Fleetwood Mac Articles

ALBUM REVIEW:
LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM - GIFT OF SCREWS

Fleetwood Mac man’s punchy pop-rock manifesto

He was, incredibly, the new wave one in Fleetwood Mac, but Lindsey Buckingham’s much-tromboned love of the Gang Of Four, Prag Vec and the Delta Five (or similar) never really seemed to make it into his music. (Certainly very few people who ever heard Love Like Anthrax ever went on to make a double album like Tusk). But he’s always had more of an adventurous spirit than his fellow band members. And this presumably why Mick Fleetwood and the McVies invited Stevie Nicks and him to join their old blues band, effectively bolting a Mustang body onto an old Bentley.

In fact, Buckingham’s extra-curricular creativity has been something of a problem for him, in that he keeps writing a lot of the best songs in his old band, all the while initially intending them for himself. Thus the first incarnation of Gift Of Screws which he worked on between 1995 and 2001, and which was, in a way, his Smile. A double album, it never came out, as Buckingham was persuaded to stripmine seven of its best songs for Fleetwood Mac, who duly recorded them, had big hits, and went away again. Buckingham released instead the perfectly acceptable Under The Skin in 2006, and no more was heard of Gift Of Screws until, as they used to say on Tomorrow’s World, now, that is.

This Gift Of Screws is no sprawling epic. It’s just under 40 minutes long, for a kick off, and it contains no mad experimentation, no Tusky title track or rewrites of “At Home He’s A Tourist”. Instead there is a fair old bit of Buckingham’s trademark fiddly guitar playing (most notably on a song called “Time Precious Time”, which is almost entirely fiddly guitar bits, like a man trying to remember the intro to “Never Going Back Again” for three minutes). Mick Fleetwood and John McVie turn up, as if apologising for nicking all those songs for Say You Will, but Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks are absent, otherwise it would all be unsolo again and Buckingham would be slapping his chiselled forehead and going, “D’oh!”

But despite all that, the most initially striking thing about Gift Of Screws is that, despite its brevity, it’s actually quite varied. The first track, “Great Day”, is both minimal and beefy, like a skeleton that works out. “Time Precious Time”, despite the aforementioned fiddly, is quite peculiar, stopping the album dead just two tracks in, while the title track is purely mental, being the most aggressive thing anyone involved with Fleetwood Mac has ever recorded. What it’s about is hard to tell, largely because it’s quite hard to get near the lyrics with all the clenched-teeth vocals and tornado-faced guitars. If it was a single, some people might die.

And there are a few proper pop classics on here as well. “Wait For You” is the sort of yearning song that The Cars or Cheap Trick would have killed for, but with an added stadium melancholy that only Buckingham can do. “Love Runs Deeper” is like ELO, only great. Best of all, if you’re listening to this album because you liked Rumours (and it would be a bit weird if you weren’t), The Right Place to Fade is a great Rumours song that never was, even down to the skipping beat and “ra-ta-ta-ta” hook. (You can imagine Fleetwood Mac’s managers begging Buckingham to hand it over the band and crying when he doesn’t).

It’s hard to imagine this record being number one all round the universe – Buckingham’s name alone doesn’t shift warehouses – but, even as a listener raised by the new wave police to weed out and destroy punk traitors, I’m astonished by the inventiveness, excitement, and pure bastard vigour of this album. It’s like Keane never happened. It would seem that Lindsey Buckingham is still the cutting edge king of Bel Air.

DAVID QUANTICK

UNCUT Q+A With Lindsey Buckingham

UNCUT: A version Gift Of Screws was originally intended for release over a decade ago. What happened..?

BUCKINGHAM: There was an intention of putting out a solo album in the late Nineties – and then something intervened, which was Fleetwood Mac, and so that got put on the shelf. And then a certain amount of the material from that grouping made its way onto the new studio album, Say You Will. There are maybe three songs that remain from that group of songs on the present Gift Of Screws that were waiting to find a home.

How do you find it as a solo artist instead of working in a group?

I don’t have a problem exposing myself as a solo artist… You can go back to a post-Rumours environment. Rumours was extremely commercially successful. In the wake of that success, you find yourself having freedom. But you also find yourself poised to follow the expectations of those who want you to repeat that success to a certain formula. So Tusk was a line drawn in the sand for me to subvert that. Because Tusk was estimated to be a failure in certain camps, because it didn’t sell 16 million albums, a dictum came down to the band that said we should stick a more conservative formula. That was the time I started making solo albums. So the left side of the palette is reserved much for solo work, and the things that are more palatable to the politics of the group as a whole tend to make their way into a Fleetwood Mac context. it’s nice to have both. And it may be a bit schizoid, but it’s a nice luxury to have that. I think you have to let people see the raw side of what’s going on.

INTERVIEW: MICHAEL BONNER

- http://www.uncut.co.uk/music/fleetwood_mac/reviews/12132

Lindsey Buckingham tells our correspondent how he found happiness after the madness of Fleetwood Mac

By Priya Elan
Times Online

Miles beyond Sunset Strip, beyond the Hollywood sign and Laurel Canyon, a familiar sound is coming from a rehearsal stage.

The opening couplet of Go Your Own Way wafts across the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, California: “Loving you/ Isn’t the right thing to do . . .” The Fleetwood Mac legend Lindsey Buckingham is in final rehearsals for a six-week solo tour. A tour de force of Californian angst, the song first appeared on Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours album – whose smooth curves masked a partner-swapping, drug-snorting epic of dysfunction. Those songs still resonate today – in recent months both Vampire Weekend and Fleet Foxes have covered Mac songs.

