STILL GOING THEIR OWN WAY,
The Mail On Sunday (Nov 11, 2018)
Toronto Review 11.05.18
After 51 years, Fleetwood Mac are still pop’s biggest soap opera. The latest episode finds one of the main characters, Lindsey Buckingham, being sacked by the others (among them an ex of his). He responds by suing them for $14 million, the amount he says he would have made from this tour, which I caught in Canada (it arrives at Wembley Stadium on June 16 next year).
On stage, Buckingham isn’t mentioned, but he does receive a compliment: two men are required to replace him. His role as the band’s only male singer goes to Neil Finn from Crowded House. In a blatant bid to add some youthful energy, Fleetwood Mac have sent for a 60-year-old.
Finn might be the oldest new recruit ever to join a great group, were it not for Buckingham’s other successor – Mike Campbell, ace guitarist with Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, at 68. The $14 million question is whether all this makes Fleetwood Mac a different band. The answer is yes and no.
They still play almost all the hits you’re hoping for, though personally I miss the beautiful shimmer of Sara. They still have Stevie Nicks (now 70) dancing with her scarf, Christine McVie (75) relishing her comeback from retirement in rural Kent, and John McVie hiding under a white cap. They still find room for a drum solo by Mick Fleetwood that is so reliably awful that everyone else abandons the stage.
But some things have changed. Tusk Finn brings an airier voice than Buckingham, and a far warmer presence: he looks thrilled to be there. Campbell nails the solos without hogging the limelight, as Buckingham tended to do. The one song he brings from the Heartbreakers, Free Fallin’, slots right in, with Nicks lending a woozy sadness to her friend Tom Petty’s lines. The song Finn brings from Crowded House, Don’t Dream It’s Over, is less of a fit but more of a treat. ‘This is a song of unity,’ Finn says, and he shows it with a meltingly simple rendition, just him and his acoustic guitar and 18,000 people singing ‘Hey now, hey now’. It’s the highlight of the night, which is saying something. Just behind are several tracks from Rumours, Fleetwood Mac’s masterpiece, currently spending its 756th week in the UK album chart. Dreams, Go Your Own Way and Don’t Stop can make you swoon while also impressing you all over again with their meticulous carpentry. ‘Yesterday’s gone,’ we all yell. Not yet it hasn’t.
“We are here for a couple of reasons,” Lindsey Buckingham announced a couple of songs into his performance Monday night at the Paramount Theatre, quickly addressing the 800-pound gorilla in the room. After the obligatory but kind assurance that one reason was because “we love Austin,” he got to the point: “Another is that we’re not out with Fleetwood Mac. So I guess we don’t love them.”
The masterful guitarist, songwriter and producer’s dismissal from that Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band earlier this year inevitably is a big part of the context for his current tour. Bitterness turned into litigation last month when Buckingham filed suit against his former bandmates, who are also on tour right now with new members Mike Campbell and Neil Finn and will play Austin’s Erwin Center in February.
Still, the music was far too good on Monday for the melodrama to be the only focus of the night. Buckingham was always the strongest creative force in Fleetwood Mac, and as such, he’s the musician most worth hearing on his own. A nearly two-hour set with plenty of highlights and an adept four-piece backing band testified to that.
Buckingham smartly honed in on his 1992 masterpiece “Out of the Cradle,” playing six songs from that album (even while skipping its best single, “Countdown”). Exquisite mood pieces “Street of Dreams” and “Surrender the Rain” showcased the more delicate side of Buckingham’s artistry, and the sweetly swinging “Soul Drifter” sounded so enchanting that it was hard to believe it didn’t become a massive hit 25 years ago.
“Trouble,” the lone song played from Buckingham’s 1981 solo debut “Law & Order,” remains the only top-10 single he’s ever had on his own. But he’s released six solo studio albums, and he drew from each of them on this night, with three standouts from 2006′s “Under the Skin” suggesting it may be the second-best album of his career.
Fleetwood Mac Toronto 2018 Review
BY T-MAK TMAKWORLD.COM
The musical soap opera known as Fleetwood Mac rolled into Toronto yet again for another tour but this time without its most important member Lindsey Buckingham whom they fired earlier this year.
