Mick Fleetwood “It just wasn’t a happy situation anymore, really for everyone.”

Fleetwood Mac on booting Buckingham: ‘We weren’t happy’
By Chuck Arnold March 7, 2019 | NY Post

“It gets lonely in these hotels,” says Mick Fleetwood with a laugh when he gets on the line. So he’s more than happy to do a phone interview from Atlanta on a day off during Fleetwood Mac’s tour.

Co-founded by its namesake drummer in 1967, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame band — which will bring its “An Evening With Fleetwood Mac” show to Madison Square Garden on Monday and March 18, and the Prudential Center on Wednesday — will take a rest day here and there, but after 52 years, there are absolutely no plans to retire from the road.

“This is what we do,” Fleetwood, 71, tells The Post. “That really is where we’re at … In the past, when we literally never stopped, we never even thought of smelling the roses and going on a holiday or something. It was always straight in the studio, straight on the road.”

REVIEW Fleetwood Mac Live in Washington, DC March 5, 2019

Fleetwood Mac reminds fans in D.C. that the chain can never be broken (even without Lindsey Buckingham)
By Rudi Greenberg | Washington Post | Photo Brent N. Clarke

Fleetwood Mac opened Tuesday’s show in D.C. with “The Chain,” a song about a relationship that’s imploding, and closed the main set with “Go Your Own Way,” about a relationship that’s imploded.

One way to interpret those setlist choices: as an expert-level troll of ex-bandmate Lindsey Buckingham, the singer and guitarist who was fired last year and replaced by Crowded House singer Neil Finn and Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell.

It could also just be business as usual: The last time Fleetwood Mac played D.C. in 2015, when Buckingham was still in the band, the set began and ended with the same two songs.

Either way, it was hard not to feel Buckingham’s absence at times on Tuesday, even if his name was never uttered by anyone onstage at Capital One Arena.

Fleetwood Mac is currently on the second leg of its first tour of the century without Buckingham, who previously left in 1987 before returning a decade later. (The tour returns to the area at Baltimore’s Royal Farms Arena on March 23.) Of course, this is a band that has weathered numerous lineup and stylistic changes over the decades, with drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie the only constants throughout the majority of the group’s 50-plus year run.

With Buckingham out of the picture, singer Stevie Nicks took an even more prominent role than usual, singing lead on most songs and drawing the largest ovations from the audience, especially on such hits as “Dreams” and “Rhiannon.”

Fleetwood Mac hasn't stopped thinking about tomorrow

With two new members, the band brings its 50th anniversary tour to Madison Square Garden for two shows.

By Glenn Gamboa | Newsday
Photograph by Randee St Nicholas

Mick Fleetwood remembers sitting backstage with Elton John, hearing about his plans for retiring from touring.

“He said, ‘No one believes me — not even my band,’ but as soon as my children are old enough to go to a proper school, I’m going to hang it up and be that parent that’s available for them,’ ” recalls Fleetwood Mac’s drummer and co-founder. “He’s keeping to his promise.”

It’s a question that a lot of Fleetwood’s contemporaries wrestle with. “For a while, the question was always: ‘Is this the Stones' last tour?’ But here they are going out again in grand style,” he says. “We have our own version of that in this band.”

And Fleetwood, 71, says there was a point last year when the members of Fleetwood Mac were battling about a tour that coincided with its 50th anniversary and wondering if it was time to hang it up as well.

“It was a huge deal that the band should change its dynamic this far down the road,” Fleetwood says. “We thought long and hard — though not too, too long because we knew we had to make our minds up. But we did some serious thinking about whether this was going to be end of the band really. We decided, the four of us, that was not going to be the case.”

Instead, Fleetwood, singer Stevie Nicks, singer-keyboardist Christine McVie and bassist John McVie decided to fire longtime guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, who joined the band in 1974 with Nicks, and replace him with Crowded House frontman Neil Finn and Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell.

Even that surprising announcement last April didn’t end the band’s worries. “Then the joyride and the not-knowing ride of ‘this has to be the right decision’ begins,” Fleetwood says. “And it only becomes the right decision with the right chemistry and the right players.”

