Category Archives: Christine McVie

Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, Tour Info, UK Articles

Christine McVie To Re-Join Fleetwood Mac?

Christine McVie To Re-Join Fleetwood Mac?

Thursday, January 24th 2013 11:30

Planet Rock can exclusively reveal that Mick Fleetwood is trying to persuade Christine McVie to re-join Fleetwood Mac. 

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McVie retired from the band in the late 1990’s and hasn’t performed with them since.

He also confirmed that Fleetwood Mac will announce the European leg of their forthcoming world tour in the coming weeks.

Mick told Planet Rock’s Darren Redick, “I’m really looking forward to reconnecting with my sister, Christine McVie, and that’s sort of a lovely, nice thing to be doing. Getting her out of the English cold there for a few weeks …and me and Chris will be flying back [to Mick’s home in Hawaii] after my work in London”.

Darren asked Mick if Christine would be with them for their shows in the UK and Mick went on to say, “I would love that and I would welcome that as we all would and I truly hope that happens. And it might just be the case and I will take that to the fore and be reminded that a lot of people would love to see that happen. It would be an emotionally charged moment that would be lovely to have happen. And I know everyone in the band would welcome that. So you never know!”.

As far as the world tour goes, Fleetwood Mac look likely to be in England by the autumn. Mick said, “We’re going to be touring in September and October in England and in Europe, we’re going on a massive world tour, which is getting more massive by the second, and those shows will be announced in the next few days”.

Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, UK Articles

Christine McVie at Peace With Fleetwood Mac Past

CHRISTINE MCVIE AT PEACE WITH FLEETWOOD MAC PAST

Christine McVie enjoyed a wild ride as a member of Fleetwood Mac, but nowadays the retired rocker prefers a quiet life out of the spotlight. In a new interview, the legendary singer and songwriter shares her fond and not-so-fond memories of the past, and says she has no problem with her former bandmates moving on without her.

McVie looks back on the landmark album ‘Rumours’ in a rare public interview with Mojo magazine. Released in February of 1977, the album spawned a string of commercial hits including ‘Don’t Stop,’ ‘The Chain’ and ‘Dreams.’ McVie contributed ‘You Make Loving Fun,’ ‘Don’t Stop,’ ‘Oh Daddy’ and ‘Songbird,’ but she recalls that her rocky relationship with ex-husband John McVie, as well as the strain between Lindsey Buckingham and Steve Nicks, made for a stressful situation.

“John and I have long since made friends, and I’m sure Stevie and Lindsey have as well. But I am often still flabbergasted at how the hell we managed to make [the album] in the first place,” McVie says incredulously. “But that was what tied us together — we knew that the music was good. The chemistry was such that we brought the best out in each other.”

Still, McVie acknowledges that the group’s crazy, drug-fueled antics impacted the recording sessions. “They were wild days,” she admits. “I can’t deny there was a lot of lunacy in the studio. But Stevie and I rented a condominium in Sausalito to get away from all of that. It was the boys who all stayed at the Record Plant house. So that’s where all the madness was happening.”

The musician still enjoys the music on ‘Rumours’ after all these years. “It was a real pleasure to listen to it again,” she states. “I’ve had it lying around but not listened to it for years. It’s like if you live next door to Buckingham Palace, you don’t go and look at it every day.”

McVie departed Fleetwood Mac in 1998, returned to her native England and has since kept a very low profile. She has seen her old band in concert a few times since, though she has steadfastly not joined them onstage. “I have a really good time when I go. I can stand at the sound board and watch them sweat,” she says with a laugh. “They do my songs, ‘Don’t Stop’ and ‘World Turning,’ but they are limited to what they can do of mine. I think they tried ‘You Make Loving Fun,’ but I don’t think the sound of their vocals were right. But I wish them well.”

McVie appears to have no future plan to return to music, and she says she has shelved any plans she once had of opening a restaurant, which was part of her intent when she left the group. “I didn’t open a restaurant but I did go to a few cooking schools,” she says, adding, “It was too much like hard work!”

Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks

Ringing in the New Year With Fleetwood Mac

Huffington Post
Jane Heller
Posted: 3rd Jan 2013

I’ve never been a big fan of New Year’s Eve. There’s so much pressure to do something out-of-this-world fabulous, not to mention have someone out-of-this-world fabulous to do it with. I remember prix fixed restaurant dinners that weren’t worth the money and too-big parties whose forced gaiety made everyone feel tense and champagne hangovers that wrecked me for days. And I remember occasions when my husband was suffering from flare-ups from Crohn’s disease and was too ill to celebrate at all.

