Who was/is Fleetwood Mac ? - CDs, Vinyl LPs, DVD and more
Fleetwood Mac
Wembley, North London, late May 1988. On Saturday England plays Scotland for UK football bragging rights, and huge coloured banners wave smartly in the wind atop the parapets of the stadium. 'Tango In The Night' is the number one record in England for the second time, and Fleetwood Mac has sold out ten nights at Wembley Arena, eight years after last playing in its native land. "Thirty minutes!" calls Wayne Cody, continuing his traditional countdown to showtime. An hour earlier Fleetwood Mac (Mark XI) had convened onstage for the day's soundcheck and a brief rehearsal. For twenty minutes the great band burned away in the giant empty hall, stopping to re-weave the three-voice harmony of their current British hit single, 'Little Lies'. Now the band and its corps of rock soldiers are pacing, chatting and waiting out the anxious minutes right before a show. And there is cause for some nervousness.
A royal prince has tickets tonight and has been invited backstage after the show. And there are the fans, some of whom have been paying to see Fleetwood Mac for more than twenty years. The backstage consensus is that tonight would not be a good night for a less-than-magic show. "Twenty minutes!" John McVie sits in the dressing room, smoking, relaxed, tight but loose. He says that when he was asked to join Fleetwood Mac in the summer of 1967 he declined and took a kif holiday in Morocco instead. Mick Fleetwood, six feet six inches of King Lear intensity, studies his costume and make-up in the mirror, issues many vague orders and great oaths, and says something about the wild days of the young Mac in the sixties. Christine Perfect McVie slips into the men's dressing room with a knowing smile. Slender, beautiful and elegant, she banters with the boys, her regal but unassuming demeanour instantly grabbing the moment. Stevie Nicks is in the dressing room she shares with Christine; she is not to be seen, preferring to prepare for Fleetwood Mac's return in seclusion, like a bride. "Ten minutes!" Back in the boys' room Billy Burnette is trying on a black silk shirt from a shop in Bond Street.
Three hundred and fifty quid for a shirt, but Billy's band has sold out ten nights at Wembley, so it's OK. With a laugh and a flash of black eyes, Mr Burnette, a real gentleman, accepts the B12 shot offered by the comical English tour doctor. New guitarist Rick Vito sits next to Mick at the mirror. As a teenager in Philadelphia he paid to see the original Mac in 1968, when they were just becoming known in the States. Playing here in London, Rick Vito has a strange feeling, as though he were stepping into some pretty heavy shoes indeed. "Five minutes!" Last-second bustle. Over in the corner the brilliant Ghanaian drummer Isaac Asante adjusts his horned cowrie-shell helmet. Mick has finished his toilette and is high-stepping in place and howling. Band managers John Courage, Dennis Dunstan and Tony Dimitriades issue final instructions to the crew and hall personnel. The dressing rooms feel electric, supercharged. And one almost senses the ghosts in the band, those not present but there all the same in spirit: the magisterial young blues god Peter Green; Jeremy Spencer, child of God; Danny Kirwan, whose playing was like blue water under Peter's red fire; Bob Welch, the California mystic; and Lindsey Buckingham, Fleetwood Mac's protean guitarist and singer for more than a decade. Two minutes, and Fleetwood Mac files breathlessly into the shadows behind the big raised stage. The intro music fades from the PA, the house lights dim, the crew climb rope ladders like spider monkeys, and thousands of voices roar for the music as Rick plays a chord and Mick starts the rhythm. Suddenly it's Fleetwood Mac at full throttle and top volume.
Christine sings the lead on 'Say You Love Me', and Stevie chants amid a wonderful stage-lit luminescence about her noble golden head. Ten rows back are her true fans, clad in top hats and chiffon scarves; they remember the days when Rhiannon, the Welsh mare-goddess, alighted onstage like a dark-winged apparition at Fleetwood Mac shows past. For two hours Fleetwood Mac holds its audience in thrall. Billy sings Lindsey's parts in 'The Chain', and it's real. Stevie sings 'Dreams' and gets an ovation; 'Isn't It Midnight' follows. Mick and Stevie rock 'Sara', drowning in the sea of love. Billy Burnette does Peter Green's 'Oh Well' and gets a big cheer, and the same goes for Stevie's 'Seven Wonders'. Rick Vito pays his tribute to the early Mac with 'Stop Messin' Around' and 'I Loved Another Woman'. In quick succession come 'Over My Head' with its bell-clear harmonies, 'Gold Dust Woman', 'Don't Let Me Down' and the lovely 'Has Anyone Ever Written', which ends with Stevie's recitative that holds the crowd silent and spellbound. The mood is sustained as Chris sings the glorious 'Brown Eyes', her blue alto lightly dipped in melancholy. But Mick changes everything when he and Asante put on a solo drum show during 'World Turning'. Playing touch-sensitive drum pads concealed in a vest, Mick grimaces and cavorts, sending out jagged shards of sampled sounds.
"Oh God," the vest screams when Mick thumps his chest, "help me!" He taps his tummy and you hear a car crash. It's a weird and wondrous techno-dance, rendered even stranger by the masked Asante's hand-drum mojo. Now the set builds to its climax. 'Little Lies' is right and tight. 'Stand Back' is awesome. 'You Make Loving Fun' is astral travel back to the spirit of '76. 'Go Your Own Way' ends the show with a powerful rock son et lumière. The encores: 'Blue Letter', 'Don't Stop' and, at the very end, Christine by herself at the piano, singing 'Songbird' under a pencil spot, holding Fleetwood Mac's delirious crowd as if she were alone in some smoky dive after hours. As she finishes, the audience lets loose. Delirium. John McVie introduces the band. Stevie and Chris receive standing ovations and many bouquets. Mick singles out the newest Macs, Burnette and Vito, for special praise. As the house lights come on, the sombre tones of 'Albatross', Fleetwood Mac's perennial English top-ten hit, elicit a final cheer from the PA. Back in the dressing rooms there's hot food and cold lager.
The young prince is escorted to a reception room with his minders, his leather-jacketed girlfriend and his posh friends, to be introduced to the band. Mick makes sure that Asante, a loyal citizen of the British Commonwealth, shakes hands with the prince. Handsome, balding slightly at the back like his brothers and father, the prince is cordial and complimentary, and the whole company is flattered that he came. As always, Mick Fleetwood is the last musician to leave the hall. As his Daimler limousine cuts through the wet night-time streets of springtime London, Mick asks the driver to make a detour, and he rides through the Notting Hill Gate area where he first came to live as a fifteen-year-old Home Counties lad in 1963, smitten with the Beatles and ready to rock. And rock he did. The next night, after another successful show, Warner Bros. Records gives a party in Mac's honour at the Kensington Roof Gardens. The entertainment is an ace London boogie band, and the members of Fleetwood Mac dance with each other until dawn. On my way home I remember what an old friend of the band, Judy Wong, had told me a few months earlier: "There's a depth to this group, an almost pure flame of truth and a sense of destiny. People were meant to be in the band. No one ever auditioned; musicians were hired on intuition and instinct. Most of all, nothing ordinary ever happened to Fleetwood Mac."
Those words still hold true, and probably will for many years to come. It's too late to stop now.
Stephen Davis, 1988
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