Let us begin by saying we are huge Fleetwood Mac fans. We flew out to New Jersey to see the show from front row center and do a VIP meet and greet with Mick Fleetwood. We flew to London’s O2 arena to see them front row again, we saw them at an invite only party at CES in Las Vegas, and the list goes on. Please click on one of the links above to understand the type of coverage we provide.
Also please note that we paid for the ticket for tonight’s show (and every single other Fleetwood Mac show we ever wrote about, except for the invite only show mentioned above) – no free reviewer tickets here to sway our observations. In fact I think all music reviews should state if the ticket was bought or given for free from the promoter or the band.
News broke that Lindsey Buckingham is no longer part of Fleetwood Mac earlier this year, and this tour was announced right after that. While logic would dictate that this tour would not sell many tickets or that perhaps they would be discounted to something reasonable like $100, neither assumption proved to be true. It seems that many people had no idea that Buckingham would not be there and thus jumped in eagerly and it also seems that the band name is much bigger than the individual artists.
There is a trend in that most classic era rock bands tour these days without the golden era vocalists ( some quick example of bands we have seen recently – Yes without Anderson, Journey without Perry, Styx without DeYoung, Foreigner without Gramm, and even AC/DC without Johnson). For whatever reason (9 times out of 10 it is because of $$$), the lead singer (and usually main songwriter), is not there. However Fleewood Mac without Buckingham is a much larger shock than anything above because he is also the main guitarist and the creative genius of everything the band made when they ruled the airwaves.
The really good news is that Buckingham is doing his own local show on Friday November 16th in a much more intimate setting in Kitchener’s Centre In The Square. As at the time of this writing a 20th row ticket in the small theater setting will cost about $80 to see the solo Buckingham show. On the other hand, tickets were still available for Fleetwood Mac at the Scotiabank Arena on the night of the show, and a lovely seat in the back of the 300 sections (i.e. where you so high up and so far back that feel you are watching people watching a concert) was selling for $211.25. Clearly the Kitchener show is a much better choice and yet it is not even sold out yet – the power of the band name proven once again.
Enough preamble… I am sure you know where we are going with this article.
Fleetwood Mac commands the Toronto stage, even without Lindsey Buckingham
By Ben Rayner, Pop Music Critic The Toronto Star
RATING (*** out of four)
Scotia Bank Arena November 5, 2018
The polite thing to do would be to look the other way and simply pretend nothing out of the ordinary was going on.
Photo: Instragram: carolmatthews128
Fleetwood Mac is Fleetwood Mac, however, so a little soap-opera drama is to be expected along with the hits. And while the veteran transatlantic rock outfit did its best to make a show of how kicking Lindsey Buckingham out of the band earlier this year was no big deal, it only made it seem like a bigger deal.
Buckingham has kind of had the last laugh, anyway, since it’s taken two musicians to replace him: former Crowded House/Split Enz singer Neil Finn on the vocal front and Mike Campbell, the late Tom Petty’s longtime right-hand man in the Heartbreakers, in the guitar-god department. But just to make sure we all knew that it was business as usual in Fleetwood Mac, the band opened with “The Chain,” one of Buckingham’s signature songs from Rumours. And, to some extent, it was business as usual. Finn could certainly hold down the vocal parts, as he would do two songs later on “Second Hand News” and at the very end of the two-and-a-half-hour set on the crowd-pleasing whoppers “Go Your Own Way” and “Don’t Stop,” while Campbell dropped a scorching mini-solo on the outro to allay any fears that we’d be denied six-string fireworks.
Campbell is far less a passenger than Finn in this particular iteration of Fleetwood Mac, which is actually padded out to 11 members when one includes the second percussionist, two backup singers, the extra keyboardist and the third guitarist arrayed around the principals. He took on his role as lead guitarist with vigour on Monday, dirtying up the arrangements with raunchy guitar tones that were more in line with the band’s bluesy beginnings than Buckingham’s finesse playing, and even taking lead vocals on a gnarly version of founding member Peter Green’s “Oh Well.”