My favorite memories are of quiet evenings with him and a few close friends, and this past New Year’s Eve was a case in point. He was in better-than-usual health and good spirits, so out we went.

Our hosts were Martha and Michael Collins, who had lost their house in the 2008 wildfire that destroyed over 200 homes in the Santa Barbara area. After living in a trailer for four years, Martha and Michael rose from the ashes, literally, and moved last month into the spectacular new house they built on the same site — a meticulously-crafted beacon of resilience. Some people would have been thrown by the very notion of losing everything (short of the clothes on their backs and their laptops), but Martha and Michael thrived, their marriage and partnership more solid than ever.

We were in the midst of their scrumptious meal when Michael, a filmmaker whose specialty has been chronicling the lives and music of our most accomplished rock ‘n’ roll artists, mentioned that among the very few material possessions he’d been able to grab before a wall of flames drove him and Martha out of their house was the documentary footage he’d shot 35 years ago of Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 Japanese tour to promote their “Rumours” album.

“I’m finishing up the documentary now,” he told us.

“The public has never seen Fleetwood Mac like this before,” Martha chimed in. “They were so young and it was such an innocent time, and the music is beyond great since they were in their prime.”

I put down my knife and fork (not easy when your hosts have prepared a feast that would rival any restaurant), and said, “Can we see this documentary? Like, tonight?”

Michael hesitated. “It’s still raw — a work in progress. But I guess I could show you clips.”

I was not taking “I guess” for an answer. Fleetwood Mac has always been one of my favorite bands and on this particular New Year’s Eve, when I’d felt barraged by news of Kanye West, the Gangnam Style guy and Rihanna’s latest Twitpic, I was so in the mood for a little boomer music. Continue reading Ringing in the New Year With Fleetwood Mac →

Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks, Tour Info, UK Articles

Christine McVie will never rejoin Fleetwood Mac, says Stevie Nicks

Stevie Nicks has downplayed the likelihood of Christine McVie reuniting with Fleetwood Mac.

McVie left Fleetwood Mac following the highly successful ‘The Dance’ tour in 1998 and has largely shunned the music business, aside from the 2004 solo LP In the Meantime.

© PA Images / Fiona Hanson/PA Archive

Fleetwood Mac will launch their latest reunion tour in 2013, but Nicks has stressed to Rolling Stone that McVie will not be involved at all.

“I would say there’s no more a chance of [McVie returning] than an asteroid hitting the earth. She is done,” Nicks explained to the publication.

The ‘Rhiannon’ singer continued: “You know when you look in somebody’s face and you can just tell? She doesn’t want to do it anymore. She doesn’t want to fly. She doesn’t want to come back to America. When she left, she left. She sold her house, her piano, her car.

“She went to England and she has never been back since 1998, so it’s not really feasible, as much as we would all like to think that she’ll just change her mind one day. I don’t think it’ll happen. We love her, so we had to let her go.”

McVie has largely refrained from public appearances in recent years, but did attend a Fleetwood Mac concert in London in 2008.

Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham expressed hopes this week that the band will tour Europe in addition to their 34-date US and Canadian trek.

 

Digital Spy
Thurs Dec 6th 2012

Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, John McVie, Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, Stevie Nicks, UK Articles

BRIT Awards 1998 – Outstanding Contribution to British Music

Fleetwood Mac

Over thirty years after they were formed and two decades since the release of their most famous and biggest selling album, Fleetwood Mac are being honoured with the BRIT Award for Outstanding Contribution to the British Music Industry.

The Anglo/American rock group emerged from Britain’s blues boom of the late 1960s, moved to America in the mid 70s, released the 20 million selling album “Rumours” in 1977 and re-appeared last year with their million selling comeback album ‘The Dance,” During that time Fleetwood Mac have featured a total of 16 musicians in more than a dozen different line-ups built around the one remaining original member, drummer Mick Fleetwood. But it is the five piece of Fleetwood, John McVie, Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks (the band that created the award-winning “Rumours” album and re-formed last year) which is acknowledged as the classic Fleetwood Man line-up and the group honoured at this year’s BRIT Awards ceremony. Continue reading BRIT Awards 1998 – Outstanding Contribution to British Music →

Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks

Flashback 1989 – Fleetwood Mac’s leading ladies: Stevie Nicks & Christine McVie

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Music Connection Vol. XIII, No. 1
Jan.9-Jan. 22, 1989

