Mick Fleetwood Blues Band play Aussie Blues fest

[FuzzyPlum]

Well, I thought Fleetwood Mac were due to be in the studio in the Spring. Not sure how likely that's looking now. Mick and Rick will be playing the Aussie 'Bluesfest' from 24th-28th March. Can't see them doing that as a one-off event, surely.


Eagles of Death Metal, Mick Fleetwood To Play Bluesfest
by PAUL CASHMERE on FEBRUARY 4, 2016
in LIVE,NEWS
The Bluesfest 2016 line-up is completely locked in with The Mick Fleetwood Blues Band and Eagles of Death Metal rounding up this year’s bill.

http://www.noise11.com/news/music-ne...sfest-20160204


Festival boss Peter Noble is pumped to get Fleetwood on the bill. “Wow…..Mick Fleetwood’s Blues Band doing the early songs of Fleetwood Mac, when they were a Blues Band, plus current Blues Award nominee for Best Contemporary Blues album, Eugene Hideaway Bridges. Then add Australia’s two greatest Blues bands ever, Chain and the Backsliders, Playing For Change, who continue through their good work and constant touring to build music schools in third world countries for young people to learn instruments, and literally play their way out of poverty, and showing great bravery to get out on the road, the Eagles of Death Metal – that’s an announcement. I have lost count, I think that’s our ninth, and of course, the other artists announced in this one are cracking too.

Other final additions announced today were Chain, Playing For Change, Eugene ‘Hideaway’ Bridges’, Backsliders, Digging Roots, Frazey Ford, Marshall Okell, Sahara Beck and Emma Donovan.

Bluesfest 2016 is on March 24 to 28 in Byron Bay, New South Wales.

[michelej1]

by Tom Ryan | February 4th, 2016 11:08:AM EST Rolling Stone AU

http://rollingstoneaus.com/music/pos...fest-2016/3106

With seven weeks to go until Bluesfest 2016 kicks off, organisers have today announced yet another round of stellar acts to join the already massive lineup.

Leading the announcement is The Mick Fleetwood Blues Band Featuring Rick Vito. Mick Fleetwood, dummer and co-founder of iconic rock band Fleetwood Mac will be joined by former band member Rick Vito as well as Lenny Castellanos and Mark Johnston. The Grammy Award winning group celebrates Mick Fleetwood's Blues heritage and festival goers can expect to hear a mix of Fleetwood Mac classics and great Blues tracks. In another exciting addition Californian band, Eagles of Death Metal, will make their Bluesfest debut at the festival's 2016 installment. Formed by singer Jesse Hughes and drummer/guitarist Josh Homme (Queens of The Stone Age) in 1998, 2015 saw the group release Zipper Down, their first studio album in seven years.

Perhaps more recently remembered as the band onstage during the Bataclan attack in Paris, the band have since returned to the Bataclan to play with U2 and resumed touring in support of their latest LP. Also included on this round of additions are Playing For Change Band, Chain, Backsliders, Eugene Hideaway Bridges, Irish Mythen, Digging Roots, Frazey Ford, Marshall Okell, Sahara Beck and Emma Donovan & The Putbacks. These acts all round out the incredible bill for the 5-day easter weekend festival, joining previously announced acts including Kendrick Lamar, The National, D'Angelo, Brian Wilson, Tom Jones, UB40, The Original Blues Brothers Band and Don McLean. — Bluesfest 2016 runs from Thursday 24th to Monday 28th March and tickets are on sale now. -

See more at: http://rollingstoneaus.com/music/pos....nGTk7mYL.dpuf

[Missy]

He did say something to the Australian media in October last year about returning to do some blues the following year.

The more than chatty sticksman also reveals that he hopes to bring his blues band back to Australia at some point next year and to possibly enlist the services of an old mate, a certain J. Barnes. “It would be fun. He’s a great rock ‘n’ roll singer and in truth a great blues singer. He’s really adept at it.” As we went to press Barnesy wasn’t aware of this development, but hopefully he soon will be.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts...5e0d562bbd7131

I don't think a join up with Jimmy Barnes is on the cards. Just noticed though apparently Mick, Billy Burnette and Waddy Wachtel did session work on Jimmy's best known material I've heard heaps of times. I had no idea.

[nicole21290]

Also playing a few other venues down here, in Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland and Wellington. http://www.bluesfesttouring.com.au/e...entGroupID=188

He doesn't come cheap, especially if you want to have a chat to the man, lol....

[justcrazylove]

I bought tickets for the Sydney show, but not a chance at the meet and greet, I played that game last year for FM! Should be a cool show, this came as somewhat of a surprise to be honest, a pleasant surprise!

[GavinBrown]

Looks like this timeline perfectly sets up the following:
Stevie summer solo tour
Lindsey summer solo tour (if he wants to)
John Mcvie summer sailing on his boat
Christine Mcvie writing and relaxing
Fall album recording
Late Winter album release
Spring/Summer/Fall tour

[FuzzyPlum]

Originally Posted by GavinBrown

Looks like this timeline perfectly sets up the following:
Stevie summer solo tour
Lindsey summer solo tour (if he wants to)
John Mcvie summer sailing on his boat
Christine Mcvie writing and relaxing
Fall album recording
Late Winter album release
Spring/Summer/Fall tour

Although there's been no mention of it yet, I was wondering whether Christine might join him on some of his Blues Band gigs. She's come back to play music- she's probably got a stockpile of songs in addition to what they've already recorded so probably doesn't need to do much more writing. If Lindsey and Stevie do extended solo work I hope Mick (and Chris and Rick) come and play some shows in the UK in the summer.

