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Fleetwood Mac Live in London
September 27, 2013 - The O2 Arena
by Michael Bonner
“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.
