All Member Interview
Programme: BBC Interview
Date Aired: November 1976
Interviewer: Unknown
(contributed to this site by James Dennis)
This interview is part of a British
(probably BBC) radio programme called "Insight", broadcast in
November 1976, i.e. before "Rumours" was released. All 5 members of the band are present, with
a British Interviewer. At various
points during the programme there is a Voiceover explaining various things that
make the story flow better. Practically
everything that is said can be heard clearly, and also there is the usual
background noise of people pouring drinks etc.
They're obviously sitting on leather chairs because you can also hear
the leather squeak as they move around.
Fleetwood Mac, or Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac as they were
then called, were formed after Peter Green, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie met
while working with John Mayall. Peter Green and John McVie had been with John
Mayall for some time when he decided to change drummers, and as Peter Green had
worked with Mick Fleetwood in The Shotgun Express with Rod Stewart, he
suggested Mick for the job.
Mick The reason I joined or was asked to join
John Mayall was because I was a very simple drummer and still am… (everyone
laughs) in the head… just musically.
Aynsley was a very proficient drummer, technically, which I'm not, and I
think it just got to the point where…
John He was too 'busy'.
Mick He was getting too busy, and
that was the reason for it. And
obviously it helped having played with Peter, who was able to account for me
musically.
Interviewer So you both met up with Peter Green during
the days with John Mayall, and I understand you recorded at some point as a
trio, I believe in Ireland. Was that
the first time…
Mick No, it was at…
John One of John's sessions.
Mick John's sessions. We went in with Mike Vernon and recorded
some tracks that Peter just wanted to make demos of.
Interviewer 'Curly', 'Rubber Duck', and 'Fleetwood
Mac'.
Mick Yeah.
'Fleetwood
Mac' is played
Mick Pete formed the band… he just called it
that. He didn't want any big guitar
hero worshipping aura set up around him, so he just called it anything other
than his own name.
Interviewer It started off 'Peter Green's Fleetwood
Mac'.
Mick Yeah it was, but that was from the record
company, and that was just to…
John And we dropped it after the first album.
Interviewer And the company was Blue Horizon Records.
John Mike Vernon, yeah.
Interviewer Who, uh, produced the first two albums.
Mick Yeah, with, really, the help of the band,
especially Pete at that time.
Interviewer Did you have a definite idea of the kind
of music you wanted to make, because I know Mike was very much involved with
blues music and did a lot to foster the talent in England at that time. Did you fall into that category?
Mick Well as far as… him having anything to do
with… Mike Vernon just merely set up the avenue of the recording situation
where we could just go in and record as a band and that's just what we
did. We just played live. There was no choice of material or anything,
but he was obviously involved with the band, being what it was, which was
absolutely a blues band. And we just
went in and recorded, there was no preconceived thing of what we should do or
shouldn't do, as far as producing an album.
Interviewer John, it didn't take long to put the band
on the map with a successful record. I
suppose the first would be 'Albatross'.
John Yeah, that was the biggie. But I think people identified with the
musicians in the band, obviously from John Mayall, you know, um, but that made
it a much broader…
Mick That was the first big hit record, but we
had the 'Fleetwood Mac' album out before then, a long time before then. It was in the charts for well over a year,
in the top 10, it was a huge success.
And that was before we had anything that resembled a hit record. It worked in reverse, which was really a
good way for it to happen. You had a really
strong base to start from, one from the working situation in the clubs, and
then after that having a really successful album, and prior to 'Albatross', I
think Man of… uh, 'Need Your Love So Bad' was released.
Christine Yeah.
Mick And another single before then, so that
was about the third.
'Albatross'
is played
Interviewer When you started having hit records, obviously the work would
change. You have TV exposure. Did you find the audiences were changing?
Mick Uh, I think the people who
originally came to see the band and used to follow us, travelling all over the
country to see us, it was a very tight sort of cliquey thing that was broken
because of having a hit record which was on television. The band just reached a bigger audience and
there was a time where a lot of people that were following the band, blues
fanatics… 'Albatross' was slightly hard for them to take, whereas to us it was
just a very natural thing to do. We
just did it and Peter wrote the song.
