Fleetwood Mac for lunch this Monday – recorded on the last night of a four night run at Festival Hall in Melbourne, Australia on March 11, 1980 from a road crew soundboard.
Another band I have never featured during their later, more wildly successful periods.
I will freely admit to having lost interest in the band the minute Peter Green left and a change of direction, even though it meant a substantial change in their fortunes, it also signaled a sad departure for one of the truly brilliant guitarists of the 1960s and ’70s.
It also meant a change of direction, once Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham joined the family. All the edges got smoothed out and much of the signature music of the previous incarnation of the band was promptly shown the door in favor of the tuneful and breezy the former Buckingham-Nicks brought to the table.
It also signaled an era of wretched excess and eyebrow-raised bed-hopping which proved to be a healthy selling point when Rumors was released. It also signified the band was in the midst of falling apart and becoming more difficult to work with than before.
But despite all that – all the personnel changes and direction shifts, Fleetwood Mac have continued, although with the passing of Christine McVie in 2023, the future of the band has been in doubt. Up until recently there were some indications a resurrected Fleetwood Mac might surface, but so far nothing.
For an idea of what they were sounding like during the Tusk tour in 1980, here in their last night at the Melbourne Festival Hall in March of that year.
