MOJO Magazine
March 2023

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.

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