And a few of them were a little bit put off by it, and then it became a
situation where they realised the band hadn't changed - it was just carrying
on, we were still there playing what we wanted to play, and then it became a
situation where we started playing ballrooms in the middle of Wales somewhere,
and kids would come because of a hit record, and you get people who used to
come and see us in the old days, and there'd be a far broader scope, which was
what the band, from that point on, started to do really - it was to probably
not just appeal to a blues audience as such - we just started writing stuff
which was more in character with the personalities in the band, rather than
perhaps rehashed versions of old blues material, really.
Interviewer You continued doing singles, and about
that time you began to make some kind of impression in America with 'Oh Well'.
'Oh Well'
is played
Interviewer Had you had any offers to go to the
States about that time?
Mick Not that I know. When we first went to America we invited
ourselves really, because we spent quite a lot of time, well most of the time,
sitting around in places like Detroit for 10 days, 2 weeks, then have one or
two gigs every 3 weeks. It was one of
those situations, and from that luckily both the Fillmore West and the Fillmore
East became, mainly the Fillmore West, became like a little stronghold for us,
and Detroit was good, um, the Michigan Ballroom, we played there, and there was
like one or two towns where we managed to do really well and to get gigs. But it was a very unorganised state of
affairs. You were just going over there
hoping for the best as far as getting gigs… you had very few prior to when you
got on the plane and went there. And…
really it was a long 10 year haul to where the band is positioned now in
America. But luckily it was always on
an upward gradient, which suddenly sort of speeded up radically in the last
year.
Voiceover Indeed it has. The 'Fleetwood Mac' album has been in the American album charts
for over a year already, but the path to success in rock isn't always paved
with gold albums. At its inception,
Fleetwood Mac was a four-piece band with guitarist Jeremy Spencer in addition
to the trio that had originally recorded.
Then the band became a five-piece with another guitarist Danny Kirwan
joining, and for a while everything ran pretty smoothly. When the newly independent wing of
Warner-Reprise Records was being set up in the UK in 1969, the Managing
Director Ian Ralphini decided he needed at least one established band on his
roster, and having a good look round he decided to make Fleetwood Mac an offer
they couldn't refuse. The single 'Oh
Well' was released, and an album 'Then Play On' but ironically, Peter Green was
finding this increasingly difficult to do.
Interviewer When you were making that first album for
Warner Brothers, was there any indication from Peter Green that he was less
than happy with the situation, the way it was going?
Mick No no,
not at all. 'Then Play On' was a very
positive thing the band was doing.
Interviewer The reason I ask is that there's one
track on the album, 'Showbiz Blues', which one could interpret, you know, as
his comment on the showbiz syndrome.
Mick Well, if it was, I mean… all of us were
very close to Peter and at that time it was certainly a very very well-kept
secret if that was the case, although of course later on he did become unhappy
with the situation, playing and just personality-wise for himself. He felt that he just didn't want to do it
any more, and that was… that.
Interviewer Well, certainly if you were all very
close it must have come as a shock if it happened that quickly.
Mick Yeah, it did…
John It happened very quickly.
Mick … it was a drag. I think, well I'm sure, that he was thinking
about it before he even mentioned to anyone that he was going to do that, leave
the band, and maybe it's just as well… It was his decision to go on his way.
Voiceover So off went Peter Green, but not without
leaving behind another memorable single.
'The Green
Manalishi' is played
Interviewer How did you feel at that time, John, about continuing in the
band? You'll obviously, uh, feel the
need to perhaps replace him, or did you just resolve yourselves to continue
without him?
John Yeah, there was never any thought, 'I'll
go out and do something else'. It was a shock, it was just getting over the
shock of you're in a stable situation, and then suddenly you're not.
Mick And Jeremy felt the most…
John Pressure.
Mick … because, he'd been very lazy
because he didn't play on, apart from one or two piano things I think, on 'Then
Play On', and it forced him into a state where he realised he was the most
visually obvious person to lead the band on stage. I think it made him more nervous at the prospect of it and that's
what happened. And of course Christine
joined the band before we actually did go on the road.
Interviewer Christine, did you join the band after
the 'Kiln House' album? After the
recording of that?
Christine Um, I think I joined during the album, at
some point. They had an album
scheduled, which ended up being 'Kiln House' and uh, I was present at all the rehearsals. I knew the songs backwards.
John You were next door.
Christine Uh, yeah, because that was the reason
they rented Kiln House for a period of time, to be able to sit back and analyse
exactly what they were going to do since Peter had left, and uh, I was, as it
happens, in between jobs, in between gigs, sort of.
Interviewer You were following a solo career at that
time.
