REVIEW: Fleetwood Mac's Swedish Concert Reviewers... Reviewed!

(translated article)
Critical points
By Jan Gradvall
Expressen.se (Click this link for the original article)

During the Fleetwood Mac concert at the Globe reviewers looked at football. Jan Gradvall notes to the audience, in return, has the eyes of reviewers.

On Saturday, one could witness Scenes from a marriage of two different scenes in Stockholm. One idea was the Royal Dramatic Theater Small Stage with Jonas Karlsson, Livia Millhagen. The second show was at the Globe with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks in the leading roles. Fleetwood Mac's Rumors album is rock music's equivalent of Scenes from a Marriage.

Like Ingmar Bergman's TV series and play, it is a work from the mid-70s, in which private experiences may be a general sense by a total mastery of the artistic expression.

What is interesting is how different these two similar shows watched by critics.

In the theater world is sitting critic concentrated in a darkened theater and wait until the show is described as final.

Within the rock critic world are today connected to the Internet throughout the show, handing out value judgments scene for scene, twittrar and write blogs.

That journalism today are using Twitter, Facebook and blogs as tools is a matter of course. Not least given that it is now on the web that the greatest number of readers there.

But it is obvious that the criticism would deal with it? What makes real-time monitoring of power to the criticism?

Customers in recent days has been on the net could see how readers rebelled against the four Stockholm-based newspapers disparaging reviews of Fleetwood Mac concert.

Many have been provoked by a picture blog where Expressen and Aftonbladet reviewers sit together and follow the football match, Denmark-Sweden in parallel with the marriage drama played out on stage.

The major events in Fleetwood Mac concert was - just about in Bergman's TV series and play - the smallest gestures.

The song "Sara" is about abortion. It is a complicated love drama, written by Stevie Nicks, which depicts the relationship between Stevie Nicks, drummer Mick Fleetwood, his wife Sara Fleetwood and Don Henley of the Eagles.

Text line "When you build your house / I'll come by" supposed to be all about Don Henley and Mick Fleetwood.

But during the concert on Saturday may be the song a new dimension. Midway track goes up to Stevie Nicks Lindsey Buckingham and gives him a long hug.

Is also the track on Stevie Nicks long relationship with Lindsey Buckingham? It was he who could become the father of the unborn child?

"Silver Springs" is one of rock history's bitterest and most powerful love songs. The song is about how Lindsey Buckingham Stevie Nicks left for another woman.

When band leader Mick Fleetwood decided that the song was rejected by Rumors on the basis of LP-disc limited playing time - the song ended up instead in the b-side of single "Go your own away - Stevie Nicks became so bitter in Mick Fleetwood that she threatened to leave the band.

During a concert in 1990 she changed the lyrics to "Gold Dust Woman". After looking towards Mick have sung "Take your silver springs and dig your grave!" She left the stage. And then left the band for several years.

On this tour ends Fleetwood Mac "Silver Springs" as the final encore.

Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham and Mick Fleetwood comes out on stage side by side. Stevie and Lindsey are looking for each other's hands before the song.

When Stevie Nicks then sings "I know I could have loved you / But you would not let me" is not just the band members' eyes that glisten.

The audience at the sold-out Globe Arena reminded about Dramaten than a typical rock concert.

Average age was somewhere around 57th And the average number of marriages per visitor somewhere around 1.7.

But the verdict from the reviewers days could be summed up: "maddeningly dull".

That concert-goers and readers are angry at reviewers are nothing new. But again is that social media has made that now even the reviewers will be watched and reviewed. And sometimes corrected.

Swedish Dagbladet's reviewer made fun of the Steve Nicks in his long, personal introduction to "Gypsy" - which turned out to be about her first time with Lindsey Buckingham - Confusing the 60's band when she started talking about the Velvet Underground.

But concert-goers informs in a comment to the concert review. As Stevie Nicks spoke of is the Velvet Underground, she mentions in the lyrics: a clothing store in downtown San Francisco.

Rock Critics seem to have concluded that constant connection makes it now needs less effort at work. Readers they are talking about the opposite.

