Fleetmac Wood goes their own way
Three-hundred-dollar Fleetwood Mac tickets got you down? All that money and you won’t even get Lindsey Buckingham?
Lisa Jelliffe wouldn’t exactly call her DJ duo Fleetmac Wood a Plan B option, but it’ll give you the old songs in a whole new way: Dance remixes.
“I think I would always recommend that everyone go and see Fleetwood Mac live,” she says from Los Angeles, where she’s packing plenty of glitter for a month-long ‘Rumours Rave’ tour that comes to The Warehouse in St. Catharines Saturday.
“But in no way are we an alternative.
“We’ve seen them live many, many times, and they’re just incredible.”
Not that Jelliffe and partner Alex Oxley aren’t making dreams of their own. Since spinning their own take on Mac classics such as “The Chain” and “You Make Loving Fun,” along with choice Stevie Nicks solo stuff like “Stand Back” and
“Edge of Seventeen,” they’ve developed their own Mac-obsessed following who’ve come to hear re-imagined versions of songs they grew up with.
The Australia-born Jelliffe says she continually had to explain she wasn’t in a cover band early on, but word of mouth quickly spread this was a different
kind of Mac.
“We started off at small parties for friends — it didn’t start off as a thing we’d tour around the world,” she says. “We were both DJs, both put on dance parties, and I was like, ‘I really want to do a whole night of Fleetwood Mac.’
“At the time we were both playing a lot of vintage remixes and edits, and it was like, ‘Hang on, it’s a bit too easy just to play the greatest hits all night … why don’t we make this a creative project?’”
With the help of other producers, they reworked the tunes from iconic albums such as “Rumours,” “Tusk” and “Mirage.” And it wasn’t much of a stretch, says Jelliffe: Fleetwood Mac has always had some groove.
“Very much so,” she says. “I think when people hear of the concert they go, ‘Oh, that’s different,’ but when you’re actually in it and listening to this music on a nice, big quality sound system, then it all makes sense.
“You’ve got great tracks that are actually perfect for dancing to. There’s a lot of groove from Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, the rhythm section of the band.”
While there’s an odd inclusion from the band’s bluesy Peter Green era, the set list is mostly all from the legendary Mac lineup of Fleetwood, McVie, Nicks, Buckingham and Christine McVie. And while she’ll introduce a top hat or two, Jelliffe — with the stage name Roxanne Roll — doesn’t adopt any particular persona.
“I wouldn’t say I’m Stevie or Christine,” she says.
“On stage we like to kind of channel all of them at some point.
“People dress up for the parties. We feel like Stevie is a state of mind, not a gender.”
She’s hoping to look out into the crowd one night and see an actual member of Fleetwood
Mac.
“Maybe they’ve turned up in secret, but as far as we know they haven’t,” she says. “The invitation’s always there, obviously.”