Finn feels a bit more like a karaoke singer, although the band did let him take the reins for Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over” just to demonstrate that he had a life before he was imitating Lindsey Buckingham for a living.
Green, of course, was no doubt invoked to make a point about a lot of people passing through the ranks of Fleetwood Mac over the years, just as former guitarist Danny Kirwan — who died this past June — was invoked by way of introduction on his “Tell Me All the Things You Do,” another pre-Buckingham/Nicks gem that found its way into the set list.
Truth be told, refreshing the ranks certainly didn’t hurt Monday’s performance. Fleetwood Mac is a reliably solid live entity, no matter who’s onstage, and the band does indeed appear to be relishing the new energy at the moment. You could only miss Buckingham so much, even if you wanted to miss him.
It’s arguably all about Stevie Nicks, anyway. When Fleetwood went around the stage to introduce each of his bandmates — this would be after his torturously long drum solo in the middle of “World Turning,” by the way — only the perpetually humble and quiet John McVie came close in terms of audience reaction. The screams for Stevie were deafening. And, man, can she still hold it down.
Christine McVie sounded a little wan when she took the mike for “Little Lies” and “Everywhere,” but Nicks’s voice was huge and still in impossibly good shape on “Rhiannon,” a feminized version of Green’s “Black Magic Woman,” her solo hit “Gypsy” and a bare, beautiful late-set reading of “Landslide.” She prowled the stage like a panther conjuring some major voodoo vibes, too, during a truly menacing attack on “Gold Dust Woman” — anchored, fittingly enough, by fellow fan favourite John McVie’s rumbling bass line — that easily won out as the most show-stopping moment of the night and probably should have ended the set.
No one, of course, was getting out of there without hearing “Go Your Own Way” and “Don’t Stop,” but they seemed a little anticlimactic after such a beast of a tune — especially when the guy behind them wasn’t actually onstage. But by that point, it had become rather easy to overlook Buckingham’s absence and simply enjoy what was a very good arena-rock show. And, hey, Stevie came back to pay tribute to her old pal Tom Petty with Campbell on an unnecessary, but nice enough cover of “Free Fallin’.” If Stevie’s in the room, all can be forgiven.
CONCERT REVIEW: Fleetwood Mac goes its own way
by Jane Stevenson Toronto Sun
Fleetwood Mac
Scotiabank Arena
November 5, 2018
RATING (*** out of four)
Photos Jane Stevenson
I guess Lindsey Buckingham should feel flattered when he’s not suing his former bandmates?
Fleetwood Mac came to Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena on Monday night and it took two stellar musicians to replace the singer-guitarist who was fired from the veteran British-American rock band earlier this year and a lawsuit subsequently followed in October.
Anyway, the latest incarnation of the mighty and enduring Mac — whose rotating lineup is hardly new in the band’s 50-year history — sees Crowded House’s Neil Finn, who possess one of the best voices in pop, and guitarist Mike Campbell, who previously played with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, picking up the slack.
There’s actually a total of 11 players including singer Stevie Nicks, singer-keyboardist Christine McVie, drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie on the stage making a big beautiful sound during such anthems as “The Chain” — which opened the show — “Second Hand News,” “World Turning,” “Go Your Own Way” and “Don’t Stop.”
That doesn’t mean Buckingham, whose solo tour arrives in Kitchener’s Centre in the Square on Nov. 16, wasn’t missed as there is an intensity to both his guitar playing and flinty interplay with his former girlfriend Nicks.
But his absence Monday night meant the band, founded by Peter Green in 1967 and named after Fleetwood and McVie, delved into their back catalogue for such Green and second guitarist Danny Kirwan-era songs as the Santana-popularized “Black Magic Woman” and “Tell Me All The Things You Do,” which truthfully weren’t never really that missed.
The one exception was “Oh, Well” with Campbell taking over on lead vocals and given his guitar a real work out.
Nicks, as usual, was the evening’s undisputed star in her trademark suede black boots, on such standouts as “Dreams,” “Rhiannon,” “Gypsy” (which included a twirl), “Landslide,” and “Gold Dust Woman” working various shawls to wonderful effect.
