Neil Finn learning how to get his voice heard with Fleetwood Mac

Joy Reid interviews the legend of Kiwi music, who has joined forces with Fleetwood Mac and will be touring New Zealand later this year.

What do you get when you combine one of the world’s biggest supergroups with New Zealand’s musical genius?  

New music, right? Well, yes maybe… (pause)… hopefully…

Sixty-one-year-old Neil Finn is the baby and newest addition in the wildly successful, but also wildly dramatic (and at times wildly dysfunctional) band Fleetwood Mac.

He’s been tasked with rhythm guitar and vocals after Lindsey Buckingham was unceremoniously fired last year (yes, dramatic) and, yes, he says he’s keen to create new music with them. 

Drummer Mick Fleetwood, who says over and over to me “I don’t sing, and I don’t play guitar” admits sheepishly that Neil Finn’s turned some of Mick’s musical ideas (he calls them doodles) recorded on his iPhone into songs.  That’s new music right?

The question is will we get to hear it?

“Anything is possible, but nothing is predictable I've discovered with this band,” says Neil Finn, as we sit in a VERY posh London hotel in the heart of Mayfair - one of the most expensive streets on the Monopoly board!

This band loves luxury.  Private jets and plush hotels that serve stupidly expensive water (which I sip politely as we set up – note: to me it tastes like normal water).

But then why not? When you’re a rock band which has made squillions of dollars over five decades, why not enjoy the spoils of hard work?

(Hard work also being code for enduring endless heartache, affairs, falling outs, drug abuse and reckless spending that went with the territory of being a 1980s sensation.)

While Neil Finn tells me he’s “excited about the idea of doing new music with Fleetwood Mac and it is on everybody’s radar as a possibility” - it appears it’s not a simple matter of putting a group of musical geniuses in a room with a pen and a paper.  

He laughs as he says: “I've learnt that I'm one of six and there’s little pincer movements you can employ to try and bring the conversation around. But yeah we’ll just wait and see.

“There’s a lot of good writers in the band, already Fleetwood Mac was a band that was known for having multiple writers, and women at the heart of the band, which is still, as far as big mainstream acts, not that common.”  

And he’s clearly impressed - “that’s an exciting thing about Fleetwood Mac, it’s a band that’s very influenced by women.”

Imagine the collaboration!  His voice is a perfect addition to the dulcet tones of Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie.

His Crowded House number Don’t Dream it’s Over (which he sings with Stevie Nicks) to 80,000 adoring Fleetwood Mac fans at Wembley Stadium gets one of the biggest singalongs of the night.  It’s most definitely a crowd favourite.  It seems he’s a natural fit with the band.

Band original Mick Fleetwood, who headhunted Neil Finn to join the band, is always thinking about tomorrow (excuse the pun).  

Side note: don’t use the word “hiring” when asking Mick about inviting Neil Finn into the fold. I got schooled. “You don’t hire Neil Finn, you ask.  Numero uno, these are hugely established players and musicians.” Point taken.

He’s a big fan of the Kiwi singer-songerwriter. The pair are always creating, it seems.

"I start rambling about anything off the top of my head. It makes no sense very often, and very swiftly he’s turned a couple of them into songs. He’s grabbed a moment of the doodle and turned it into a song, which of course that’s part of why I love him so much.”

At 6 foot 6, Mick Fleetwood has a presence.  I knew he was tall, but he still blew me away when he walked into the hotel room immaculately dressed in a velvet waistcoat with a pocket watch, looking and sounding every bit the perfect English gentleman - and NOT looking at all like a man of 72.  

Years of alcohol and cocaine consumption (he once worked out that if he laid out all the lines of cocaine he’d ever snorted, it would be around 11 kilometres long) don’t appear to have aged the highly annimated drummer, whose energy on stage is like that of a man a third his age.

But some things might surprise you.

“I’m petrified every night” – Ummm what? Remember this is the man whose confidence in a room is unavoidable.  Who knew he still got stage fright?

“I’m scared of not knowing what I’m doing,” he goes on. For a man who’s performed for five decades, this blows my mind.

“I don’t play the same thing every night, it sort of sounds like I'm doing it. But I never do fills in the same place. I'm on the edge.”

Well he has us fooled, and together we laugh. It’s nice to see the human side of people I’ve grown up listening to.

Fleetwood Mac show no signs of slowing down, not that it bothers Neil Finn.  

In a time of his life where he’d be forgiven for slowing down, he’s taken on probably the biggest gig of his career and he looks to be loving it.  And luckily for him, the crowds love him too.

But perhaps his harshest critics, or biggest fans, will be his home crowd in September. If it’s like anything I saw at Wembley, I think they’ll be well pleased.

* Watch Joy's full interview on SUNDAY, TVNZ 1 at 7.30pm.

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