Almost all the songs at concerts are also now on YouTube afterwards, the public tender.

It is no longer the critic who has the last word. To quote the title of Thomas Anderson's recent book on criticism: We are all critics.

The visitors to the Globe on Saturday that gave the best journalistic narrative of the concert was the person standing in front of the stage held up a camera phone during Lindsey Buckingham solo version of "Big Love".

With this simple tool to tool - a camera can be a pen, a pencil can be a camera - achieves this amateur critic as critic heel up in the gallery is not brokered.

Through this story we follow down to the concert floor.

We'll see Lindsey Buckingham tense temples. We can relive the exorcism he practices with his acoustic guitar. We can almost feel how it smelled in Stockholm on Saturday evening.

And when the person with the mobile camera at the end of the song turns around, we'll also see how the audience reacts to the performance.

Writing reviews is not just about making a thumbs up or thumbs down. The idea is to reproduce in detail.

These are things that, at least in the past, been the foundation of what critics do.

FLEETWOOD MAC'S UNFINISHED BUSINESS

Fleetwood Mac's unfinished business

If the bust-ups are over, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham still have unfinished business as their latest tour hits the UK

The Times Online

Dan Cairns

Mick Fleetwood, 6ft 6in of military bearing, white beard, gold watch chain and pinstriped waistcoat, sits back in an armchair that can barely contain his extensive frame. “You know what I’d love?” the Fleetwood Mac drummer says to a hovering assistant, eyeing the bottle of water in front of him with some disdain, “A little glass of red.” In the old days, that little glass of red would have been the first of many libations, accompanied by copious quantities of cocaine: when the band recorded Rumours, a velvet bag full of the drug was kept beneath the studio mixing desk, for dipping into at will.

Nowadays, the group’s remaining co-founder is drug-free, and, though he still carries about him an unmistakable whiff of volcanic unpredictability, the 62-year-old seems to be settling into his role as the calm centre of the Fleetwood Mac storm. During the band’s mid-1970s commercial heyday, he served briefly as their unofficial manager, which, considering that he was running amok on brandy and cocaine, probably says a lot.

Thirty-plus years on, the group have individual managers, together with an impressive number of helpmeets, chauffeurs and eagle-eyed enablers. The band appear to travel for the most part separately, with their own retinues. What Lindsey Buckingham will later describe as the “residue” of historic dysfunction still requires placating. They could surely, I suggest to Fleetwood, just sort it all out themselves, couldn’t they?

“It could be a lot easier,” he agrees with a characteristic chuckle. “You know, make a decision and move on. We all used to be so much more in control of our own destinies, we just bundled along ourselves and did pretty well — considering. I always call the managers, and I don’t mean it nastily, the Gang of Five [Christine McVie, who left the band in 1998, is still represented], like a kind of Maoist thing. So, yes, things take a little more time now. But, you know, we’re still here.”

Fleetwood is holding court in a hotel suite in Copenhagen, the city where, several days later, the four surviving members of the Rumours line-up — Fleetwood and his fellow original bandmate John McVie, plus Stevie Nicks and Buckingham, who both joined in 1974 — are due to kick off the European leg of their current world tour. To accompany the dates, a double album of greatest hits is being released, featuring the songs that make up the majority of the set-list they will perform. It is the first time they have headed out on the road without a new studio album to promote, but that, says Fleetwood, has its advantages. “There’s a lot less of that pressure, of having to rehearse a load of new songs, then force people to listen to them.” Does he wonder why they didn’t try it years ago?

“I always joke with Lindsey,” he replies, “that we’re probably the worst run but most ongoingly successful music franchise in the business, if you look at what we don’t do and what we could have done. If you were a cynic and went, ‘Huh, they’re just doing it for the money,’ it’s like, ‘Hang on a minute, I wish we had.’”