McVie, surprisingly, was the weakest vocal link despite sounding solid last year while on tour with Buckingham of all people (including a summer stop at Toronto’s Budweiser Stage), although she spoke the most poignant words of the night while introducing the final and older song, “All Over Again.”
“This is a song about change, about surviving change, and the future,” she said.
Much to the crowd’s delight, Finn trotted out the Crowded House gem, “Don’t Dream It’s Over,” with Nicks taking a turn on one verse, and there was also a tribute to Petty in the encore with Nicks singing lead vocals on his hit, “Free Fallin’” while pictures of him (and often Nicks together) appeared on the back video wall.
“It’s wonderful to be in your fair city with this magnificent band,” said Finn, whose only false step came during a rough start to “Monday Morning.”
In a way, this is more of a supergroup than just Fleetwood Mac’s latest lineup change and given they’re already set to return to Scotiabank Arena on April 8, you never know what new twist might just come next.
Review: Fleetwood Mac @ Scotiabank Arena
By: Adam Harrison Aesthetic Magazine
Photo Beckymccreath
Rock n’ roll was very much alive and well last night in Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena for one of all-time’s most classic bands, Fleetwood Mac, who now date back fifty years with the release of their self-titled debut album in 1968. It was a rare experience to be apart of the sold out arena welcoming the band to its sixth decade.
The now eleven-person touring band featured four-fifths of the traditional lineup, including rock goddess Stevie Nicks, keyboard songstress Christine McVie and her husband John on bass, as well as ponytail sportin’ namesake drummer, Mick Fleetwood. Original guitarist and vocalist, Lindsey Buckingham, was fired from the band in April 2018 and was replaced with Crowded House’s Neil Finn as well as Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers’ Mike Campbell.
The band opened their impressively lengthy 130-minute set with “The Chain” from their 1977 hit album Rumours, and at the very first note the fans let our a roar of excitement and appreciation. While the audience spanned multiple generations, it became one of those crowds who couldn’t decide whether to sit or stand, not unlike a Catholic Church service.
As Fleetwood Mac made their way through a songbook of hits like “Little Lies,” “Dreams,” and “Landslide,” one of the most interesting elements was how each song had a different arrangement of band members. Of course at the centre of the stage was Stevie Nicks who not only grasped you with her iconic singing voice, but also her powerfully feminine charisma. She often swayed about in her black robe mesmerizing like a gypsy.
Photo Kristen Shilton
During “World Turning,” the 71-year-old, Mick Fleetwood, took on a 10-minute drum solo, proving he can still hang with the kids, as he rolled through tom-tom rhythms alongside touring percussionist Taku Hirano, who furiously smacked on the bongos. Fleetwood accompanied his drumming with jungle like screams as well as his signature wide eye stare.
One of the best highlights of the night came when most of the band cleared the stage for Finn to perform “Don’t Dream It’s Over” which he wrote for Crowded House. The arena lit up with cell phone lights as Finn dove into the first chorus. Halfway though the song he was joined by Nicks who finished the song with him as a duet – A rare and spin-tingling moment to say the least.
The main set came to a climactic conclusion with an inspiring performance of Fleetwood Mac’s biggest hit and one of the greatest rock n’ roll songs of all time, “Go Your Own Way.” For this moment, it was not hard to decide whether to sit or stand. In fact, it was nearly impossible to stay off your feet. The arena echoed with applause for several minutes after until the band returned for an encore.
Fleetwood Mac would kick off the encore with an emotional cover of “Free Fallin’” with Nicks paying tribute to Tom Petty on vocals. Slideshow images of Petty with the band members appeared above them. By the end of the song, Nicks was on the verge of tears as she expressed her thanks to be able to sing the legendary song on his behalf.
The ever-catchy greatest hit “Don’t Stop” also graced the encore for one last dance-happy sing-a-long. The night then concludedwith a beautiful duet of Nicks and McVie singing “All Over Again.” It was truly phenomenal to experience one of rock music’s all-time greats still performing at top-level, surrounded by an arena full of people, traversing multiple generations, in attendance to appreciate it.
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