THE QUEEN OF HOOKS
FLEETWOOD MAC’s not-so-secret weapon held the group together through breakups and freakouts, ruptures and reinventions, blizzards of drugs and booze, until even she could take no more. But without her voice, her songs, and her sanity, they were only ever half the band. MARK BLAKE pays tribute to CHRISTINE McVIE.
IN AUGUST 1987, LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM TOLD Fleetwood Mac he wouldn’t be touring their new album, Tango In The Night. The shows were already booked and a furious Stevie Nicks chased him up and down the corridors of Christine McVie’s Beverly Hills mansion, hurling insults. Eventually, the couple ended up outside, physically threatening each other, among the manicured hedgerows and expensive cars. “I remember saying, ‘Please don’t kill each other on my driveway,’” said McVie, displaying her flair for understatement. Christine McVie passed away on November 30, 2022 after a short illness. Descriptions such as “the quiet one” and “Fleetwood Mac’s secret weapon” appeared in several obituaries; “referee” could also be added to the list. Really, McVie’s contribution was neither quiet nor secret.
McVie composed or co-wrote eight of the group’s 16 US Top 20 hits, including Don’t Stop, You Make Loving Fun, Everywhere and Little Lies, and was the creative glue binding the original blues band, comprising drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie, with the Californian influx of Buckingham and Nicks.
This writer was fortunate to interview her three times. She was always candid and considered, with a highly-tuned bullshit detector. McVie was also a musical giant, steeped in blues, pop and rock’n’roll, and adored and respected by the rest of Fleetwood Mac; even the notoriously single-minded Buckingham deferred “to Chris”. Yet it took her 15-year hiatus from the group and, finally, her death, for McVie’s contribution to be more fully, and broadly, acknowledged.
McVIE WAS BORN CHRISTINE ANNE PERFECT IN Bouth, Cumbria, on July 12, 1943, and never liked her surname: “Teachers would always say, ‘I hope you live up to it.’” Raised in Smethwick, on the grey border between Birmingham and the Black Country, she was the second child of music tutor and concert violinist Cyril and his wife, Beatrice, a medium and faith healer.
Growing up, McVie was wary of her mother’s interest in the occult. Though she recalled Beatrice once placing a finger on a wart under her nose and promising her it would be gone by morning: “And it was. Though I still have a slight scar there.”
A talent for art was spotted early, and McVie was barely in her teens when she was fast-tracked into Moseley Junior Art School. But music was a parallel passion, nurtured by her father and her older brother John. McVie played piano and cello, and discovered the blues aged 15 when John showed her Fats Domino’s piano songbook. Domino’s seesawing left hand on Ain’t That A Shame – “the boogie bass” as McVie called it – would reappear in several of her signature hits.
Soon after, she composed her first song, I’ll Never Stop Loving You, hid in a cupboard backstage at the Birmingham Odeon so she could meet the Everly Brothers, and sung with a young Spencer Davis. One night, she ended up playing on-stage with a local band, Sounds Of Blue. There were very few female role models
in groups at the time. “It was considered a novelty,” she said. “Like the girl bass player in The Applejacks or the drummer in The Honeycombs.”
Graduating from Birmingham Art College with a diploma in sculpture but no idea what to do next, McVie found herself employed as a window dresser at Dickins & Jones department store in London’s West End. “The job was boring and the uniform awful,” she recalled. But salvation arrived in 1967: former Sounds Of Blue bassist Andy Silvester spotted her in the window and asked if she’d play piano in his and guitarist Stan Webb’s new ensemble, Chicken Shack.
She joined in time for a six-week residency at Hamburg’s Star Club, before composing Chicken Shack’s first single, It’s Okay With Me Baby, and two tracks on their 1968 debut, 40 Blue Fingers Freshly Packed And Ready To Serve.
“We worked seven nights a week, five hours a night,” she recalled. “But I enjoyed being part of a group, and suddenly knowing where I was going.”
FLEETWOOD MAC ENTERED HER life in November 1967. At the show at London’s Saville Theatre, most eyes were on the blues boom standard-bearers’ mercurial lead guitarist, Peter Green, but she was drawn to the bass player, John McVie, “with his dry sense of humour and Fu Manchu moustache,” she recalled. The pair married the following year, and spent their wedding night getting drunk with Joe Cocker, who was staying in the same Birmingham hotel.
