Category Archives: Christine McVie

Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey Buckingham, Release Info, Reviews, Solo Activity, UK Articles

Lindsey Buckingham & Christine McVie Review | MOJO Magazine

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Lindsey Buckingham & Christine McVie ****
Lindsey Buckingham & Christine McVie
EAST WEST. CD/DL

Fleetwood Mac’s new not-quite Fleetwood Mac album

The party line is that Stevie Nicks’ solo commitments have forced Fleetwood Mac to put their next album on hold. But as the recent Tango In The Night reissue proved, Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie were often the band’s great unsung partnership.

Confusingly, this duets album also includes bass guitarist John McVie and drummer Mick Fleetwood, making it essentially Fleetwood Mac, minus Nicks.

McVie brings the sing-song pop (Feel About You, Red Sun) and the slightly cloying Game Of Pretend; Buckingham, the whispered vocals and fingernail-splitting guitar solos on Sleeping Around The Corner and Love Is Here To Stay, plus the album’s best song: the nagging and melancholy In My World.

Does it miss Stevie Nicks? Yes, just as the last Fleetwood Mac album, 2003’s Say You Will, missed Christine McVie. But until all parties can sync their calen-dars, this will do nicely.

Mark Blake

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Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, Release Info, Solo Activity, UK Articles

The MOJO Interview: Christine McVie

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A graduate of Birmingham’s blues clubs, her songwriting and harmonic joy helped make Fleetwood Mac one of the biggest acts in the world. Then, she withdrew. “I just shut myself off,” admits a fully returned Christine McVie.

Interview by ANDREW MALE
Portrait by TOM SHEEHAN
June 2017, MOJO Magazine

I’M SORRY,” SHOUTS CHRISTINE McVIE FROM the kitchen, as she rummages for mugs under the I sink, “it’s a rented flat, and everything’s still in storage.” They’re words that conjure up a cheerless one-bedroom studio with wipe-clean beige walls and collapsed sofa bed, but for Christine McVie, 73-year-old singer-songwriter and on-off veteran of Fleetwood Mac, one of the biggest-selling bands of all time, the flat is a penthouse in Belgravia, decorated with antique Turkish carpets, giant African drums and, hanging in the drawing room, Edward Reginald Frampton’s 1898 Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece, – Saint Cecilia With Angels. “It looks like she’s playing a Hammond B3, doesn’t it?” smiles McVie, pointing at the spinet in the painting, a nod to her own early years, when as art student Christine Perfect she played keyboards in late-’60s Brummie blues outfits Sounds Of Blue and Chicken Shack.

Today, McVie’s look is a designer variant on Brumbeat beatnik; grown-out blonde bob, blue jeans, white T-shirt and black leather jacket, and her Smethwick drawl is still audible beneath a warm, measured voice with the same low blue tones that have coloured such soulful Mac belters down the years as Say You Love Me, Don’t Stop and Little Lies.

Indeed, Mac history is all around us, McVie’s walls bedecked with early photos of herself with band founder and drummer Mick Fleetwood, and bassist and one-time husband John McVie. There’s tour posters from the early-’70s Bob Welch years, and a plethora of platinum record updates on the 30-million-plus sales of the band’s 1977 LP Rumours. Recorded with LA conscripts Lindsey Bucking-ham and Stevie Nicks, the album set in motion 20 years of infra-band dance, dalliance and excess, and finally ended for McVie when she walked away from the group in 1998, exhausted and disillusioned, with a dream of living quietly in the Kent countryside.

Today she positively beams when discussing the band, especially her surprise return to the fold at the 02 Arena in September 2013 that led to the On With The Show world tour (“There was nothing bad about that tour. Everything was a joy!”) and the resultant reunion sessions with Buckingham, Fleetwood and McVie that have resulted in a buoyant new “duets” album, Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVie, recorded in Studio D at Village Recorders in Los Angeles, the same custom-designed annex the Mac had built, at ludicrous expense, for the recording of Tusk, some 39 years ago. “Lindsey gets me,” says McVie, happily, “and I love working with him. As with everything in Fleetwood Mac, it’s chemistry. I feel like I’ve come home. The prodigal daughter returns.”

