London Tonight, 9/24

[seanthompson]

Will Christine rejoin Fleetwood Mac tonight?

[applebucked]

I would be surprised if she did, honestly. I only expect her to be on the last two shows.

[jbrownsjr]

If it's only one song, why not all 3? Seems so strange...

[applebucked]

Originally Posted by jbrownsjr

If it's only one song, why not all 3? Seems so strange...

Maybe she'll do a warm up with this show, but who knows?

[seanthompson]

It's a little past 7 p.m. in London right now, so they must be taking the stage in the next hour or two. It's like the quiet before a storm.

[Macfanforever]

Have fun tonight guys and enjoy.

[Deeshere]

I thought this review was kind of funny and thought some of you might enjoy reading it too. This writer seems kind of hard to please.

Fleetwood Mac, O2 Arena
Are the megagroup's love poems, drum solos and heartache still interesting?
by Serena Kutchinsky| Wednesday, 25 September 2013

We all know the backstory of the Mighty Mac, the breakups, the betrayals, the addictions and now, finally, the reunion. These days they're more like the Mellow Mac with the emotional hatchets buried, lingering hugs on stage, and tender tales of their time as struggling Seventies hippies. Few other bands, not even Abba, have mined their private lives for inspiration to the same extent. Unlike today's manufactured pop-ettes who invent relationship strife to grab column inches and make themselves more interesting (Harry Styles and Taylor Swift, I'm looking at you), heartache has always been at the core of Fleetwood Mac's music and their unique, explosive chemistry.

Rivalling the likes of fellow pensioners the Rolling Stones in the longevity stakes - 37 years and counting - Fleetwood’s Mac's performance, almost three hours long, was infinitely more emotionally charged and entertaining than that which Mick Jagger and his merry band of geriatrics managed to muster at this year’s Glastonbury. This was the first of three nights at London's O2 which features the band in its most successful incarnation with Mick Fleetwood (drums) (pictured below), John McVie (bassist), Lindsey Buckingham (guitar) and the inevitable star of the show, Stevie Nicks (vocals). Disappointingly, tonight’s crowd were deprived of the emotional reunion with former vocalist Christine McVie (ex wife of John), which is rumoured to be on the cards for later in the run.

Mick Fleetwood The mammoth 23-song-set was perfectly pitched to please the 20,000 fans packing the venue, tell the Fleetwood Mac story and even showcase the odd new track. As the cross-generational crowd (including young hipsters paying homage in afghan coats and flares) shuffled expectantly in their seats, these old friends and lovers (Nicks dated Buckingham seriously and Fleetwood briefly) launched into a rousing rendition of “Second Hand News” from 1976’s bestselling album, Rumours. As someone who grew up with Stevie Nicks’s ethereal howls blasting out of my parents' car stereo, it was pure pleasure to see this gothic rock goddess perform live. I even found myself unexpectedly tearing up as the opening notes of their classic hit "Dreams" sent the crowd into a foot-stomping frenzy.

Yes, there was the odd over-indulgent guitar solo and waffle from Lindsey Buckingham about the evils of the music business and overcoming his personal demons, most of which sounded liked psychobabble. But he made up for it with a genuinely moving version of “Big Love” (from Tango in the Night, 1987), when he stood alone in the spotlight strumming a Spanish guitar. “The lyrics when I first wrote this song described who Lindsey Buckingham was at the time," he confessed. “I was running away from love. But, what once was a meditation on alienation has now become about the power of change.” Whatever it was about, the audience loved it.

Stevie Nicks Throughout the performance, Mick Fleetwood sat majestically behind his drum kit, positioned between Nicks (pictured left) and Buckingham whose friendship is finally back on track after a decade-long feud. In one particularly touching moment, the pair performed a song inspired by a love poem Nicks wrote in the duo’s pre-Mac era entitled "Without You". Only when the encore came did Mick Fleetwood take centre stage and showcase his drumming prowess with an impressively energetic solo on "Don’t Stop".

The show should really have ended there, but for some reason they decided to raise our hopes of a last minute rendition of another classic such as “Little Lies”, only to disappoint with the little known “Silver Springs” (the B-side of “Go Your Own Way”), and “Say Goodbye” from 2003’s Say You Will album, which is about Buckingham finally letting go of his love for Nicks. Just as Fleetwood Mac have allegedly moved on, so too have their fans, and by that point in the evening we’d had enough of hearing about their emotional issues. Playing out to a rapidly emptying arena can’t have been the finale they were hoping for. Fingers crossed that if the rumours about Glastonbury in 2014 are true, they use that opportunity to shut up and play a few more of the hits.

http://www.theartsdesk.com/new-music...d-mac-o2-arena

[chiliD]

Originally Posted by Deeshere

. This writer seems kind of hard to please.

Actually, he makes himself look like a Class A Tool.

[vivfox]

Without You (no intro) by Rozalind Sargent




Dreams by Rozalind Sargent




Tusk by Rozalind Sargent

[vivfox]

Rhiannon by Carolinetillyann

[michelej1]

By Bernadette McNulty 1:06PM BST 19 Sep 2013

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/m...s-of-rock.html

Fleetwood Mac: the Time Lords of rock

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 Lindsay 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 been already mooted for the line-up 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.

[michelej1]

http://www.theguardian.com/music/201...-mac-o2-review

Fleetwood Mac – review by Kitty Empire, The Observer,
The Guardian, Sunday 29 September 2013


O2, London
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

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.

[vivfox]

Stevie jokes (to the audience), "I hope that the day you die you do think of this story."



Without You intro by Cath_InTheDark