Christine McVie and Lindsey Buckingham Photo: supplied
Nick Bollinger tunes in to the latest episode in a long-running rock soap opera.
If you look at the career of Fleetwood Mac as rock’s longest running soap opera, then this album could be its latest seasonal cliffhangher.
There nowhere to go/but on down the road/let’s get on with the show’ sing the familiar voices of Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie. And with the rhythm section of John McVie and Mick Fleetwood weighing in behind them, it’s almost a reunion of the Mac classic – the version of this band that made the multi-platinum Rumours, 40 years old this year. At least it’s as close as they’ve come on album since 2003’s Say You Will, the last Fleetwood Mac long-player released under that name. On that occasion they were missing McVie, who was five years into a retirement from which she only emerged when she rejoined the group in 2014. This time it’s Stevie Nicks who is absent, her solo plans taking precedence over group endeavours, and the album comes out credited to just Buckingham and McVie. But tracks like these sound like Fleetwood Mac in all but name.
Lindsey Buckingham & Christine McVie Photo: supplied
In some ways it’s a timely return, as young groups like Haim are reviving those signature Mac sounds. It’s a signature these musicians discovered – with great success – a long time ago now, and Buckingham and McVie return to it with a vengeance in tracks like these. In fact, where the post-Rumours Mac would often vary that signature, sometimes quite experimentally, these new songs stick four-square to the familiar.
Not surprisingly, thoughts of ‘the way we were’ run right through these songs, while the melodies – hooky as some of them are – tend to be as backward-looking as the lyrics.
There’s nothing disgraceful about any of this, though occasionally a promising verse will dissolve into a lachrymose chorus, like McVie’s ‘Game Of Pretend’, a piano ballad that starts out as a potential ‘Songbird’, but lapses into clichés. There’s much better stuff than that on In The Meantime, McVie’s little-noticed solo album from 2004.
But she does return to the soulful bluesiness of her earliest work – even before Fleetwood Mac – on the album’s moody closing track, ‘Carnival Begin’.In that bluesy melody I actually hear an echo of Peter Green, Fleetwood Mac’s founder, long-departed from the group though his spirit remains inescapable. Mostly though, it’s the mid-70s Californian model Mac that Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie rekindle in this pleasantly inessential set.
Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie is available on Warner.