In 1975, when Fleetwood Mac entered the studio to begin recording a new studio album, no one could have predicted the massive success that this veteran English band would soon achieve. Following a ten-year, checkered history of changing personnel, which frequently left the band minus key members and a music direction, founding fathers Mick Fleetwood and John McVie recruited a little-known singer-songwriting duo, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Nick’s bewitching musical persona and Buckingham’s guitar and arrangement talents, coupled with the earlier addition of Christine Perfect (later Mrs. McVie), gave this band all the chemistry and direction it needed. The resulting album, simply titled Fleetwood Mac, spawned the hit singles, “Rhiannon,” “Say You Love Me,” and “Over My Head,” and catapulted a band with a limited sales base into a multi-platinum hit machine.

In the years that followed, the band solidified its superstar status with 1977’s Rumours LP (an incredible twenty million copies sold worldwide); survived the traumatic breakup of two romances within the band – Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, and John and Christie McVie; dabbled in experimentation with the ambitious, 1979 two-record set Tusk; and recorded the lackluster 1982 LP Mirage that had critics and fans wondering if the band had finally run out of creative steam.

But rumors of the band’s demise proved premature. In 1987, after a five-year layoff, Fleetwood Mac released the excellent Tango In The Night, an album that re-established the band both commercially and artistically. That was the good news. The bad news was Lindsey Buckingham, whose production and instrumental skills had so greatly contributed to their success, would be leaving the Mac fold. Undaunted, the band recruited two musicians, guitarist/vocalists Rick Vito and Billy Brunette, to fill the Buckingham void.

Now, with the release of their current greatest hits LP, Fleetwood Mac spears to be taking stock of its platinum past and looking forward to its future. The album is a reminder of past glories – “Rhiannon,” “Don’t Stop,” “Dreams,” and “Go Your Own Way” – and a harbinger of things to come, with two new tracks, “As Long As You Follow” (the album’s first single) and “No Questions Asked,” featuring the band’s new guitar lineup. We recently spoke to the two first ladies of Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie, about the band’s past, present and future.

MC: Tell me about the new Fleetwood Mac. What’s different and unique about Fleetwood Mac as we’re seeing you now?

Continue reading Flashback 1989 – Fleetwood Mac’s leading ladies: Stevie Nicks & Christine McVie →
Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, Mick Fleetwood, Stevie Nicks, Tour Info, UK Articles

Big Mac – Fleetwood Mac talks to Record Mirror (Apr 1988)

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Well, you can’t get much bigger than Fleetwood Mac, can you?
In the wake of Lindsey Buckingham’s much-publicised departure and their combined chart success.
Dave Zimmer talks to the band that just refuses to lay down and die….

Record Mirror (UK)
April 1988

RecordMirror_Apr88_FrontCover_small

Somebody should write a soap opera based on Fleetwood Mac’s career. They’ve been plagued by jealousy, bankruptcy and alcoholism; and when guitarist Lindsey Buckingham left the band last year, it looked like the end of the road.

Buckingham had been with Fleet­wood Mac since 1975 when he and Stevie Nicks helped catapult the rather obscure ‘hippy’ band into the big time with the LP ‘Rumours’. To date, it’s sold over 30 million copies worldwide. But the relationship between Nicks and Buckingham soured, as Stevie explains.

“If Lindsey said the wall in the studio was grey, I’d be absolutely sure it was pink. In order to get one of my. songs on a record I’d have to say ‘Okay, the wall’s grey Lindsey’. Otherwise it was back on the bus.

Continue reading Big Mac – Fleetwood Mac talks to Record Mirror (Apr 1988) →

Article Archive Pages, Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, John McVie, Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, Release Info, Reviews, Stevie Nicks, Tour Info

Fleetwood Mac Return Without Leaving | CREEM Magazine

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Creem Magazine
September 1987
by J. Fordosh

Up in the hills of Bel Air is Lindsey Buckingham’s house, Lindsey Buckingham’s croquet-perfect lawn, Lindsey Buckingham’s pool, Lindsey Buckingham’s radio-controlled toy submarine that’s busted, but could be fun in the pool, Lindsey Buckingham’s home studio, The Slope-where the final work on Fleetwood Mac’s Tango In The Night was done-and, indeed, Lindsey Buckingham himself.

Lindsey, like everyone in Fleetwood Mac, will tell us something of this latest record-and something of this immensely popular band. Their times and their troubles, stuff like that.

