UPTOWN GIRL ABROAD
by ALANA DIXON
The Southland Times
In an 11-month, 13-country (so far) adventure there have been plenty of ‘‘I’d die happy’’ moments. But, despite an ever-burgeoning passport, a self-satisfying list of European sights and South American escapades, and mastering the art of slipping through the masses to score the last empty seat on the Tube, I’ve struggled to think of another moment to top my list of moments since setting off on the Big OE.
Yes, folks, you might have tickets to Vector Arena but I defy you to trump seeing Fleetwood Mac belt out folksy rock jam after jam at London’s O2 Arena.
The evening did not start off the way I hoped.
After making the mistake of first heading to a bar in the Square Mile for some pre-show drinks (oh sure, I’ll pay £19 for a shared cocktail that arrives in a miniature bathtub filled mainly of ice cubes not booze, and, oh sure, I’d love to be surrounded by Hooray Henrys loudly discussing how many zeros are in their salaries! That doesn’t sound irritating at all) we came to our senses and decided to venture to the surely packed-to-the-brim bars around the stadium.
From there the night was on a steady, skyrocketing improve.
Great show by Fleetwood Mac last night at Manchester Arena. Possibly the best time I’ve seen them. Fleetwood Mac are enjoying a renewed wave of success. It seems everyone wants to see them and demand for tickets for their concerts has been much greater than the last couple of occasions they visited the UK. This gig at the massive 20,000 capacity Manchester Arena sold out in a matter of hours and tickets have been changing hands for twice their (already expensive) face value. There has also been some added excitement in the form of Christine McVie rejoining her old band mates at a couple of the London concerts.
I was sitting in my seat way up in the top level at the back of the arena. This is the 5th time I’ve seen the band, the first being way back in 1972, and I was still pretty excited and really looked forward to it. I was quite a distance away from the stage, but it gave me a great view of the whole arena. This was very much a classic rock show with crowd pleasing songs, drawn largely from “Fleetwood Mac”, “Rumours” and “Tusk”, excellent visuals, and great individual performances by each member of the band. Stevie still manages to pull off her gypsy, hippy rock chick image, all swirling skirts, twirling folk dancing, and even we even saw the return of her top hat towards the end of the show. She may have reworked some of the songs to remove the higher parts, but her vocals remain stunning. It would be easy to say that Lindsey Buckingham is the star of the show.
We’d gotten the tickets in March: Fleetwood Mac in London town. Don’t mind if I do.
I’d been hooked since watching their documentary. And much like when Harry Styles got his first tattoo, we all remember where we were the day that it aired, don’t we? (For me, it was the early hours of a Monday morning, drinking the remnants of the weekend before the onset of a black suit and a headset as the inevitable Brick Lane mouse twerked in the corner).
In 2011, I felt like the luckiest person in the world for being able to see Brit-pop icons Pulp headline Reading festival. Earlier this year I felt even luckier when I witnessed The Rolling Stones headline the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury.
Yet neither of these majestic live music experiences could have prepared me for the pure perfection that was seeing Fleetwood Mac. A band whose music has been in my life since early childhood courtesy of my dad and a band that tonight, made all of my wildest dreams come true.
It was time for a rare to visit to the vacuous O2 arena in London for an equally rare visit from the British-American super group Fleetwood Mac as part of my year of classic rock and oh my, were they good. The Mac are a band that I’ve lived with for a long time, with Rumours possibly my favourite non-metal album of all time. However, I’ve never seen them live before and given their history it appeared likely that I would never get to witness them in the flesh. When the opportunity presented itself earlier in the year it was just a case of making sure tickets were purchased. No easy task given the speed they sold out. We spent a while before the show marveling at the age range of the audience. A few metal heads, many old hippies and I suppose the type of audience you would expect them to attract; a real cross section and many there for the event as opposed to real fans of the band. However, just for once I shall concentrate on the events on stage rather than the annoying fucks sat around me.
Fleetwood Mac Live in London
September 27, 2013
Photos by Peter H.
When Stevie swoops down in front of the audience during the Stand Back twirl, she comes so close to the edge of the stage and the audience almost tauntingly, telling her subjects to "Stand Back" She almost grazes the tops of peoples heads with that cape!
“Life is good,” reflects Mick Fleetwood. We are over two hours into Fleetwood Mac’s third and final show at the O2, and it has fallen to Fleetwood to introduce his fellow bandmates on stage.