Christine Uh, yeah, which actually ended up in a
big heap. Um, I ended up just being a
housewife and uh, they were rehearsing frantically for about 2 months, they
were recording and they felt about a week prior to going on the road that they
needed a fifth… entity in the band.
Someone to fill out the sound, someone that wasn't a guitar player
preferably, and there I was, sitting there, in the house.
Interviewer So Christine, you decided that you would
join the band and that was on the eve of an American tour, if I'm correct.
Christine Well it was very unexpected for me, I
didn't have any idea they were going to ask me and it was about a week prior to
the tour that they had scheduled.
Wasn't that the tour when Jeremy was doing his Elvis Presley thing?
Mick Yep, and he was doing, uh…
Christine He had a whole gold lamé suit made up for
him…
Mick Some Buddy Holly stuff…
John Some Fabian stuff…
Mick Fabian stuff…
Interviewer That sounds interesting.
Christine That's something I tend to forget about
that, but that was really an amazing… that must've been quite amazing to watch…
John The transformation.
Christine Jeremy used to not be exactly… a stage
personality when he was himself, but then at the end of the show he used… this
was the first… I'd never been to America before, this was the first tour I'd
ever been on, and we'd go through the whole set, and towards the end of the
set, Jeremy would just disappear. Danny
and myself would do a song and then suddenly the spotlight would appear in one
corner and Jeremy would totally change, his whole personality, and all the hair
would be greased back, and the gold lamé suit and the gold shoes, and he
commanded the whole audience. No-one
moved, you know, it was amazing. I'd
forgotten all about that.
Mick Jeremy was always a performer as such
though, even in the times when Peter was in the band, and naturally, he wasn't
that way. When the big thing to go out
and do something, he would go and do it.
For instance he used to hide behind the amplifiers half the time, during
the early sets, it was like, Peter and Danny would be playing, and John and
myself, and then Jeremy would come out, and do his numbers, the Elmore James
numbers and a couple more things and then disappear. It was a very strange situation - at the end of the show Jeremy
would come on and there'd be massive rock 'n' roll, he'd be leaping up and down
on the piano, but naturally he was a very reserved little person, unless he had
a means to… go out from.
Christine Yeah, he almost would hide behind other
characters.
Mick Yeah, Elmore James for a start.
Christine He would be more at home being Elmore
James or Fabian or Dion, or Elvis Presley, than he would be being Jeremy
Spencer.
Mick Right.
Christine He was a very… there was one song on
the 'Kiln House' album that he made called 'One Together', which was definitely
a very very personal song and he hated singing
it. He hated listening to it, he hated
playing it.
Mick It embarrassed him.
John 'Cos he was…
Mick Showing himself.
Christine You know, showing his…
Interviewer He bared his soul, in a way.
Chris/Mick Yeah.
'One
Together' is played
Voiceover 'One Together', the song that Jeremy couldn't bear to sing,
and it wasn't long before he gave up secular singing altogether. But let's face it, even for the pop music
world, the circumstances of his departure from the group to join the Children
of God were still very bizarre.
John Yeah, we were just on a plane from San
Francisco to Los Angeles, to work in Los Angeles, at the Whiskey, and he got
off the plane, got to the hotel and that was it.
Christine He went shopping…
John And everyone was worried in case he'd got
mugged, or…
Christine Yeah, he just went out to buy some
groceries or something and just never came back and we had this amazing
detective, you know, Hawaii Five-O hunt for him which lasted for about a week.
Mick Yeah, it was very strange. It was just after the last fairly
substantial earthquake in Los Angeles and we had to go out and search for
him. At that time there was a huge glut
of Jesus compounds out in weird places they'd managed to acquire, and just all
very strange… had people who were trying to vibe him out and coming up with
ideas of, you know, holding his clothing and it was all very strange at that
time. The atmosphere in Los Angeles was
very electric…
Christine Yes, it was.
Mick After the earthquake, it was all…
John Very spacey.
Mick And he didn't come back, we didn't see
him for about 2 years, and then we saw him, he turned up at a gig. And he's still with them, he's in South
America.
Christine I thought he'd left them?
Mick No, he's still with them, and
he's playing still. And he's more
himself - initially it was very upsetting because they'd, uh, changed his name
and completely broken him down character-wise, and then built him up as
something else. That was the Children
of God, the sect that he's with.
Christine Brainwashed him.