None of this is said with any apparent bitterness: Fleetwood has the avuncular-referee role down pat. He admits the biggest pleasure he derives from the hits-only set list is the opportunity it gives him to place the band’s key albums in some sort of perspective. The biggest surprise, he says, is how linked they strike him as being: the feeling-their-way radio pop/lingering blues hybrid of the new line-up’s self-titled 1975 debut, the soft-rock masterclass of Rumours and the wildly experimental disjointedness of 1979’s Tusk. And how uncategorisable. “As poppy as our legacy is in many ways,” he says, “I think, equally, there’s a darkness about it. We’ve never done coy and cute.”

The tension Fleetwood admits marred the band’s previous world tour — to promote 2003’s Say You Will album — is, he believes, less evident now. Not that things don’t remain unsaid: this is Fleetwood Mac, after all. But there is still no chance, he says, of recruiting a group therapist, of the type documented in the Metallica film Some Kind of Monster. “At various times,” Fleetwood laughs, “I think we’ve all been to one on our own. When it sort of imploded with emotion was when all of us were besotted with emotional overload, so nobody could sort of take the back seat and come in impartially. But it’s like kids in a playground. Last week someone was your best friend, and this week they’re inviting someone else round for a play.”

Several days earlier, in a different suite at the same hotel, one of the other kids in the Mac playground reclines with a Lady Bertram-like torpor on a giant sofa, her eyes hidden behind vintage Aviator shades. It would simply not be possible to talk to either Nicks or Buckingham about their love affair, which famously crashed and burned during the Rumours sessions, in tandem with the collapse of the McVies’ marriage, without reopening a can of worms. “Residue”, Buckingham called it. I’m not sure that does it justice.

“Lindsey is definitely still angry with me,” Nicks says in her dusky drawl. “Absolutely. He’s never quite understood why we broke up. Even though he’s married and he’s very happy, and he’s a great dad, I think that he never really forgave me for breaking up our relationship.”

Long characterised as an away-with-the-fairies fruitcake, Nicks strikes me as having a core of steel, no matter her languor or penchant for woolly soliloquy. By her own admission the only member of the band who could rival Fleetwood — with whom she had an affair — for hedonism, she long ago conquered her drug addiction, then endured a lengthy and briefly life-threatening dependency on the tranquillisers she had been prescribed to wean her off cocaine. These days, she appears to be physically somewhat fragile, but the mischievous candour remains. She tells me she finally went to see a psychologist “about five years ago, a really sweet little lady, and we were just talking about my life, and I was telling her about those years, when Lindsey and I first moved to LA, and I was a waitress, a cleaning lady, and anything else I could do to pay our rent, and I said to her, ‘But there was something about those years that I really loved.’ And she said, ‘Well, in many ways, Stevie, the day you joined Fleetwood Mac was the saddest day of your life — because it was the day you stopped being the caretaker.’ You can imagine, there was a real big silence in the room when she said that”.

When Nicks and Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac, they were at the tail end of a four-year struggle to make it as a duo, and heavily in debt. But they both to this day believe that they would have made it on their own terms, and it is this sense of unfinished business and unrealised dreams, together with nostalgia for a time before what Nicks calls the “very fast and very hard” ascent to stardom they experienced with Fleetwood Mac, that appears to haunt them still.“It was scary,” Nicks continues. “To not have enough money to even file a tax return, then to have so much, eight months later, that you had to hire someone to file it for you. All of a sudden you have a big, huge house, and you end up filling up your time, doing drugs and just getting lost in that whole world. I didn’t any longer have the responsibility of having to watch out for Lindsey. We all just stayed in great places, and we got room service. Nobody had to cook, nobody had to clean up the kitchen.”

She looks suddenly lost. “We joined Fleetwood Mac, we made a record in three months, put it out, went on the road in May. We did a four-month tour, we got home and we had close to $1m between us. What Lindsey grieves for, in my opinion, is, if he had the chance to go back and decide, when we were beginning the second Buckingham-Nicks record and we got asked to join Fleetwood Mac, he would not join.” Again, she pauses. “If we had not moved to LA, would Lindsey and I have gotten married and had kids? Probably.”