Fleetwood Mac’s saga has been a strange one: since Lindsey and Stevie Nicks joined up in 1975, the band’s made five studio albums, including Tango. The first four have sold something like 33 million copies-about 20 million of those courtesy of 1977’s monstrous Rumours.

You can perceive that, despite their relatively sluggish output, this band has a lot of fans. As I write this, Tango is safely ensconced in the Top 10, where it may well remain for eternity or the next Fleetwood Mac album, whichever comes first. But, coming almost five years after Mirage, we can correctly assume that there’s a story behind the story, so let’s start here . . .

Continue reading Fleetwood Mac Return Without Leaving | CREEM Magazine →
Archive News, Article Archive Pages, Christine McVie, Solo Activity

Christine McVie takes off in solo flight…| People Weekly

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People Weekly
April 30, 1984
by Jim Jerome

Fleetwood Mac’s Christine Mcvie takes off in solo flight with a new boyfriend under her wing

Singer-songwriter in Fleetwood Mac has been a pretty good gig for Christine McVie. Plenty of travel; lots of perks; long stretches between albums. Pay hasn’t been too bad, either, what with some 35 million albums sold worldwide. As a result, among other things, she has been able to furnish her four-bedroom Beverly Hills home without ever eyeing a price tag. And yet McVie, 40, has managed to keep it all in perspective. “I mean, anybody can spend all their money if they work hard enough at it,” she says. “It’s not like I’ve got a piano-shaped Jacuzzi or walls full of Picassos and Monets or anything like that. I do put limits on myself: I haven’t bought the Queen Mary.”

Fair enough. Another, more concrete example of McVie’s sensible adjustment to fame and fortune at the top of rock is Christine McVie, a finely executed solo album containing the jaunty hit single Got a Hold on Me, and the follow-up, Love Will Show Us How. McVie’s LP is in the great tradition of solo efforts by members of Fleetwood Mac, following one in 1981 by guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, two platinum monsters by Stevie Nicks and two obscure releases by drummer Mick Fleetwood. Only Christine’s ex-husband, bassist John McVie, has yet to try a solo and record sans Mac.

McVie may have thrust Christine from the shadow of her megaband, but it does have guest appearances by fellow L.A.-area residents Fleetwood and Buckingham. And ex-husband McVie, who lives on the island of St. Thomas, devotedly popped into the Montreux, Switzerland studio to check on Chris. “They all said they loved the album, and I have no reason to doubt them,” she says wryly. Only Nicks hasn’t weighed in. In fact, McVie hasn’t spoken to Nicks for a year “because our paths just haven’t crossed.” Like any major act, Mac is constantly rumored to be disintegrating—and Nicks’ solo triumphs have hardly silenced that kind of talk. Still, McVie downplays any intraband melodramas. “Any competitiveness—if that’s the right word—is all quite friendly,” says McVie, who certainly doesn’t want to rock the boat. “The album is a project, not a career for me. My main interest in life is still the band.”  Continue reading Christine McVie takes off in solo flight…| People Weekly →

Archive News, Article Archive Pages, Christine McVie, Release Info, Reviews, Solo Activity

Christine McVie Album Review | People Weekly

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People Weekly, March 19, 1984
Christine McVie. (sound recording reviews)

CHRISTINE McVIE by Christine McVie
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There’s a loose, good-time feeling to this album. The tunes, most of them written by McVie and sometime Hall and Oates guitarist Todd Sharp, are snappy and full of rhythmic rock and roll hooks. The production by Russ Titelman is slick. For all that, there’s not much excitement in McVie’s first solo album since 1970 (shortly after she’d left the British group Chicken Shack to join then-husband John McVie in Fleetwood Mac). The subtle harmonic skills that make McVie a peerless ensemble singer and musician with Mac don’t necessarily translate into a solo act.

Her singing seems colorless at times and her keyboard work is overshadowed by her sidemen. Mac mates Lindsey Buckingham and Mick Fleetwood sat in, as did Eric Clapton, Elton John, drummer Ray Cooper and rock ‘veteran Steve Winwood. McVie, in fact, calls Winwood “my idol,” and their vocal duet on One in a Million is the LP’s most striking track, though the no-frills rock tune Got a Hold on Me has become its hit single.

Maybe McVie’s heart wasn’t totally in this project–“It had reached a point where this record was expected of me,” she has said–but if nothing else, she has it out of her system.

Review Grade: B