Interviewer Well this must have come as a complete
shock to you, that it could happen so suddenly, such a radical change. It was the second time that a founder member
of the band had decided that he didn't want to go on.
Mick Yeah.
I mean, Peter made his exit very gracefully, I might add.
John Yeah, he did it with taste.
Mick In a very responsible fashion,
and it allowed us all time to know what was happening and finish off gigs. Jeremy was… he didn't even know that it was
going to happen. And it was just very
bizarre that that went down.
Christine He left us in the middle of a huge
problem since we'd signed various contracts that would've left us in a lot of
trouble. That was when we pleaded on
Peter's mercy and Peter came out and saved us, uh, and just played the whole of
the rest of the tour with us. Actually
we didn't do any songs as such, we just jammed every night, which was really
fun, but poor old Peter wasn't really ready for it, he just did us a favour.
Interviewer When you came back to England, did you
begin to look for someone to join the band, or had you someone in mind, 'cos I
know that Bob came in.
John Yeah, what happened was we came back and
for the first time in the band's history we went on the audition trip which
was… (everyone laughs) a complete… horrifying, because we'd never done it
before.
Mick We were more nervous than the
people arriving, knocking on the door, it was just… hideous.
John One guy came down, and we said. 'OK,
let's do something'.
Christine Let's just play a 12-bar!
John A 12-bar in E and it didn't give
the guy a chance. So that was so
harrowing.
Christine Oh, it was dreadful.
John We said we can't go through this
any more. So a friend of the band knew
of a guitarist who was working in Paris and that was Bob Welch. And he came over, and we were still nervous
about… even playing together.
Mick We never actually auditioned
with Bob.
Christine No we didn't, he just ambled in.
Mick He ended up staying at the
house, commiserating with us about how nervous and awkward it was having these
people come down to play, not knowing what to do, and he became involved as a
personality and then it was just one of those things where we said, 'Well,
we've got two more people, I think we've committed ourselves, they've got to
come down and play', and we said, 'Well look, after that, you're in!'
Christine He was such a vibrant, wonderful
character, we'd never played with him, he just sort of ambled into the house,
made himself perfectly at ease with everybody and everybody just really liked
him. And Bob Welch is definitely a
really really strong personality, a really nice, beautiful guy, you know. Really that was it, we hadn't played a note
with him and we said, 'Hey, yeah… you know, just join the band.'
Interviewer Seems like it had to be. And he was also very quickly to make a
contribution not only as a musician, but as a writer, on the next album.
Christine Future Games.
Interviewer The title track was his if I remember
correctly.
John Yep.
'Future
Games' is played
Voiceover The pattern for the band was now set, a new album would be
followed by a lengthy American tour, which would then be followed by more
writing and recording. So really the
next major event in the group's career was the departure of the last of the
three original guitarists, Danny Kirwan.
But did he fall or was he pushed?
John In the truth of it, Danny was I
think the only person… (quietly) oh no, there's been another two… who was asked
to leave. It was traumatic at the
time. He had a hard time handling being
on stage and that affected… everybody, and made him very unhappy.
Mick Very nervous, naturally a nervous person.
Christine Yes.
John And it made everyone else unhappy, so it
came to a point where it was starting to get destructive, which is… the
pressure on the road is bad enough anyway and if you've got just a tiny grain
of destruction in there, it's just unpleasant.
Christine Definitely. Danny was a studio… he was…
John A great guitarist.
Christine …happy in the studio. Yeah, and he was a very very talented guy,
but personality-wise, we had a problem…
Mick That was it.
Christine …communicating with him on the road.
Mick Nothing musical at all involved in that decision.
It got impossible, and it was over a long period, it wasn't something
that just came out of the blue and someone turned around and started swearing
at each other. It was a thing where, as
John said, he was not happy onstage
and it was a torment for him, really, to be up there, and it reduced him to
someone who you just looked at and thought 'My God'. It was more a thing of, although he was asked to leave, the way I
was looking at it was, I hoped, it was almost putting him out of his agony.
Christine Yes.
It was destroying him actually, going onstage every night.
Mick And he didn’t understand why it was done,
because although we knew and also he knew that musically there was every
respect from everyone's point of view, towards him and vice versa. But we were a working band and when you're
on the road for practically most of the year, you can't have that situation
where you're just making everyone desperately tense and unhappy. So he was asked to leave, which is …
(unclear)
Interviewer 'Bare Trees' had been recorded and
released at that time, had it not?
