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Old 06-11-2019, 10:33 PM
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Fleetwood Mac brings fewer highlights than you would expect from a Pinkpop valve ★★★ ☆☆

It was Stevie Nicks who made the concert shine.
Gijsbert Kamer11 June 2019, 12:07

The fiftieth edition of Pinkpop was closed by a band that was already brought to Limburg by Jan Smeets in 1971: Fleetwood Mac. At that time it was mainly a British blues band. Since the arrival of the American duo Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, the name Fleetwood Mac stands for beautiful pop songs (Dreams, Rhiannon, Everywhere), for one of the best-selling albums in pop history (Rumors, 1977), but also for a lot of mutual arguing and changes in the tire.

In the Fleetwood Mac that traveled to Landgraaf on Monday, no Lindsey Buckingham - he was fired a year and a half ago by his old partner Stevie Nicks. Christine McVie did sing along and Buckingham was replaced by not one but two guitarists: Neil Finn from Crowded House and Mike Campbell from Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers. Great musicians, but even together they didn't forget Buckingham. His guitar parts were not imitated, and his vocals were not.

Drummer and band leader Mick Fleetwood had already foreseen that. Typical Buckingham songs such as Big Love and Tusk were removed from the set list and the old blues rocker Black Magic Woman just returned.

But still, the Fleetwood Mac that closed Pinkpop, has become a different band and the performance got stiff. Dreams was sung a bit falsely, the high notes of Nicks and McVie came from the throats of background singers and it took a while before they were discreetly put into the sound mix.

The audience initially reacted somewhat lukewarm. Only when the bubbles in the Everywhere intro fluttered across the field did everyone revive. Cell phones went up in the air and the whole field sang along with the choirs.

The band maintained that good atmosphere during Rhiannon, after which the concert sagged considerably. Mick Fleetwood interrupted World Turning for an endless and especially dull drum solo, and the old blues riffs from Oh Well probably worked better in 1971 than now.

It was Stevie Nicks who made the concert shine. First in support of Neil Finn, who played hoarse Don't Dream It's Over - it must remind Fleetwood Mac that the song with the most acclaim is not their own, but from Crowded House - and then only in the ever beautiful Landslide.

It was nice, but not enough for a band with the stature of Fleetwood Mac. So many hits that seemed scanty scattered across the set. During Go Your Own Way without Buckingham you even got the idea that you were watching a cover band.

Perhaps the most heart-warming song was Free Fallin, in the encore. Also not a song from Fleetwood Mac, but from Tom Petty. Immense images of the rock musician who died in 2017 were shown on the screen and guitarist Mike Campbell got a moment on stage.

But again it was Stevie Nicks who beautifully sang the song to himself. She was unmistakably the big star of a performance that had fewer highlights than you would expect from a closing party of this jubilating Pinkpop.
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"I think what you would say is that there were factions within the band that had lost their perspective. What that did was to harm the 43-year legacy that we had worked so hard to build, and that legacy was really about rising above difficulties in order to fulfill one's higher truth and one's higher destiny."
Lindsey Buckingham, May 11, 2018.

Last edited by button-lip; 06-11-2019 at 11:09 PM..
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