6th November 2015
For my 47th birthday, my sister took me to Fleetwood Mac. They were playing at Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne. She got us very good tickets, VIP tickets in fact and whilst I wouldn't normally check the price tag of a present I did in this case and they cost around $800 each. The VIP package included a slap up meal, free bar and a hovering event manager that let us know what we had to do. It was one down from the 'meet and greet' package.
I arrived early. There was rain about so instead of waiting 45 mins for my sister who had the tickets, I walked down the Yarra River towards the city and made myself comfortable with a beer from a riverside bar. As I drank and ordered another I thought back to my days of loving the band I was about to see. I was too young in the seventies to understand, but as a teenage boy of the eighties I remember how I had found Fleetwood Mac. It was 'The Chain' that the BBC used for a theme tune for formula 1 racing.
"That's cool." I probably said because I went out and bought Rumours albeit ten years after it was released, even so it was new to me.
I quickly devoured the album and pricked my ears up at anything I could find about the band and noted 'Albatross' and 'Oh Well'. The ephemeral Peter Green seemed the architect of those 1960's days. Christine Mcvie joined with her concord notes, then Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham injected California sound years after Peter's ruin. The once couple is where my heart lays. Lindsey's guitar work is up there with the best, and Stevie has a way, a turn of lyric, a spell like melody that whilst utterly different, matched my other heroine, Kate Bush. I downed my beer and strode back to the tennis stadium to meet my sister.
We ate well at the VIP lounge. Privileged. Greedy for all senses, food drink and music topping the chart. We laughed at this and that, we watched some of the other eighty VIPs, crimped hair and fringes for Stevie abounded. We had our photo taken and we waited in luxury. My sister suffers from crowd anxiety and we were last to leave the Davis Cup Room. Soon a lady said:
"I will take you to your seats." We explained my sister's affliction. The hostess nodded and accommodated us in every way, she led us to a lift the public don't use and took us to our seats just as the buzz announced imminent arrival of Fleetwood Mac.
The Rod Laver arena hosts tennis. It is a small stadium accomodating just shy of 15,000. We were smack bang at the front. We sat down and the lighting turned blue.
Fleetwood Mac opened with 'The Chain.' The Formula 1 theme and the clip you can see above. My sister and I were transported back, we weren't in our mid forties, we were sixteen and seventeen again. The thud thud of Mick Fleetwood's drums and the th-thwwurung of Lindsey Buckingham's guitar held court and then Stevie Nicks shivered the tambourine. Exquisite. The spell of music developed and my memory is jumbled- Rhiannon, Tusk, Sara and Landslide. Lindsey did a brilliant solo of 'Looking Out for Love' from Tango in the Night. He spoke at length before he began, of how things can be shit but we can always change. He rocked it man even if he is a little too aware of the appreciation.
Things ended soon enough, we had drunk too much. My Sister's crowd anxiety made her puke and we were led away by the VIP event manager just as Fleetwood Mac came back for an encore of 'Go Your Own Way.' It didn't matter and I don't care about that. We were the intimate audience of one of the best bands of all time.
