Set for deluxe reissue on April 9th is Fleetwood Mac's 1980 concert collection, Fleetwood Mac Live. The new three-CD/two-LP collection, was primarily recorded during the band's then-recent world tour behind Tusk, and features a remastered version of the original release on both 180-gram vinyl and CD, plus more than an hour of unreleased live music recorded between 1975 and 1982 on the third disc.
An exclusive “Tour Edition” is available for pre-order exclusively at the Rhino.com store for $109.98. Limited to 1,000 copies, the “Tour Edition features the three-CD/two-LP collection plus a seven-inch single of replica ephemera from the era including a ticket, backstage pass, ad, button, sticker, and iron on patch”. Also included is a bonus seven-inch single featuring previously unreleased demos for “Fireflies” and “One More Night.”
In addition to the Tusk-era material, live tracks were culled from both the band's road dates as far back as 1975. New additions to the set feature material from the 1982 dates in support of that year's Mirage, along with with such favorites as “Second Hand News,” “The Chain,” “What Makes You Think You’re The One,” “Gold Dust Woman,” “The Green Manalishi (With The Two-Pronged Crown),” “Hold Me,” and “You Make Loving Fun.”
We recently caught up with Mick Fleetwood and asked him his thoughts on the ongoing Fleetwood Mac reissue program: “We're very happy with the way Warners. . . they do a lot of leg work. Y'know, we don't actually have anywhere near — sadly — we don't have anywhere near the archive (the) Beatles, and (Rolling) Stones, and Eagles and. . . I'm always happy when we do find something with outtakes and stuff like that that have been kept, and also it's that time to do that. We've never really got into it. The Stones and the Beatles, they've been doing this for a long time.”
Despite his solo career often being interrupted — if not co-opted — by Fleetwood Mac consistently over the years, when we last caught up with him, Lindsey Buckingham retained a strong sense of allegiance to the band both in the studio and on the road: “There's also an accountability, y'know? These are four other people to whom I owe a great debt, y'know, in many areas, and there's a lot of problems, there's a lot of craziness — but there's a lot of love, too. You can't downplay that at all. The thing that I always did for the group was to take the raw material from everybody and to fashion it into records, and, y'know, that's a responsibility that I took pride in. It was something that I felt sort of blessed to be able to do for other people.”
We asked Stevie Nicks how after so many years as a working unit, Fleetwood Mac is able to still deliver at the top of their game with each new road trek: “It stays fresh because we never stop playing. Y'know, basically what we are is entertainers. Even if this band had never made it big, we'd be playing all the clubs, we'd be playing all the clubs in Europe, we'd be still doing that because what we really are is entertainers. So when we go onstage — we're performers. We're performance artists, that's what we do. So it isn't a question of keeping it fresh because it's what we love. We don't basically have anything else to do.”
