Sunday, August 30, 2009

Truth and Rumours

The kiss-offs are in the lyrics, the choruses and - most brutally - the titles. On Dreams, in between Buckingham declaring that he feels like Second Hand News and that he’s Never Going Back Again, Nicks warns her former beau that (other) “women, they will come and they will go”.

Later on side one, in arguably the greatest break-up song in pop history, Buckingham counters by telling her to Go Your Own Way. Which they did at the end of 1976 before these unguarded moments propelled Rumours to the top of the charts.

More than 30 years after those tumultuous times, Fleetwood Mac are still together - albeit without Christine McVie, who retired a decade ago - performing those classics on their Unleashed greatest hits world tour, which comes to Australia in December.

Speaking from her home in Santa Monica, California, after finishing the 53-date North American leg of the tour, Nicks says the songs still summon strong memories.

“We all really time-travel back to those days - drama, drama drama,” the 61-year-old says. “That’s why we’re able to sing them now and sing them with a lot of heart because we never lost the value of why they were written or the fact that they were real.

“It was real hearts being broken like bowling pins going down.” Despite the dramas, Nicks says that the Rumours sessions were a lot of fun.

In particular, the three months of recording at The Record Plant Studios in Sausalito across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco provide some of her fondest memories.

“The Record Plant was looking out over the ocean, so it was very romantic and beautiful,” she says.

“Then when we went back to LA that was fun too because we probably recorded in every studio in this city. Sometimes we had two or three running at the same time. So, it was huge and it was a lot of fun and it was very exciting - and the songs were brilliant. We were just having the best time ever doing it.”

The five stars of rock’s greatest soap opera were having the best time but falling apart because of the volatile cocktail of drugs and passions.

Somehow the creative bonds outlived the emotional ones, and the band forged on to prove (putting to one side Buckingham’s departure from about 1987 to 1997 and McVie’s retirement a year later) that you can never break the chain.

Today, Nicks is looking out over the same ocean, albeit from her Santa Monica condominium where she lives with her Chinese crested-Yorkshire terrier cross, Sulamith (named after fairy-obsessed German fantasy illustrator Sulamith Wulfing).

When she’s not on tour, which is not very often, Nicks prefers to live at her modest apartment rather than her big property in the Pacific Palisades up in the Hollywood hills.

“When I walk into my really beautiful little condo, I feel like an international star and when I walk into my big house, I feel like an old woman who can’t figure out what to do,” she says.

“I’m keeping my big house because I have my pianos, I can record there, but I really live in a very small, albeit very beautiful place. I’m looking straight at the ocean right now and I just love it.

“I have a little dog. I bought this big house and she and I would look at each other and go, ‘What the heck are we doing?’”

While she claims that the rigours of touring, either for solo shows or with Fleetwood Mac, leaves little time for socialising, Nicks has become a mother hen figure to a group of younger female musicians, including Sheryl Crow, Vanessa Carlton, Michelle Branch and the Dixie Chicks’ Natalie Maines.

And while Nicks has had high-profile affairs with Mick Fleetwood (a secret liaison while the band were touring Rumours), Eagles’ members Don Henley and Joe Walsh, and record producer Jimmy Iovine, she still considers Buckingham the unattainable love of her life.

“Lindsey and I have that bittersweet thing,” she says. “He’s married, has three kids, he’s very happy in his marriage. I’m very happy for him.

“He’s not like me. I’m happy to grow old with a bunch of friends and dogs, and he was not. He never really wanted to have kids . . . (but) all of a sudden he had this beautiful little boy and I think his whole life changed.

“I chose purposely - my choice - to not be married or have children so I could follow being a true artist,” Nicks continues.

“So I can turn around and say to my little dog, ‘We’re going to New York tomorrow’. We don’t have to ask anybody if we can go and we don’t have to have anybody mad at us because we don’t know when we’re coming back. I chose that and I’m very happy with that choice.”

But when Fleetwood Mac start playing those classics, Nicks gets back on that rollercoaster of love and heartbreak.

“When we walk on stage, it’s no longer these two ruffian kids,” she says. “We still have that love. We’ll always have it. We go back way too far now to not be appreciative of what he and I dreamed up and actually made happen.”

- Article by Simon Collins, The West Australian

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

New Photos up!

Hey guys!

We have updated the, Buckingham Nicks, Stevie & Lindsey photo sections with lots of new pics! Most of them are from the Unleashed Tour.

Special thanks to Darlene & Jennifer who helped us in our search!

If you know of any other pictures that we can can put up on the site, please drop us a line! We are always looking to add more content!

Enjoy!

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Aussie/NZ Tour Dates!

Although they are not on sale as of yet, I added the tour dates for the Australian/NZ leg of the Unleashed tour! Take a look at the list to your right!

Fleetwood Mac rocking on

THE last time Fleetwood Mac played in New Zealand, Rob Muldoon was prime minister and we still had the "carless days" scheme. There was a major strike at Kinleith Paper Mill that year, and the police noted that a staggering amount of pot was smoked, right out in the open, at the first Sweetwaters music festival near Ngaruawahia.