McVie now had to navigate the dual roles of lone woman in an all-boys’ club and a touring musician’s wife. “Nobody chatted me up in the group. I wasn’t even like a bird to them,” she told Disc magazine in 1969. “The groupies used to glare daggers at me, and it rather put them off their stroke when I was around.”
In later years, McVie admitted to feeling conflicted about her early career. She won Melody Maker’s Female Vocalist Of 1969,
for Chicken Shack’s hit cover of Etta James’s I’d Rather Go Blind, but quit the group to stay home, because she wasn’t seeing enough of her husband. “It always destroys me when John’s away,” she said at the time. “It’s like having my right arm missing.”
McVie’s manager coaxed her into a solo LP, Christine Perfect, but she was a reluctant performer and the subsequent tour was blighted by stage fright. “There were 300 people in this club and I ran off-stage and burst into tears,” she said. In the meantime, Peter Green’s departure from Fleetwood Mac had left the remaining members to take stock. The musicians, wives, girlfriends and roadies began living in a converted oast house in rural Alton, Hampshire.
While Fleetwood Mac wrote and rehearsed 1970’s Kiln House, McVie cooked, cleaned, rolled joints, tie-dyed T-shirts and drew the children’s book-style illustration on the LP sleeve. Then, 10 days before Fleetwood Mac were about to go on tour, they asked her to join the band. “I knew all the songs,” she told MOJO’s Andrew Male. “So I just came chiming in with my piano and did a couple of harmonies.”
Green’s fellow guitarists were still in the group, though Jeremy Spencer disappeared with The Children Of God religious movement in mid1970, leaving Danny Kirwan to hold the fort on 1971’s Future Games and ’72’s Bare Trees.
Kir wan and McVie’s relationship was fraught.
“I respected Danny as a musician,” she told this writer in 2018. “He was a great player, but we did not get on as people. He certainly didn’t know how to treat a woman.”
Kirwan didn’t want McVie’s harmonies on his songs, but her compositions and lead voice lit up both records, with Spare Me A Little Of Your Love pairing her cut-glass English enunciation with gospelly backing voices.
Jeremy Spencer’s replacement, Tennessee-born guitarist/vocalist Bob Welch, was more encouraging. The Welch-composed Sentimental Lady, from Bare Trees, made a feature
“ODD THINGS HAPPEN TO THIS BAND. WHEN YOU’RE RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE, YOU BECOME PHILOSOPHICAL.” Christine McVie
of his and Christine’s pealing harmonies. It suggested a new direction, but Fleetwood Mac ignored the signs a little longer.
Instead, Brum bluesman Dave Walker made a fleeting appearance on 1973’s
Penguin, before being fired. Kirwan’s replacement, Bob Weston, duetted with McVie on Did You Ever Love Me (the only Mac song to ever feature steel drums), but was sacked for having an affair with Mick Fleetwood’s wife, Jenny. “Odd things happen to this band all the time,” reflected McVie, understating again. “When you’re right in the middle, you become philosophical.”
McVie’s songs – notably, Mystery To Me’s lovelorn Why and Heroes Are Hard To Find’s brass-filled title track – gave this phase of the band an illusion of continuity. In reality, Fleetwood Mac were in limbo. In a last attempt at a relaunch, Fleetwood persuaded the McVies to move to Los Angeles with him. “I agreed, just for three months, as I really didn’t want to leave England,” said Christine.
It didn’t help that, sped by her husband’s alcoholism, her marriage to John McVie was ending. But the move, and the marital trauma, would have unpredictable impacts on the band. “Had we stayed in England,” she told this writer, “Fleetwood Mac might never have survived.”
IN WINTER 1974, BOB WELCH BECAME THE MAC’S latest man overboard, frustrated by their lack of hits and battling heroin addiction. Fleetwood Mac were now down to three exiled Brits, clinging onto their record deal. Mick Fleetwood’s latest gambit was to induct Californian guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and singer Stevie Nicks, the boyfriend-girlfriend duo whose 1973 debut had landed with a resounding thud. The two parties needed each other, but Fleetwood required the buy-in of his group’s remaining songwriter. “Christine had to meet Stevie first,” explained Fleetwood, “because there would have been nothing worse than two women in a band cat-fighting.”