INTERVIEW Stevie Nicks Rollingstone Magazine

Stevie Nicks on Tom Petty, Drag Queens, ‘Game of Thrones’ and Missing Prince
Wisdom from the first woman to make it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice

By ROB SHEFFIELD | ROLLINGSTONE
Photograph by Randee St Nicholas

Stevie Nicks has the only kind of BDE that matters: Bella Donna Energy. The Fleetwood Mac gold dust woman is adding yet another sequin to her top hat by going into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist, years after she got enshrined with the Mac. She’s the first woman inducted twice — as she puts it, “at the ripe and totally young age of 70.” She’s also hitting the road with Fleetwood Mac for the 2019 leg of their world tour, in their surprising new incarnation after a sudden split with Lindsey Buckingham.

As eloquent and witty as ever, Stevie went deep with Rolling Stone for an epic late-night chat about her 50 years as a rock goddess, discussing love, loss, female music heroes, her poetry about Game of Thrones, how “Stand Back” makes her miss Prince, drag queens, sexist hecklers, loving Tom Petty, why she wears platform boots and the joys of having two female rock stars in the same band. And also why the story of her life would be titled, There’s Enough Shawls to Go Around. Rock on, queen.

Congratulations on the Hall of Fame. How is it different going in the second time?

It’s 22 to zero. It’s 22 guys that have gone in twice to zero women — Eric Clapton is probably in there 22 times already! So maybe this will open the doors for women to fight to make their own music.

You’re one of the few rock stars with both a band and a solo career.

My solo career is much more girlie. It’s still a hard rock band — but it’s much more girlie-girl than Fleetwood Mac is. I never wanted a solo career — I always wanted to be just in a band. But I just had so many songs! Because when you’re in a band with three prolific writers, you get two or three songs per album — maybe four. But I was writing all the time, so they just went into my Gothic trunk of lost songs.

Christine would walk by me — my totally sarcastic best friend. She’d say [imitation of Christine McVie’s English accent] “Soooo. Writing another song, are we?” To this day, I write all the time. I have a poem that I’ve written about Game of Thrones, and I have a really beautiful poem that I’m writing about Anthony Bourdain.

REVIEW Fleetwood Mac Returns to Chicago March 1, 2019

Fleetwood Mac Return To Chicago - "It May Get A Little Witchy" Says Stevie Nicks On Night 13 Of Tour
by Jim Ryan | Forbes

Having recently settled a lawsuit brought against them in October of last year by former guitar player Lindsey Buckingham, who was fired from the group at the beginning of 2018, Fleetwood Mac is back on the road for the second leg of their “An Evening With Fleetwood Mac” tour, which runs across the U.S. through April before heading abroad with dates into September.

Buckingham was replaced by Crowded House founding vocalist/guitarist Neil Finn and former Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell amidst much acrimony.

All of which is just the latest chapter in a book that’s been defined by conflict over the course of much of the group’s 52 years.

But what’s defined the most recent twist is just how much fun Fleetwood Mac seems to be having on stage in its latest formation. It was easily apparent on the first leg of the group’s tour last year and it was obvious again on stage Friday night in Chicago.

“This is night 13,” observed Stevie Nicks on stage at United Center in the tour’s second week. “Things might get a little witchy," she added in characteristically mischievous fashion.

REVIEW Fleetwood Mac Live in Atlanta March 3, 2019

CONCERT REVIEW: Minus Lindsey Buckingham, Fleetwood Mac returns to Atlanta with energetic replacements
By Rodney Ho AJC.com

Given how tumultuous life was for the five core members of Fleetwood Mac when it was a hit-making machine from 1975 to 1987, it was a miracle to see them all together again in 2014.

When they arrived at what was then Philips Arena late that year, the band was rejuvenated, everyone just thrilled to have captured the magic again. After Christine McVie sang “Songbird,” the band members spent several minutes on stage talking to the exiting audience about how amazing it was to have McVie back after 16 years. 

But those positive vibes didn’t endure.