Chris/Mick Yeah.
Interviewer And that was to go on to be your most
successful album to date, so perhaps we should play something of Danny's, one
of his songs.
Christine Oh yeah,
definitely.
John Play 'Sunny Side of Heaven'.
'Sunny Side
of Heaven' is played
Voiceover Danny Kirwan's composition 'Sunny Side of Heaven' - and after
he left the group, they expanded for the recording of the 'Penguin' album, with
Bob Weston, Dave Walker and Steve Nye being added to the basic line-up. But there was yet another strange twist to
the career of Fleetwood Mac when later in 1973, a bogus band using the same
name set off on a tour of the States.
Mick Fleetwood explains:
Mick What happened was that a tour was cut
short owing to personal…
Christine Personal problems.
Mick … (laughs) problems within the
band, and the situation was just not possible to carry on, we came back and
were going to have a rest. That was it,
and unfortunately…
Interviewer Excuse me, this is when Bob Weston was in
the band.
Mick Yeah… unfortunately, our manager took it
upon himself to think that the band had broken up, which it had not, and he
really took advantage of a situation where everyone was mentally and
emotionally completely flagged out and finished, and proceeded with what he
did, which was very bizarre to say the least…
(Christine laughs a lot) … and they ended up doing a tour which was
curtailed after about 18 gigs where no-one on the stage was anything to do with
Fleetwood Mac, but they were being represented, advertised as Fleetwood Mac,
even so far as putting pictures of us in the adverts. And luckily, the audience were not amused. And uh, (laughs) they came home.
Christine (Laughs a lot again) You're really understating this.
Mick And then legal proceedings have gone on
and are still happening right now. But
it did us a lot of harm, because promoters, obviously in good will, put out
money, people went out to see us that had regularly gone out, we didn't play
huge concert arenas or anything, but the people we'd built up during the
previous years always came out and bought our records, always came out to see
us, and suddenly they were presented with this, which is not what they wanted
to see.
Christine And
kept us out of work for nearly a year.
Mick Yeah, and that was another big hassle.
Interviewer So you were prevented from working while
this was…
Mick Yeah, because the name was under dispute,
who had the right to it and this that and the other, until that was settled
through a temporary injunction. It took
six months of shlapping around lawyers' offices until we could get out, back to
Los Angeles, which is when we, from that point on, stayed there to record
'Heroes Are Hard To Find'.
'Heroes Are
Hard To Find' is played
Voiceover The title track from 'Heroes Are Hard To
Find' - and that was to be the last
recording to feature Bob Welch.
Mick He really wanted to try and do
something, another album project, while he was still working with the
band. It just wasn't possible, and
after all the hassles of the build-up of getting to the point where we could
record the album 'Heroes Are Hard To Find', and plus we worked extremely hard
getting the goodwill of the band back from a lot of places that had heard the
rumours of, like, things had gone down, seen the band which wasn't supposed to
be playing there. And, I think he was a
little disappointed that the album didn't do better, after what was definitely
a very hard year of effort and trying to get things going, and he decided there
was no way, which there wasn't, of doing anything else within the framework,
'cos we had to keep going, and working and recording, and he decided to just
knock it on the head. And he formed his
own band which was called Paris, which was where he came from. He ended up there.
Interviewer And then there were three… considering
what to do.
Christine Well, in actual fact Mick had actually
heard some tapes of Stevie and Lindsey before Bob actually left the band. I think Mick just had vague intuition that
Bob would be leaving.
Mick Yeah, he wasn't totally happy and you
definitely get… through the years you sense when someone is starting to get a
little bit itchy to go and he maybe doesn't know quite how to do it, or whether
they're really decided or not. And I
was looking for a studio to record the next album, which of course would have
been with Bob, but turned out to be with Stevie and Lindsey, and it was through
listening to a basic thing of seeing how the studio sounded, the engineer that
was working there played an album which he worked on with Stevie and Lindsey. I just made a mental note of it, and a
couple of weeks later or whatever it was, Bob decided to leave and it was one
phone call to find out what they were both doing, or wanted to do. And I asked them to join the band.
Christine That all happened very quickly. It did happen very quickly.
Mick Yeah, it was very quick.
Interviewer So Stevie, how aware were you of Fleetwood
Mac at that time? Before the telephone
call, say.