The man she refers to, and whom she can, on one level, still not let go of, sits in a dressing room, legs up on the chair in the lotus position, the tension crackling off him as audibly as it does off his music. Easily the most uncomfortable interviewee — however courteous — of the three, the band’s 60-year-old sonic architect answers in carefully structured, emotionally arid chunks, cool where Nicks is confessional.

“When we first got together to talk about the tour,” he says, “because Stevie had some trust issues in terms of her perception of how things ended up at the end of the last tour, my comment was, ‘Stevie, if nothing else, you and I have known each other since high school, and we need to have this thing end up in a way that dignifies how it started.’ And you wouldn’t think that, at this point in our lives, it would be a work in progress. You’d think that things would be fine. But there is still an evolution going on.”

If he shares a similar degree of regret with Nicks about what they lost, rather than gained, by joining the band, he hides it well. His answers are startlingly impersonal. “When we made the decision to join, we both gave up something that had been more essentially ourselves. And it wasn’t just giving up the synthesis between the two of us in terms of how we wrote together, sang together. It was Stevie losing herself to having been singled out as Stevie Nicks, in capital letters. This is one of the things I think has been hardest for her over the years, having sort of been asked to be this person who’s out front, the pressure of that. And what I gave up was a great deal of my style as a guitarist. I mean, I had to adapt to an existing situation — something as fundamental as changing the guitar I used because it didn’t fit into the pre-existing sound.”

Watching Nicks apparently goading Buckingham during the rehearsal later, complaining about the loudness of his guitar and asking for further ear protection, you rewind to that answer — about his “style as a guitarist”, for God’s sake — and begin to see why she might feel the need to poke him for a reaction. Buckingham cuts a moody, needy figure, the human equivalent of a Just Married car, with others forced to bang and clatter along the road behind him. From his drum stool, Fleetwood observes the scene impassively, a weather eye on the sort of playground scrap he has doubtless witnessed many times before. Then the band strike up the opening chords of Dreams, Nicks purrs “Now here you go again”, and you think, that’s why we still bother. And why they do, too. Heaven knows, though, they don’t make it easy.

The Very Best of Fleetwood Mac is released tomorrow on Warners. The British tour opens in Glasgow on Thursday

Press Mentions on Fleetwood Mac Releasing a New CD After Current Tour

Well someone is planting the seeds for Fleetwood Mac to release a new album after this tour is over.  The Euro press is going gaga over (not Lady Ga Ga), but over the fact that Stevie mentioned they will be meeting in January to decide what to do next as a band. Whether it's the press picking up on what she said and running with it, or it was planted by their publicists, who knows... But I'm glad someone is paying attention to this - maybe it will send a signal that YES, we would like to see a new album from these guys!

Some of the press mentions:

Fleetwood Mac to release new album
BreakingNewsie
Fleetwood Mac are planning to release a new album.

The legendary band – who kick off their ‘Unleashed’ tour in Glasgow, Scotland, next Thursday – want to go back into the studio next year to start work on their first LP of original material since 2003’s ‘Say You Will’.

Singer Stevie Nicks says fans have a lot more to look forward to from the band, but say they can only start recording when they complete their dates.

She said: “When we're on the road, we barely have time to go and have a meal, let alone write new material. But in January we'll have a meeting and decide what to do.”

The legendary singer also claims the band – who were notorious hellraisers during their 70s peak – have finally grown-up and are having a great time on the road.

She added: "Fleetwood Mac still presents some amazing opportunities. Around thirty years ago, we were all so self-absorbed that we couldn't see out of our own corner. Things are a lot more fun now."

Fleetwood Mac: Stevie Nicks kündigt neues Album an
Klatsch-tratsch.de
Die legendäre 70er-Jahre Band Fleetwood Mac startet am 22. Oktober Glasgow/Schottland ihre 'Unleashed’-Welttournee. Die Gruppe um Sängerin Stevie Nicks und Masterminds Lindsay Buckingham sowie Mick Fleetwood will im kommenden Jahr wieder ins Studio, um am ersten Album seit 2003 zu arbeiten.