“Our first show is in two days, but I don’t feel like we’re quite ready,” he says, but that’s just the perfectionist in him speaking. In truth the show is an exhilarating mix of the old and new, reworked Mac classics combined with lost solo singles and tracks from his new album Gift of Screws. It’s a career-spanning set at a time when Buckingham is, he declares, “the happiest I’ve ever been”.

Buckingham today is a far cry from the hirsute, heartbroken pin-up of 1970s Fleetwood Mac, or even the lone, studio-bound experimental egg-head of the 1980s. He is married to the photographer and LA society belle Kristen Messner (with whom he has three children) and domestic contentment has reinvigorated his erratic solo career. Fourteen years had elapsed between Out of the Cradle (1992) and Under the Skin, and now Gift of Screws appears. His fifth solo album is as dense and engrossing as you would expect.

The best bits are classic Buckingham – mixing arch LA pop with avant-garde touches. The results are even more impressive live. Good Day channels Radiohead’s Idioteque with bluesy licks direct from The Chain, while Love Runs Deeper bops about joyfully, like a reconstructed new wave hit from 1982. His state of mind is reflected in the banter with band-mates. The vibe among the group, he says with a grin, is “camaraderie central”.

We go to chat in his office, which is feng shui-tidy – three identical white shirts are lined up next to three identical black leather jackets. A vintage Beach Boys poster hangs behind his see-through wardrobe. Through the door the bassline of FloRida’s Elevator can be heard.

“Is thatus?” he asks, half-joking, as the track blasts from the adjacent sound stage where the high-octane reality TV show So You Think You Can Dance? is being shot.

He is impressively well preserved for a 58-year-old rock survivor. The “blue-grey” eyes that his former paramour Stevie Nicks longingly sang about in Blue Denim radiate a fresh Californian glow. In conversation he’s forthright and relaxed. Interviews in the past have reflected the self-help books that saw him through the turmoil of Fleetwood Mac. But there is no trace of that now.

A Californian boy through and through, Buckingham was born in Palo Alto. There were early ambitions to be a professional swimmer (his brother Greg won a silver medal in the 1968 Olympics) but he was galvanised by music after hearing his brother Jeff’s copy of Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel.

“I was eight when I first started playing guitar,” he recalls, “because Jeff would bring home all these records. Not much later I got into acoustic, finger pickings, but I couldn’t read music.”

After meeting Stevie Nicks at high school (“I was playing California Dreamin’ and she came along and harmonised”), the two formed a duo, first with the band Fritz (“We opened for Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin”) and then on their own as Buckingham Nicks.

A chance encounter with Mick Fleetwood followed and he asked them to join his faltering British blues band, with Buckingham as lead guitarist. His predecessors had either fallen into drug-induced schizophrenia (Peter Green), left to join cults (Jeremy Spencer) or became violent alcoholics (Danny Kirwan). Was he worried about being afflicted with the “Curse of the Fleetwood Mac Guitarist”?

“I knew about it, it was almost a joke,” he laughs. “I loved Peter’s work but when I met him . . . Well, let’s just say that he was less nice than he could have been. As for me? I’m still here – I didn’t join a cult and I didn’t go crazy. At least I think I didn’t . . .” His solo work has always been an escape from the debauched, multi-platinum madness that Fleetwood Mac involved. He cites Tusk, the eccentric follow-up to Rumours in 1979, as the “lightning bolt” moment.

“I consider it to be my first solo album – I recorded things at my home and brought them in to the band,” including, he says, percussion parts banged out on Kleenex boxes.

“With that album I was trying to accomplish stuff to the left of what Fleetwood Mac had become.”

Today, there is no tension between his solo work and working with Fleetwood Mac. “Being a father and a husband I realised that there are more important things than music. Solo work is a boutique effort for me; it’s a labour of love. I long ago gave up the idea that it would be appreciated on a commercial level. Fleetwood Mac is the golden carrot and my solo work is kind of indulged by the record company.”

And, he says, unlike Nicks, the needs of Fleetwood Mac always came before his solo records. “Stevie was always able to pull back from the Fleetwood Mac machine and say ‘OK, now I’m doing my solo stuff.’ But I wasn’t in a position to do that, nor would I have felt comfortable to do that and call myself a band member – possibly because of my role as an arranger in the band.”

Indeed, Buckingham was twice poised to do albums that became Fleetwood Mac projects instead. “It happened with Tango in the Night [1987] and in 2000 with Say You Will. But this time I put my foot down and said I wanted three years when I’ll make a solo album, tour, then make another solo album.”

So after this six-week solo tour, he is due to reunite with his main band for a tour in 2009 and then possibly an album. “In Fleetwood Mac nothing is certain until you actually see it,” he notes wryly. “But it’s up to us to not shoot ourselves in the foot.” The band is still very much a “work in progress”, by which he means both emotionally and musically.

“Happily they are still part of the fabric of my life,” he says. “I’ve known Stevie since I was 17, which is something to cherish – and why it’s still worth working on getting rid of all the bulls*** between us. Because there still is after all this time, would you believe.”

Bel Air Rain, a song from Gift of Screws, looks back at the decadence of Fleetwood Mac and contrasts it with the relatively calm life he is living now. “I lived in Bel Air for a number of years as a bachelor with some crazy girlfriends. I also built a house there when I started my family. Fame is really funny, it gives you lots of freedom but then at the same time it takes away a lot of yourself.”

After all the madness, it’s good to see that he has managed to retain what made him so special in the first place.

Gift of Screws is released by Warners in the UK on Monday 15 September 2008