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Tuesday, November 03, 2009
FLEETWOOD MAC - "DON'T STOP" DOCUMENTARY COMMENTARY
Fleetwood Mac and a divorce lawyer’s Rumours
MarilynStowe
Continue To Marilyn's Blog
MarilynStowe
I watched an incredibly personal interview with the band Fleetwood Mac on the BBC the other night, in advance of their forthcoming British tour. The band members are clearly older and wiser than they were in the late 1970s. They had stories to tell about the emotional turbulence in their lives when arguably they were at the height of their success. It made fascinating viewing for me, a fan who keeps The Very Best Of close by in my bedroom.
I love the music and I love their voices, but I must admit that the words haven’t always made sense to me. I’ve just been conscious that these are world-class artists producing world-class timeless music. Now I understand how their tumultuous lives have contributed so much to their art.
Continue To Marilyn's Blog
REVIEW: Fleetwood Mac - Sheffield Arena - Sheffield, UK Nov 2, 2009
By Mike Russell
Sheffield Telegraph
Sheffield Telegraph
GREATEST hits they promised and greatest hits they delivered - Fleetwood Mac were back last night, thrilling a packed Sheffield Arena.
Five years after they insisted they were calling it a day for good, Stevie Nicks, Mick Fleetwood, John McVie and Lindsey Buckingham are on tour again playing songs "just for fun" - and fun it most certainly was.
This was a debut appearance in these parts for the band's most famous incarnation, the one which gave the world the mega-selling Rumours, and they came armed with a fantasy setlist designed to thrill any fan.
Bland it wasn't. Freed from its usual F1 home The Chain roared out of the starting blocks, second song in, with power to spare, while a fierce percussion-led Tusk banished any thought that the Mac are simply gentle easy-listening.
Buckingham in particular seemed determined to prove the band aren't ready for their pipe and slippers just yet, giving many of the rockers like Go Insane the big solo guitar god treatment.
With Christine McVie opting out of the current reunion, there's more focus on Nicks, whose voice remains strangely ethereal and other-worldly.
You can't go far wrong with a songbook like the Mac's - highlights included Say You Love Me, Sara, Rhiannon, Gold Dust Woman and the mighty Go Your Own Way.
There was even a nod to the original Peter Green-led version of the band, with a punchy version of Oh Well, which was one of the highlights of the night.
While McVie and Fleetwood remain as tight a rhythm section as ever, it's Buckingham and Nicks who now dominate the band, and they had plenty of references to the band's often tumultous past - a living soap opera as famous as any in pop.
Any flabby moments were soon swept away by yet another big tune. Everyone was up and bopping to encore Don't Stop - and on this form no-one will want them to.
Monday, November 02, 2009
(REVIEW) FLEETWOOD MAC "DON'T STOP" DOCUMENTARY
Fleetwood Mac - Don't Stop, BBC One
Written by: Adam Sweeting
The Artists Desk
Fleetwood Mac - Don't Stop lacked the caustic edge of the Rock Family Trees film about the band from 1995. That contained some great stuff about the fake Fleetwood Mac launched by their former manager Clifford Davis, true confessions from ex-guitarist Bob Weston about his affair with Mick Fleetwood's wife, and the one about addled guitar hero Peter Green wandering around with pieces of cheese in his hair. But inevitably director Matt O'Casey's new film had the advantage of being able to bring the story up to date, notably in a bittersweet coda reflecting on the still-unbridged chasm between Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham.
For all the doggedness of founding father Mick Fleetwood, who increasingly resembles a castaway from a tropical island - funnily enough, he now lives in Hawaii, along with original bassist John McVie - the Mac became the biggest band of their era because of Buckingham and Nicks. Of all the inter-band traumas, theirs was the most spectacular, intense and creative, and it still bites both of them hard to this day.
Nicks, in particular, wasn't pulling any punches. It hurt her when Buckingham wrote "Go Your Own Way" about her, and it still does: "Ladylike, prudish Stevie, which I am, was very offended by him saying 'shacking up is all you want to do', because I was not in any kind of shacking up mood. I was not shacking up with anybody."
By all accounts Buckingham has always been a gifted but bloody difficult band-mate - "one of those people that will go up on the cross to make a point, and die," as Nicks put it - but marriage and children have given him some equilibrium. Yet his history with teenage sweetheart Stevie is still a weeping scab. "Maybe in 10 or 15 years when Lindsey and I are 75, we'll be friends again, when Fleetwood Mac is a distant memory," she said wistfully. But like the Flying Dutchman, maybe the Mac can never stop.
Watch Don't Stop on the BBC iPlayer here.
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