Fleetwood Mac reunites for ‘Unleashed’ tour

By John Benson

After going their own way for the past five years, Fleetwood Mac is reuniting for its “Unleashed” tour, which brings the iconic ’70s classic rock outfit to Pittsburgh on Sunday at Mellon Arena.

While each member of the act has experienced varying degrees of solo commercial success, with singer Stevie Nicks clearly enjoying the most, the idea of reforming every so often is enticing to the band whose songs — “Go Your Own Way,” “Dreams,” “Don’t Stop,” et al. — are still in heavy rotation decades after they were first released.

“It really is kind of a blessing in many ways,” said Nicks, during a recent media telephone conference call. “So you can do your thing until you start to get bored, and then you can go to the other thing. It really makes for staying in a much more excited and uplifted humor for everything that you do when you’re not just doing one thing year after year after year.

“So for us right now, we’ve been apart, and now we’re back together, and we’re having a blast. We’re all excited, and we’re all happy to be doing it. We all feel really, you know, blessed to be in each other’s company. We’re getting along great, and it’s fun.”

Getting along great is invariably important for the members of Fleetwood Mac, who famously turned band turmoil in the form of failed relationships and secret love affairs into its multiplatinum 1977 album “Rumours.” While such conflict would have broken up most bands, this group remarkably stayed together in various forms for the long run.

Lindsey Buckingham quit the band in the mid-’80s, while Christine McVie isn’t touring with the outfit on its current stateside jaunt. Speaking to the eggshell-like relationships that still exist today within Fleetwood Mac — Nicks, Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie — was Nicks, who somewhat took a few jabs at her former boyfriend Buckingham regarding the status of their current friendship.

“Lindsey has been in incredibly good humor since we started rehearsal on the fifth of January,” Nicks said. “And when Lindsey is in a good humor, everybody is in a good humor. When he’s happy, everybody is happy. So he seems happy and he seems to be enjoying it.”

When asked to comment about Nicks’ statement, Buckingham said, “Well, you know, I think again that you have to get it in a certain context. And I think that knowing that we did not succeed as well as we could have the last time we did an album and did a tour together — we did not succeed as well as we could have on a kind of an interpersonal level — that there was something to shoot for that was a little higher.

“We are a group of great contradictions, a group that in some strange way you could (say) doesn’t really have any business being in a band together because of the range of sensibilities is disparate. But that’s in fact what makes Fleetwood Mac what it is, you know. It’s the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. It’s the kind of energy that is created from that kind of contrast in personalities.”

Something notable about the upcoming Fleetwood Mac tour, which is being billed as a greatest hits affair, is its “Unleashed” title. Nicks does her best to explain what the tour name means in context to Fleetwood Mac.

“Unleashed to me meant unleashing the furies,” Nicks said. “Unleashed to me was an edgy term of throwing this amazing musical entity back into the world that we had been away from. I never looked at it as being leashed. I looked at it as unleashing a fury, which is what Fleetwood Mac is a lot of the time.

“It is one of the world’s greatest furies in my opinion. And that was my idea. Fleetwood Mac ‘Unleashed’ just meant Fleetwood Mac thrown back down to the universe.”