside her old pal Mick Fleetwood, “I didn’t even notice the wheels leave the ground. Ever since then, I’ve embraced flying. I’ve been to Africa on these little tiny prop planes on safari, and everything. I love flying now.”

She was persuaded to return to the fold for the band’s 2014-2015 world tour. As always, there was talk of cutting a new record — and instead of a full Fleetwood Mac project, that became Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie.

“This was never intended, in the beginning, to be any kind of album at all,” McVie explains. “It was just for Lindsey and I to get together on a more intimate basis in a controlled room — rather than me just walking blind into Fleetwood Mac rehearsals. Just to get together and play some of my new songs. And that’s all we did.

“Then we did the Fleetwood Mac tour and went back to revisit those songs. And we thought, ‘Blimey, these are too just good to not do anything with.’ So that’s when we thought ‘Let’s do a duet album, why not?’”

Since 1975’s breakthrough album Fleetwood Mac (“Over My Head,” “Rhiannon,” “Say You Love Me,” “World Turning”), the musical chemistry between McVie and Buckingham has been obvious.

“I think the three of us have always sung well together,” insists McVie. “But Lindsey and I have a particular synergy, in the fact that we were the only actual people that were playing more than single notes in the band.

“I’m a keyboard player, he’s a guitar player, so between the two of us we seem to have this certain knack of understanding what the other is gonna do. So we play around each other. And therefore we can be point creative, and that’s always been the case between Lindsey and I.”

The current tour, she says, is a blast compared to Fleetwood Mac’s semi-regular world-domination dog and pony shows.

“I haven’t played to this few people since I was in a band called Chicken Shack! And it is really, really fantastic. It’s wonderful to play in these old theaters. The acoustics are always amazing. We find that people listen more. It’s not quite such a circus. We just thoroughly enjoy the performing bit of it, you know?”

There will, she adds, be a full-sized Fleetwood Mac tour — with Nicks included — in 2018.

And beyond that? McVie, who’ll turn 75 next July, isn’t sure. “Lindsey and I have been talking about doing another album together,” she says. “But that’s not official.”

She pauses, then laughs softly. “I’ve bought a house in London, so I want to spend some time making my new home as I’m in my dotage! And I want to get a dog.”

Lindsey Buckingham & Christine McVie
Thurs, Nov. 9, 7:30 p.m. $63.25-$128.75.
Ruth Eckerd Hall, 1111 McMullen Booth Road, Clearwater
More info: local.cltampa.com
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