[michelej1]

Mick Fleetwood brings his own Blues Band back Down Under

Date March 21, 2016 Craig Mathieson Sydney Morning Herald

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/...22-gnnant.html

Mick Fleetwood, the drummer whose surname underpins one of the most successful bands in the history of popular music, has written two autobiographies.

The first was 1991's Fleetwood: My Life and Adventures in Fleetwood Mac, with 2014's Play On: Now, Then, and Fleetwood Mac the recent successor. The difference between the two tomes, the 68-year-old explains, is simple.

"I did the second one sober," Fleetwood says. "It wasn't planned, but it was cathartic, and a little more thought went into it. I think there was too much whistleblowing in the first one, which can create a sense of betrayal sometimes, and that was very much not the case with this book. I was happy to talk about my lifestyle, but not bring other people into it."

A percussionist of inventive dimensions, Fleetwood is speaking from Los Angeles, a city he visits often to spend time with his teenage twin daughters, Tessa and Ruby, whose mother was his third wife, Lynn Frankel. The couple divorced in 2014 and Fleetwood is wont to joke that every time he arrives in Los Angeles, a city intimately associated with the touchstone albums and grand follies of Fleetwood Mac's tumultuous second iteration, that he remembers another mind-boggling incident from the murk of his decades powered by alcohol and cocaine.

"If I had any hair left," he adds with a laugh, "it would be curling."

Fleetwood, who has left behind what he terms "the dark ages", lives on the Hawaiian island of Maui, where he owns the restaurant and bar Fleetwood's on Front Street. The venue hosts gigs, and unsurprisingly one act that is often booked is The Mick Fleetwood Blues Band, the drummer's long-running side project with guitarist/vocalist Rick Zito, bassist Lenny Castellanos, and keyboardist Mark Johnstone.

"My nightmare is an audience thinking they're getting Fleetwood Mac, when really it's The Mick Fleetwood Blues Band. You don't want people turning up thinking we'll be playing Rhiannon," he says, citing one of Stevie Nicks' Fleetwood Mac singles.

"The fact is we are a blues band, which should make clear to people what they're getting. We're a straight ahead four-piece band like the original Fleetwood Mac."

It's the first incarnation of Fleetwood Mac, which formed in London in 1967 and was dominated creatively by the guitarist and vocalist Peter Green, who left the often chaotic group in 1970 due to deteriorating mental health, whose music is prominent in the setlist of The Mick Fleetwood Blues Band.

Fleetwood, who grew up in Egypt, Norway and various English boarding schools as the son of a Royal Air Force fighter pilot, was part of the British generation who spent their adolescence obsessed with blues music. Like Keith Richards and Eric Clapton, he would travel for hours to get to the home of someone who had somehow come into possession of a blues record imported from America, huddling in groups around tiny record players and recording primitive bootlegs on secretarial dictation machines.

"How sad is it that people don't have that adventure any more?" Fleetwood says. "When you went around to [band leader] John Mayall's house it was a shrine to the blues. He'd sit you down, almost like a school teacher, and he'd bring out this vinyl, some of it was Bakelite 78s that could break, and it would be early John Lee Hooker."

Fleetwood was recently chatting with Aerosmith frontman Steve Tyler, who is just nine months his junior, when he realised that Tyler was an original Fleetwood Mac fan, enthusing about seeing them play in Boston in 1968. Fleetwood had helped form Fleetwood Mac just after his 20th birthday and been in a handful of London-based outfits for four years prior, after being discovered practising in his sister's Notting Hill garage.

"Back then being in a band was a dream come true," he says, and it's been his life for more than 50 years now. A reformed Fleetwood Mac, with the definitive five-piece Rumours-era line-up, only finished a 15-month world tour in November, but Fleetwood is already restless to perform, so The Mick Fleetwood Blues Band is back on the road.

"I'm not like Bob Dylan or Elton John in that I can actually take a break from touring," Fleetwood says, "but just not for very long."

The Mick Fleetwood Blues Band play at Bluesfest in Byron Bay and at 170 Russell, Melbourne, on March 29.


Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/...#ixzz43hY4f38g
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[nicepace]

I really wish Christine McVie was in the Mick Fleetwood Blues Band. She was originally a blues musician and still has a lot of blues left in her playing style. But maybe it would greatly increase the chance that people would show up expecting Rumours era FM (which Mick fears, according to his quotes above).

[michelej1]

Star-studded Bluesfest a resounding success
MARCH 26, 2016

http://www.news.com.au/entertainment...921706cafe40e6

Fleetwood Mac enthusiasts packed the Crossroads tent to see the drummer at work with the Mick Fleetwood Blues Band, his Maui-based bunch of mates. This was an entertaining blues romp with the charismatic skinsman undoubtedly pleased to be playing the kind of music which defined his band in the late 1960s before Rumours.