Fleetwood Mac to release new album
Breaking News Ireland On-line

FLEETWOOD MAC TO RELEASE LP
Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks has revealed the band are planning on releasing their first new album in six years.
Contactmusic.com

STEVIE NICKS - Fleetwood Mac put out new album
Fleetwood Mac are planning their comeback album.
Gala.de

Fleetwood Mac to release LP

Monstersandcritics.com

New Fleetwood Mac Album Coming Soon
Current Movie Reviews

FLEETWOOD MAC PLAN NEW ALBUM
Entertainment Africa

FLEETWOOD MAC - HOT TICKET (REVIEW MAGAZINE)

HOT TICKET: On Page 16 of the "Review Magazine" inside the October 17th edition of The Daily Telegraph in the UK Fleetwood Mac are reviewed by Bernadette McNulty (click photo to enlarge)

(REVIEW) ROTTERDAM - Duo nog altijd bepalend voor Fleetwood Mac

Duo nog altijd bepalend voor Fleetwood Mac
MUZIEK, Gijsbert Kamer
De Volkskrant

ROTTERDAM - De afgelopen dertig jaar was Fleetwood Mac diverse malen in Nederland, maar een bezetting met zowel de Britse oprichters Mick Fleetwood en John McVie als het Amerikaanse duo Lindsey Buckingham en Stevie Nicks dat de groepssound midden jaren zeventig compleet zou veranderen, stond hier sinds 1980 niet meer op het podium. Van het vijftal dat in 1977 met Rumours een van de best verkochte popalbums ooit uitbracht, was donderdag in een uitverkocht Ahoy alleen Christine McVie er niet bij.

Drummer Fleetwood en bassist McVie spelen al meer dan veertig jaar in Fleetwood Mac, maar hoe sympathiek de aloude bluesrocker Oh Well (1969) ook klonk, het was het enige moment dat het publiek herinnerd werd aan de periode voor de komst van Nicks en Buckingham. Het waren hun liedjes, en enkele van de gewezen toetseniste, die centraal stonden – en dan vooral het nog altijd prachtige werk uit de jaren zeventig, dat nog niets aan relevantie heeft verloren.

Fleetwood Mac was ook niet gekomen om nieuw werk te presenteren, verduidelijkte Buckingham, maar ‘to have fun’. Lol straalde de band zeker uit. Van de spanningen die jarenlang een van de leukste soaps uit de rock ’n’ roll opleverden, was weinig meer te merken. Zangeres Stevie Nicks stond weliswaar veel verder van haar ex Buckingham vandaan dan de slimme montage op de videoschermen suggereerde, maar het was duidelijk dat het stel er weer echt zin in had.

Dreams klonk goed, de hoge toon in Rhiannon haalde Nicks helaas niet meer. Wel zong ze een prachtige Sara en leverde ze met Landslide een van de hoogtepunten. Tussen deze Nicks-liedjes speelde Buckingham in zijn eentje op akoestische gitaar een versie van Big Love die het origineel uit 1987 overtrof.

Deze drie nummers bewezen hoe bijzonder de kwaliteiten van dit duo nog altijd zijn, en het was aardig dat ze elkaar na afloop van Sara toch even omhelsden.

De andere bandleden werden in een bijrol gedrongen. De wat stevigere rockers als Second Hand News en Go Your Own Way klonken goed, maar ook wat gewoner. Het bandgeluid was met drie achtergrondzangeressen ook wat anoniem. De in eenzelfde zwart vestje gestoken Fleetwood en McVie, toch de ritmetandem van het eerste uur, lieten zich hun bijrol als begeleiders welgevallen.

Misschien was dat maar goed ook. Twee sterke blikvangers als een prachtig spelende Buckingham en een Nicks die ook nog twee keer kans zag zich in een andere jurk te hijsen, is genoeg. Die twee hebben het nog altijd samen.

(PHOTOS) FLEETWOOD MAC - ANTWERPEN, BELGIUM (Photos by GaramiAA)

Fleetwood Mac Antwerpen Belgium October 14, 2009

Photos by: GaramiAA

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