“I liked Stevie straight away,” said McVie, who realised that having another woman in Fleetwood Mac offered strength in numbers, and found that the new recruits brought out the best in her voice and songs. The first single from 1975’s Fleetwood Mac was McVie’s
Over My Head, which twinned her pristine vocal with a sleepy West Coast groove, and gave the band its first US Top 20 hit. “Your mood is like a circus wheel,” sang McVie, “you’re changing all the time…” It was partly written about Buckingham, who intimidated McVie with his mood swings and perfectionism. “But it forced me to up my game,” she said. “Both Lindsey and Stevie made me a better writer.”
The previous year’s ailing blues-rockers had been transformed by a slick American paint job. ‘The White Album’ sold a million copies within a month of release in July 1975 – and kept on selling.
Everything changed, though. Nicks was almost five years McVie’s junior and had a fraction of her songwriting experience, but she became Fleetwood Mac’s on-stage frontwoman, a whirling dervish of hair, silk and lace.
“For a while, I got jealous,” admitted McVie. “It didn’t last long, because I saw my role as part of the rhythm section with John and Mick. I could no more do twirls in chiffon than Stevie could play the blues on the piano.”
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT IS UNIMAGINABLE WITHout the input of Fleetwood Mac’s most graceful element. Released in January 1977, the all-conquering Rumours topped the charts in four countries, including the UK and US, and would go on to sell in excess of 45 million copies, shored up by two of Christine McVie’s greatest hits.
By now, Buckingham and Nicks had broken up, John and Christine had split, and the latter had begun a new relationship with the group’s lighting engineer, Curry Grant. The mixed emotions flooded through the three writers’ work. But while Buckingham goaded Nicks in Go Your Own Way, McVie delivered the album’s most upbeat songs. On the American Top 3 hit Don’t Stop she urged her estranged husband to get on with his life, and serenaded her new boyfriend in its US Top 10 follow-up, You Make Loving Fun. “I’m good at pathos,” she told MOJO. “I write about romantic despair but with a positive spin.”
Her voice and songs were also a link to the old Fleetwood Mac, without being stuck in the past. McVie avoided faux Americanisms and always sang in an unapologetically English accent. She
was also the self-proclaimed “queen of the hooks” – always starting with the chorus, and working backwards. “Christine wrote the hits,” said Nicks. “Way more than I ever did.”
Inevitably, Curry Grant was fired and the relationship ended. The band always came first. McVie composed Rumours’ ballad, Songbird, as a love letter to the rest of Fleetwood Mac. It came to her one night, fully formed – “after a couple of toots of coke and half a bottle of champagne” – and she stayed awake until she could get to the studio. In defiance of her earlier stage shyness, McVie would perform Songbird, alone at the piano, closing the vast majority of the shows she subsequently played with the band.
The song summed up the band’s shared philosophy: Fleetwood Mac versus the world, regardless of any personal squabbles. But there was still something terribly British about how the McVies coped. Christine poured out her heart in song and her spurned husband – bucket hat or flat cap pulled down over his eyes – dutifully played the bass lines. “I never really listened to the words,” John once said. “‘Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow…’ Yeah, OK.”
CHRISTINE’S STEADIER HAND PROVED invaluable as Fleetwood Mac embarked on 1979’s Tusk. Fleetwood and Nicks had begun a not-so-secret affair and the band’s cocaine use was excessive even by ’70s standards. “I was the most restrained of the lot,” claimed McVie, “and I was certainly no angel.”
On Tusk, McVie anchored Buckingham’s more outlandish songs and production ideas. While he played percussion on lavatory seats and Kleenex boxes and sounded like a one-man band on The Ledge and Not That Funny, McVie soothed the
Rumours-loving fanbase with Over And Over and Tusk’s gorgeous hidden gem, Brown Eyes.
She also policed the others. On 1979-80’s Tusk tour, McVie threw a glass of wine in Buckingham’s face after he mocked Nicks’s on-stage dancing. “I told Lindsey, ‘Don’t you ever do anything like that to this band again,’” she raged.
Despite the pure voice and poignant songs, there was a side to McVie that one contemporary member of the Mac’s entourage described as “earthy and tough”, adding that “she was the band mother”. But McVie wasn’t immune to romantic drama either. By now, the Beach Boys drummer and notorious bon vivant Dennis Wilson had moved into her Coldwater Canyon estate after a whirlwind courtship. “I watched in trepidation as Chris almost went mad trying to keep up with Dennis,” recalled Fleetwood. McVie composed Only Over You on 1982’s Mirage for Wilson. “People think I’m crazy,” she sang. “But they don’t know…” Nevertheless, the relationship ended, not long after McVie discovered he’d been using her credit card to buy underwear for his teenage girlfriend.
