In their first interview since firing their longtime guitarist, the group discusses balancing lingering tensions with an expanded live palette.
Fleetwood Mac discuss life after Lindsey Buckingham and plans for their massive, upcoming tour. - Randee St Nicholas
A little over a month ago, the majority of Fleetwood Mac – Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood – quietly gathered at a little theater in Maui with their future in doubt. The band had secretly parted ways with Lindsey Buckingham, the longtime guitarist and voice behind many of their most enduring songs. According to the group, the split came down to a scheduling conflict surrounding a world tour. “We were supposed to go into rehearsal in June and he wanted to put it off until November [2019],” says Nicks. “That’s a long time. I just did 70 shows [on a solo tour]. As soon as I finish one thing, I dive back into another. Why would we stop? We don’t want to stop playing music. We don’t have anything else to do. This is what we do.”
So instead, they invited Mike Campbell, the former guitarist of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and Crowded House frontman Neil Finn and spent a few days workshopping tunes from their vast catalog to see if this new lineup had the right chemistry. “I immediately felt like I’d known them for years,” says McVie, “even though we’d only just met.”
The new lineup will embark on a massive 52-date tour beginning October 3rd in Tulsa and crisscrossing the country before wrapping up in Philadelphia in April 2019. Tickets for the tour go on sale Friday, May 4th at 10 a.m. local time. (A complete itinerary is listed below.)
Nobody in the group is quite willing to say Buckingham was “fired,” but they don’t completely object to the term. “Words like ‘fired’ are ugly references as far as I’m concerned,” says Fleetwood. “Not to hedge around, but we arrived at the impasse of hitting a brick wall. This was not a happy situation for us in terms of the logistics of a functioning band. To that purpose, we made a decision that we could not go on with him. Majority rules in term of what we need to do as a band and go forward.” Buckingham did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.
"Majority rules in term of what we need to do as a band and go forward" - Mick Fleetwood
Buckingham’s ousting marks the latest messy chapter in the ongoing 50-year Fleetwood Mac story – or, as drummer Mick Fleetwood tells it, business as usual. When key early members like Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer left the group in the early 1970s, Fleetwood got right on the phone and recruited new ones. The group never stopped working, even when Nicks left in the early 1990s and a new lineup found themselves opening up for the likes of REO Speedwagon on the state fair circuit. “There’s no doubt that my instincts, for better or worse, have always been to gravitate towards going forward,” Fleetwood tells Rolling Stone. “Having said that, I’d be lying if I didn’t literally say to myself, ‘This one needs a lot of thought.’”
One of the first people that came to mind was Campbell, who was at his home on the Hawaiian island of Kauai when the call came. It happened to be his 68th birthday. “I was sitting in my yard by my pool contemplating my future without my partner [Tom Petty], which was going to be a dark place in a lot of ways,” he says. “ I said, ‘Give me a day to think it over.’ The more I thought about it, the more I thought it could be great. I’ve known Stevie for years and we’ve always been very creative together.”
Not long after getting a commitment from Campbell, Fleetwood called up Finn at his New Zealand home. The singer had enormous success in the 1970s and 1980s with his bands Split Enz and Crowded House, but he was now earning a comfortable living as a solo artist with a devoted cult following. Getting back in the arena rock game was the last thing on his mind. “I was stunned when I got the call from Mick,” he says. “I was enjoying my life and my music, but I have a restless nature and now I’m relishing this beautiful gift that’s been given to me.”
The group has yet to begin formal rehearsals - which they say will last two months working five days a week - but they've already decided that this tour will feature songs from the entire history of Fleetwood Mac, not just the original Buckingham/Nicks run from 1975 to 1987. “We were never able to do that since 1975 because certain people in the band weren’t interested in doing that,” says Nicks. “Now we’re able to open the set with a lot; a raucous version of [1969’s] ‘Rattlesnake Shake’ or something. I’d also like to do [the 1970’s] ‘Station Man,’ which has always been one of my favorites. We’re definitely doing [the 1970’s] ‘Oh Well.’”
How does this all feel to bassist McVie, the guy that put the “Mac” in Fleetwood Mac but speaks so infrequently that most fans don’t even know what his voice sounds like? “I felt very comfortable when we rehearsed,” he says. “It seemed to fit. It’s another exciting chapter in the book, in the saga.”
The expanded set, however, doesn’t mean they’ll be neglecting the big radio hits like “Gold Dust Woman” and “The Chain.” “There are 10 hits we have to do,” says Nicks. “That leaves another 13 songs if you want to do a three-hour show. Then you crochet them all together and you make a great sequence and you have something that nobody has seen before except all the things they want to see are there. At rehearsal, we’re going to put up a board of 60 songs. Then we start with number one and we go through and we play everything. Slowly you start taking songs off and you start to see your set come together.”
The band realizes that a Fleetwood Mac tour without Buckingham will be a different experience, but they soldiered on without him on the 1987 Tango In The Night tour and didn’t see a big decline in attendance. They also had 16 years of successful road work without McVie when she left in 1998. She came back for the 2015 On With The Show tour, and last year recorded an album with Buckingham that they supported with a long tour that wrapped up just five months ago. “I had a great time with him on the road and making that record,” she says. “I was surprised to hear the news because it happened after I went back to London that the decision was made. But life moves on and I wanted to carry on with these guys.”
For Nicks, carrying on without Buckingham is bittersweet. “Our relationship has always been volatile,” she says. “We were never married, but we might as well have been. Some couples get divorced after 40 years. They break their kids' hearts and destroy everyone around them because it’s just hard. This is sad for me, but I want the next 10 years of my life to be really fun and happy. I want to get up every day and dance around my apartment and smile and say, ‘Thank God for this amazing life.’”