It was 1980. Fleetwood Mac played two sold-out shows here that year, with most of the band nursing raging cocaine habits financed by the success of their biggest album Rumours, released three years earlier. Rumours was inescapable in New Zealand we heard it in shopping malls, takeaway bars, petrol station forecourts, drifting from the open windows of houses and passing cars. Radio stations thrashed it, and your mum quite possibly played it at fondue parties where the after dinner instant coffee arrived in earthy brown Temuka Pottery cups.

And I played it myself, incessantly. When Rumours came out, I was 16 and Stevie Nicks was a powerful object of desire, a Californian hippie witch with ragged hems and come-to-bed eyes. Now Nicks is 61, and Fleetwood Mac are returning to play their first New Zealand gig in 29 years in New Plymouth in December.

"Really, I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to it," says Nicks from her home in Santa Monica, her speaking voice as nasal and husky as her singing voice. "I came down there on a solo tour in 2006 and I loved it, and so when Fleetwood Mac were booked to come to Australia, I convinced the rest of the band we should play New Zealand as well."

It is, says Nicks, a tour that will delight their fans. They won't have to suffer any new songs; it'll be singalong nostalgia all the way.

"It's our first ever greatest hits tour. In the past, we've always had a new record to promote, and the fans are, like you're not doing `Say You Love Me' because you wanna play a song we don't know? C'mon! So this time we're gonna pick 23 of the biggest songs Fleetwood Mac ever did and play 'em all over two-and-a-half hours. It's like OK, here's our body of work. Here are the best songs we've made since this line-up came together in 1975. This is our tapestry."

And what a rich tapestry it has been. Even within the notoriously dramatic world of rock'n'roll, Fleetwood Mac's career has stood out for its lack of calm and restraint. The band's history resembles a particularly tumultuous soap opera, or perhaps a soft-rock Spinal Tap, replete with madness and cults, lawsuits and lust, bogus touring bands, clandestine shagging, industrial strength bitchiness, oceans of alcohol, blizzards of cocaine. Numerous members have burnt out, flipped out or been kicked out along the way, leaving drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie the only surviving members from early line-ups.

Read the rest of this great article over at The Sunday Star Times!

Stevie Nicks is a hard act to follow

SUPERSTAR Stevie Nicks will not allow Lindsay Lohan to play her in a planned Fleetwood Mac biopic.

"Lindsay cannot be me until she gets her life together," Nicks, 61, told the Sunday Herald Sun. "If I were to do a movie, or allow a movie about my life, Lindsay Lohan is not the person I would pick to do it.

"She has got completely off track. She has a bad reputation. She is a party girl.

"I would want somebody who is an excellent actress and dedicated to their craft."

Fleetwood Mac is swamped by movie offers and Nicks has picked the actor to play her.

"I want Reese Witherspoon to play me," Nick said. "Reese knows. She would play Stevie Nicks really well."

Nicks can relate to the traps snaring Hollywood's new brat pack.

She once released a solo album, Trouble In Shangri La, about the perils of celebrity and fame.

"I look at Miley Cyrus and wonder how she can keep it up because she is everything," Nicks said. "She is a singer, an actress, a dancer, a song writer. She is very famous. And she's only 16."

Nicks knows Miley's father, singer-actor Billy Ray Cyrus, keeps his daughter on track.

"He's a good old boy. He's tough as nails underneath that sweet smile," she said.

Nicks said Paris Hilton should not be rated alongside Cyrus, Lohan or Britney Spears.

"Paris is an heiress. She has so much money, she never has to work a day in her life," Nicks said.

"But she has purposely chosen to build an empire. So God bless her."

But Nicks gave her strongest support to Spears.

"I love Britney and I want the best for her," Nicks said. "She has got her life back and she has two boys who need her.

"But Britney has her body back, her beauty back and, hopefully, she will get her power back."

Fleetwood Mac performs at Rod Laver Arena on December 1. Tickets go on sale on September 4.

mA 40TH anniversary edition of Frank Sinatra's classic album, My Way, will be released in October.

"There's simply no one like Frank Sinatra. His music is one of the reasons I got into this business," Universal Music chairman Lucian Grainge said. "Now we plan to bring it alive for a whole new generation of fans."

- Article from the Heraldsun

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Australian dates are coming!

Hey Aussies! Great news! Looks like according to this article, Fleetwood Mac are "coming to town"!

Check back here next week for the dates, it looks like that's when the announcement will be made!

Sunday, August 9, 2009

Hiatus is over! Anyone have photos to spare?

I want to apologize for the loooong 2 month hiatus I took from updating this site. At least our band, our girl and our guy has been pretty quiet since June, so hopefully I didn't make any of you miss something super important since I have been lacking in updates lately!

Anyway, I have updated the videos, photos, and tour dates. There is also a new poll up, and I'll be posting important articles and reviews as per usual !

I have a favor to ask all of you. If you have any Stevie/Lindsey solo or photos of them paired together that you do NOT see in our photos sections, feel free to e-mail them our way! We are looking to update the photos section of the site, and we figured that this would be a good place to start! There is a link to your right for e-mailing us. If they are photos you took yourselves, feel free to put a small watermark on them if you so choose for crediting.

Thanks so much, guys! It's good to be back!