Stevie Well, I was aware of several songs, but I
wasn't really aware that that was Fleetwood Mac, I was aware of 'Oh Well' and
uh… some others that I really didn't know titles of that I would hear on FM
radio when I was going to college a lot.
Um, but I guess that was mostly Peter Green albums, and I was aware that
Fleetwood Mac had a lady singer, because I saw them on television in San José
at one point, and Christine was playing the piano and singing and stuff, and
that stuck in my mind, that there was a woman in the band, but that's really
about all I knew. I was not a big
'blues person' so I really didn't know too much about the band.
Interviewer Lindsey, did that go for you as well,
were you aware of the band, or had you just caught something on television or
radio?
Lindsey I had heard, uh, I had gotten into
the 'Then Play On' album very very much and someone then turned me on to
'Future Games', so I was aware that they had been through a lot of
changes. But from say, 'Future Games'
on, I had no idea what they had been through at all. So, it was a strange, like… Keith Olsen came to our house and
said, 'Well they would like you to join them,' and we said, 'Well that's… far
out.' um… and we really had no idea how to relate to say, how our music would
fit into theirs at the time, you know.
Interviewer And did Keith Olsen work with you? Did he record…
Lindsey Yes, he had recorded the 'Buckingham
Nicks' album and we remained friends with him, you know, through all that time
and um, the year and a half after the 'Buckingham Nicks' album had been
released, we were just kinda scuffling around trying to get something else
happening, because Polydor at that time didn't have even an office on the West
Coast - it was very difficult, communication was not the greatest and we really
didn't have the whole trip together because there's so many things you have to
get together in order to break a record, aside from just music. So uh… yeah. Our reaction… we really didn't
know how to react until we actually went up to, uh, Chris's, uh… I guess it was
your house, Mick's house, at the time, in Laurel Canyon and we all, the five of
us all met, and it just seemed really good, you know, just as people. It was nice. So we decided then to join.
Interviewer It came as a bolt from the blue, just a
call from Mick saying he'd like you to join the band, and you met up. When you met up that evening, did you play
any music together, or just talk about the idea?
Lindsey Nah… (laughs)
Stevie No.
Christine No, absolutely not, we didn't play
anything together. In actual fact, when
Stevie and Lindsey joined the band, I think I went to England for about ten
days, directly after that, and we didn't play anything together.
Mick John and I did. John and I played with Lindsey in a garage…
Lindsey In that garage, right.
Stevie Yeah, it was (unclear - possibly
'brilliant.')
Mick And Stevie came down a couple of times…
that's a weird thing…
Christine And then, in actual fact, we didn't play
one live concert with each other until after this album, this 'Fleetwood Mac'
album was made.
Interviewer I would say, it seems to me that, uh, you
must have done the same, bringing in new members into the band, as you have
done previously, with other people coming in and saying, 'Well here it is. Let's have your contribution. Write some songs.' (Mick agrees) And that
seems to have worked out in no uncertain fashion. When you were recording the 'Fleetwood Mac' album, the white
album, did you know that you had singles on it? Had you given it any thought that we must record some songs, we
must put some singles on?
Mick Nuh, what happens in America is like they
get a feedback situation from all the hundreds of radio stations - 'What is the
most played track?' and that's not to say you couldn't… you can do it the other
way, you can just put a single out and say, 'That's it,' and we did have that
choice, where you can insist, 'No, that's gonna be the single,' but, uh,
usually the situation is you take advantage of having the feedback from radio
stations and release the most played track.
The first single, to me, was a very unlikely thing to be a single, which
was 'Over My Head', one of Christine's songs.
'Over My
Head' is played
Christine We finished that track last of all on
the album, because nobody quite knew what we should put on it. It was a track that just had drums, guitar
and a vocal, and nothing else. And that
was the last track in the world anyone thought would be a single.
Lindsey I think we knew there was a good
amount of commercial potential, if you will, on the album, um, maybe the songs
that ended up getting on, you know getting to be singles weren't the ones we
thought, but like, I don't think any of us were really consciously saying,
'Well let's go for a commercial sound,' 'cos a lot of people have asked us,
'What's it like now being like a more commercially oriented band' or something…
Mick Yeah.
Lindsey ..which is… they're saying that we
consciously made an effort to do it, which we haven't, I mean, if the addition
of Stevie and I has made it more accessible to a broader base, you know, then
that's just the way we… are, you know, we're just doing what we like to do, as
opposed to making a conscious effort.
