REVIEW Fleetwood Mac: Legendary rock band stays with tried and true. Columbus, OH Nov 7, 2018

Concert review | Fleetwood Mac: Legendary rock band stays with tried and true
By Julia Oller
The Columbus Dispatch

Lindsey Buckingham may have gone his own way, but the guitarist’s absence didn’t stop Fleetwood Mac’s other members from carrying on as if he never existed in the first place.

He got the sack in April, before the band’s “An Evening With Fleetwood Mac” tour began in October — reportedly due to differing opinions on the set list — and two last-minute additions filled his spot during Wednesday’s packed show at Nationwide Arena.

Neil Finn, wiry lead singer of 1980s Australian rock band Crowded House, took the lead on classics such as “Go Your Own Way” and “Second Hand News” with the pure voice of a Westminster Abbey choir boy.

Guitarist Mike Campbell covered soloing duty, flexing his skill particularly on early Fleetwood Mac singles “Tell Me All the Things You Do” and “Oh Well,” written by early members Danny Kirwan and Peter Green.

Aside from those and another one-off single or two, the 11-person configuration stuck to songs sure to please the (mostly) above-50 crowd.

Stevie Nicks — whom drummer Mick Fleetwood introduced as “our eternal romantic” — didn’t attempt to reach the high notes on “Rhiannon,” the fifth single off the group’s self-titled 1975 album, but her lower register resonated clear and full.

Standout hit “Landslide,” which she sang to Finn’s acoustic strumming, saw her voice warmed up enough to elicit tears from the woman next to me.

If Nicks is a black-clad, whirling dervish of a moon, Mick Fleetwood and his yellow drum kit were the evening’s sunshine.

Sweating profusely in an outfit akin to a Revolutionary War uniform, the band’s sole original member took a minutes-long interlude during “World Turning” to charm the crowd with his British accent and oddball facial expressions.

“You should never leave a drummer alone. You know why?” he asked while pounding solo onstage. “Because he’s going to unleash the hounds!”

Substantially less sanguine keyboardist Christine McVie scratched somewhat when reaching for top notes on a perky “You Make Loving Fun” and too-mellow “Say You Love Me,” but she committed to staying true to each track as recorded.

McVie’s former husband (and longtime bass player) John McVie stayed quiet behind her, unleashing his loudest contribution on opening song “The Chain,” which could have been ripped straight off 1977′s “Rumours” record.

Rarely, in fact, did the group reimagine any of its hits.

A Nicks-led rendition of “Black Magic Woman” gave a feminist twist to the lyrics, and a blues-leaning bent to the music.

She also led first encore track “Free Fallin,’” a touching, if uninteresting, tribute to Tom Petty.

Otherwise, Fleetwood Mac’s members leaned into nostalgia, right down to the ceaseless bickering that left it one man down.

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FLEETWOOD MAC STILL GOING THEIR OWN WAY, 51 YEARS ON...

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.

REVIEW Lindsey Buckingham Live in Austin, TX Nov 5, 2018

Lindsey Buckingham goes his own way with Paramount performance
By Peter Blackstock
Austin360

Photo Suzanne Cordeiro
VIEW THE PHOTO GALLERY 

“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.

REVIEW The musical soap opera known as Fleetwood Mac rolled into Toronto Nov 5, 2018

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.

Continue on to the full review

REVIEW Fleetwood Mac Live in Toronto 'Refreshing the ranks certainly didn’t hurt Monday’s performance'

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.

In a sense, missing a crucial member or two is nothing out of the ordinary for Fleetwood Mac. Of the original 1967 lineup, only drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie remain, after all, and both Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie (along with Buckingham himself) have left the group and returned to the fold at odd points over the past 40 years or so. Nevertheless, Monday’s show at Toronto’s sold-out Scotiabank Arena found the band being almost stridently blasé about the fact that, for reasons that remain rather fuzzy — not to mention the subject of a lawsuit since filed by Buckingham — it had recently fired the songwriter and the voice behind some of its most recognizable tunes.

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.

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REVIEW Fleetwood Mac Live in Toronto Nov 5, 2018 "I guess Lindsey Buckingham should feel flattered"

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.