While Fleetwood was talking for the most part about the enduring friendships that exist between the various members of Fleetwood Mac, he could just as easily be surveying the last, remarkable 12 months in the band’s career. This sprawling world tour has been a tremendous success – “We’re doing the best business we’ve done in 20 years,” Lindsey Buckingham recently told Rolling Stone. The 35th anniversary of Rumours earlier this year provided a useful reminder of the band's most successful and notorious period, while the Extended Play EP showcased a clutch of new songs that seem redolent of the Rumours-era sound. Elsewhere, there are the broader cultural threads that have pillowed Fleetwood Mac’s 2013 – the revival of the soft rock aesthetic, and the kind of West Coast vibes evoked on Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories and Haim’s Days Are Gone.
But in many respects Fleetwood Mac are actually a more interesting proposition away from the Rumours material. The reissue a few months ago of the band’s 1969 album, Then Play On was a terrific reminder of the magical guitar interplay between Peter Green and Danny Kirwan. Indeed, while it’s nice enough to watch Christine McVie join her old band for “Don’t Stop”, it would have been more remarkable if Green had strolled on stage to play “The Green Manalishi (With The Two-Prong Crown)”. Tonight, the band’s decision to foreground songs from Tusk is sort-of brave – a great chunk of the audience seem bewildered by this – while the weird tensions between Buckingham's songs and Nicks' is actually quite compelling. To some extent, Buckingham and Nicks might as well be in different bands. Buckingham (who, I should point out, plays without a plectrum) seems to think he’s in some early 80s New Wave band for great chunks of the set, throwing punk rock shapes or shredding; at one point, during the extended coda for "I'm So Afraid", he seems to think he's in the middle of some wonderful, digressive Crazy Horse jam. His introduction to the Tusk section of the show involves a lecture in the merits of art against commerce; he clearly still has an almost neurotic attachment to that particular material, as his need to explain – or, perhaps, defend – it suggests. Later, his acoustic treatment of “Big Love” displays his extraordinary fretwork skills (incidentally, those solo albums are amazing). He and Nicks are gracious with each other – if, say, she’s singing a song, she’ll step back a little from the mic to let him play a solo – it’s slightly formal, a little awkward, you might say. Nicks, meanwhile, doesn’t entirely seem comfortable during the faster Buckingham numbers – she totters visibly during “Not That Funny”. Sounding a little like Edie Falco in The Sopranos when she speaks, and dressed as if she’s going for dinner with Big Edie and Little Edie at Grey Gardens, she seems clearly more comfortable with the soft focus Laurel Canyon Goth of “Rhiannon” and “Gypsy” than Buckingham’s angrier compositions. Her attempt to explain the provenance of the Extended Play track “Without You”, originally written by Nicks in the early Seventies, lasts longer than the song itself.
One of my earliest music memories is Peter Green singing Need Your Love so Bad, and his composition Green Manalishi (with the two prong crown), which to my pre-teen brain sounded bewilderingly mystical. Strange to now see Fleetwood Mac, in its present form, live in 2013, over 30 years later.
own
Mick Fleetwood and John McVie command the audience’s attention as the band opens with Second Hand News. This position is swiftly usurped by flamboyant performers Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. Nicks and Buckingham: the two former lovers hold the audience’s attention throughout the performance, their body language indicating that drama, tension and chemistry are alive and well. We can only watch and make of it what we will. Lindsey periodically moves to the front of the stage, crouching down with his guitar, to the obvious delight of the fans clustered at his feet.
Stevie Nicks has, gratifyingly, lost none of her hippy charm, she’s all drippy scarves, butterfly gestures and long hair (at 65 – yes, it still looks great). A tanned Lindsey Buckingham looks as if he’s been whisked straight from a California health spa.
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.
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.
Fleetwood Mac Sept 27th - London
Photos by Muzzy_ Full Gallery
LANDSLIDE:
Dedicated to Christine McVie
RHIANNON:
Stevie changed up the ending of Rhiannon a bit during the last show... I thought Friday's performance was exceptionally strong and I really liked what she did with the ending.
GOLD DUST WOMAN: is still really creepy and eerie at the end when Stevie's voice gets all echoee and she deeply growls into the mic... It's just an awesome song live and this extended version they are doing on this tour is really cool. Most of the video from the last show is posted below.
Fleetwood Mac Live in London September 27, 2013 - The O2 Arena
Yet one more memorable night! Big thanks to Fleetwood Mac for another great show... You never disappoint! And a massive thanks especially to Christine McVie. You've made an extremely large amount of people very happy with your return... Please don't make it another 15 years before we hear from you again with Fleetwood Mac!
Check out Erin Brown's pics from the show... 37 of them in a gallery HERE.
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