With Fleetwood Mac off the road, McVie made another solo album, Christine McVie, and coaxed Buckingham and Fleetwood into playing on it. When the group reconvened for 1987’s Tango In The Night, she and Buckingham wrote most of the hits, while Nicks struggled with an addiction to the prescription tranquilliser, Klonopin.
While McVie had married again, to Portuguese musician Eddy Quintela, Tango… was a testament to another partnership – Buckingham and McVie – the pair going about their business without a past romantic entanglement to confuse matters. Buckingham applied his studio wizardry to Little Lies and Everywhere – their sing-song choruses and sweet hooks distilled the essence of Christine McVie – but his departure after Tango In The Night was a case of history repeating. Once again, McVie tried to steady the listing ship on 1990’s inconsequential Behind The Mask and ’95’s Time. Her song, Save Me, from this era, had a gold-standard chorus but could be now considered a cry for help. McVie clashed with the new recruit, ex-Traffic guitarist Dave Mason, and eventually quit. “Chris helped to the degree she could,” said Fleetwood. “Then, for her own survival, she couldn’t do one bit more.”
SUBSEQUENTLY, CHRISTINE McVIE could easily have used Michael Corleone’s words about the Mafia – “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” – to apply to Fleetwood Mac.
A one-off performance of Don’t Stop at President Bill Clinton’s 1993 inauguration gala was followed in 1997 by a full reunion tour. But she’d had enough of it
“CHRISTINE WROTE THE HITS. WAY MORE THAN I EVER DID.” Stevie Nicks
months before its end. “Don’t tell anyone,” she told this writer after the Mac’s show in Auburn Hills, Michigan, on October 4. “But when this tour’s over, I am leaving the band to open a restaurant.”
In the end, she only made it as far as cookery school. But McVie underwent a drastic life change. She sold her song publishing for an unspecified amount and moved into a 19-acre estate in the Kent village of Wickhambreaux. “I’d had enough of living out of a suitcase,” she said.
McVie and Quintela’s marriage didn’t last, and the couple divorced in 2003. A third solo LP, In The Meantime, snuck out the following year before disappearing almost without trace. McVie now found herself rattling around a country house, with just her two Lhasa Apsos, Dougal and George, for company. She walked the dogs, read plenty of books, and watched crime dramas and Have I Got News For You on TV. “I used to be a late-night person,” she told MOJO’s James McNair. “But these days I’m more of an early bird and go to bed about nine in the evening.”
In reality, she was drinking too much and had developed agoraphobia, plus fear of flying. As she would tell Andrew Male (see Q&A p56), in 2013 a psychiatrist asked McVie if she could bear to fly, where would she go? She said Maui to see Mick Fleetwood. The therapist told her to book a plane ticket for six months’ time.
Over the intervening weeks, McVie gradually began to regain her confidence and leave the house again. When Fleetwood came to London, she flew back to Maui with him: “And I barely noticed the plane taking off.”
McVie rejoined Fleetwood Mac for good in 2014. She’d played as a session musician on some of their last album, 2003’s Say You
Will, and the others had missed “the queen of the hooks”. Even so, there was a caveat. Buckingham, emotionally invested in his past collaborations with McVie, did not want to get his hopes up. “I called her up and said, ‘Chris, I think it’s a great idea,’” he told MOJO’s Jim Irvin, “‘but you do know that if you come back you can’t leave again!’”
For the 2015 world tour, McVie was back behind her keyboard, customised with a wing mirror so she could see the trusty rhythm section behind her. “The prodigal daughter returns,” said McVie, but even she couldn’t stop Buckingham and Nicks from clashing, and old tensions soon resurfaced.
A planned Fleetwood Mac studio album morphed into 2017’s
Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVie instead, before Buckingham
was fired from the band at Nicks’s insistence. The album’s closing song, Carnival Begin, sounded autobiographical. “Travelling girl is moving north, west, east and south,” sang McVie, sounding like she’d been around the world more times than she could remember.
FEW OUTSIDE FLEETWOOD MAC’S INNER CIRCLE knew she was ill, and her death came as a shock to many. Christine McVie always felt like a constant presence in the Fleetwood Mac story, even though she’d stepped away from the band more than once.
Initially bound to them by marriage, McVie’s roles as musician, hit songwriter, confidante and friend proved vital to the group’s chemistry and long-term success. As Mick Fleetwood said after learning of her death, “The healer’s daughter will always be my sister and inspiration.”