Christine Absolutely.
Stevie And also, just the fact that we played everywhere.
Mick Everywhere, yeah.
Stevie I mean, we played Grand Junction,
Colorado, which is not easy to get to.
And just, you know, lots of colleges - we drove all over hills and
valleys, lost, trying to find these places, you know, and…
Mick I mean, it's a very very
spirited thing, I mean, just going out and doing the best we could, and
playing, obviously not top of the bill, you know, but not opening the shows and
everything. The whole thing was just
completely infectious, you know, for us and audiences.
Christine It seemed to me that when Bob Welch was
in the band, it made, for some reason, us - I mean John, Mick and myself, and
Bob - start to feel old in the business, it's difficult to describe
really. When Stevie and Lindsey joined,
it was like an adrenalin shot or something, that made the whole band seem ten
years younger than we felt, in a way… (everyone laughs) we had this big
facelift (more laughing). It was
almost like a big facelift, because the music was younger, it was fresher, it
was more exciting. I think the first
two or three concerts we did in Texas, I would have to say that we walked
offstage - and they were 10,000 seater auditoriums and they were about a third
or a quarter full - those first three concerts we did with Stevie and Lindsey,
and it didn't matter, because we came offstage knowing for some reason that it
was a good combination of people, we knew it was going to be good.
Lindsey It seems like the whole rise in
popularity over the last year and a half too had a very, kinda, honest attitude
about it, or it reeked of a certain amount of honesty because a lot of times
now record companies are really anxious to find, say, a new energy source or an
idol or try to manufacture something (everyone agrees) and the hype that they
sometimes put into it can really work against you, and people, or a lot of
people anyway, are really turned off to the fact that, you know, you see the
full page ad saying, (puts on a funny voice) 'You're not ready for this,' or
whatever (everyone laughs)… you know, and there was really no hype involved in
the process as far as… I mean, it was like, seeing the returns - we went out
and we worked so hard for about a year, we went in the studio to do another
album and then we began to see all of a sudden the album which had maybe gone
up to the 20s and started to go down…
Stevie Come back up again.
Lindsey …come back up again.
Mick It even went down as far as the
40s, round there and then… whoosh.
Stevie And then it would drop again, and then
we'd get a call, it'd go back up.
Lindsey We were working on a new album, and
it (the white album) seemed to go up, it went gold, then it went platinum. It was all just, like, street, you know,
talk like word of mouth, if you know what I mean…
Interviewer Yes I do. And it was beginning to build even further with the second
single. 'Rhiannon' came out and was
incredibly successful.
'Rhiannon'
is played
Stevie I remember, after the album, my
Dad called me up and said, 'I went in to get a couple of copies of the album
for somebody today, and the man told me that he had sold 100 copies - today.
Christine In one shop.
Stevie Over his
counter, and he didn't have any left, you know!
Interviewer Well, you've told me how much you're
working in the States and I'm sure you can work for as long as you like, and
you're probably booked out for months and maybe years ahead. But we read about in this country and people
re beginning to say, 'I wonder if they'll ever bring the show here and come
back and do some concerts?' Do you have
any plans to come to England, to perform?
Christine Ooh, I really hope so.
Mick Definitely… for sure in either May or
June, and probably we're going to do it before that in late February.
Interviewer Do you ever feel surprised that you still
enjoy, really enjoy performing because you must, to work as hard as you've been
doing in the last year, 18 months - obviously you must get some great
satisfaction from working live to an audience.
Christine Oh…
Interviewer Does that ever surprise you, the fact
that you still enjoy it?
Mick Not me, I mean, just because of
the fact that basically I enjoy being onstage a lot, you know, I love to
play. I don't practice like a fanatic
at home, I just love the association of playing. I think that because of things that have happened, and gone down,
and changes within the band, there always has been an element of challenge,
where the band has chosen and wanted to carry on with a new situation, and
through the years we just never have been allowed to get bored, never ever has
a situation been boring in this band - musically, emotionally or anything else
(Christine laughs). It's in fact the complete
opposite, and that I would say, must have something to do with it, rather than
ten years later to be sitting maybe here with a whole band of people that
started off ten years ago. You have to
be pretty clever to keep that sort of situation healthy and exciting and
motivated, but it's happened naturally that we haven't had any option other
than to be confronted with changes which at least bring intrigue and excitement
into what you're doing.
'Say You
Love Me' is played