So, how did Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVie come about?
I’d rejoined the band, after being retired for 16 years, and I had a phone call from Lindsey saying, “If you’re going to do that Chris you gotta commit.” He’s very hardline. I said, “I’m committing!” And I did. I worked out, I started writing songs, I sent Lindsey some demos, and he did his magic on them. It never occurred to us anything would happen in terms of an album. Then we thought it was a good way of getting me back into the swing of things for the upcoming Fleetwood Mac tour. We got some studio time, Lindsey brought in some songs he’d recorded with John and Mick a few years back, and before we knew it we had, like, six or seven songs. We shelved them, because we had to rehearse to go on the road, then we just pulled them back out a few months ago and decided to make it a proper duets album.

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Continue reading The MOJO Interview: Christine McVie →

Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey Buckingham, Solo Activity, UK Articles

In Fleetwood Mac nothing fits into any formula | The Times

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26th May 2017
The Times

Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie have got back together to sing duets, they tell Will Hodgkinson

Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie: “It was clear early on that this wouldn’t be Fleetwood Mac”

Just when you have a handle on the Fleetwood Mac drama, the principal characters go way off script and do something nobody could have predicted. First, the songwriter and pianist Christine McVie makes a surprise return in 2013 after a 15-year absence. Now McVie has recorded a duets album with Lindsey Buckingham, the guitarist associated, through good and bad times, with the other woman in the group: one Stevie Nicks.

“This is a band where nothing fits into any formula,” says Buckingham, on an atypically stormy afternoon in Los Angeles. He is at the Beverly Hills office of Fleetwood Mac’s manager, Irving Azoff, where I have just heard a handful of songs from the forthcoming duets album. From Buckingham’s sweet, fairytale-like In My World to McVie’s breezily romantic Feel About You, the album features classic Fleetwood Mac-style soft rock, which isn’t surprising given that Mick Fleetwood and John McVie form the rhythm section. The only Maccer missing, in fact, is Nicks.

“Oh, she’s fine about it,” insists Buckingham, on what Nicks makes of her old boyfriend recording an album with her one-time ally in the male-dominated world of 1970s rock. “She was off on her own thing [a solo tour], she knew what we were doing, and it was clear early on that this wouldn’t be Fleetwood Mac. You can look at it cosmically. The universe was speaking to Christine and me, even to Stevie, for this to be a duets album.

“Doing a duets album with Lindsey was the last thing I expected,” says McVie. “We don’t hang out in the way Stevie and I do, but we do work well together, and we ended up with all this material while Stevie was off doing other things. It started when I was in LA to rehearse for the tour and it developed from there. It’s just another splinter off the tree.”

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Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey Buckingham, UK Articles

Fleetwood Mac: The Saga Continues. Meet… Buckingham McVie | Uncut Magazine

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Uncut Magazine
Stephen Deusner
May 2017

Go Your Own Way

Fleetwood Mac should be preparing for their farewell tour but, true to form, their epic saga has taken on another complicated turn. Introducing, then, the dynamic duo of Buckingham McVie  – “a nice splinter off the main artery of Fleetwood Mac.” In this exclusive interview, Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie reveal all to Stephen Deusner about their unexpected side project, and about how it fits into the storied past, present and future of Fleetwood Mac. “It’s that umbilical cord that can’t be broken,” says Christine. “It just pulls you back.”

“THERE WAS SOMETHING COSMIC about it.” says Lindsey Buckingham. He’s sitting at the head of a long table in the brightly lit conference room of an anonymous office building in the Westwood neighbourhood of L.A, talking about Buckingham McVie, the new album he wrote and recorded with his Fleetwood Mac bandmate Christine McVie. Even as they are preparing for a Fleetwood Mac farewell tour in 2018, these two members have emerged as intimate collaborators proving there’s still a lot of life left in the band. “She and I kept saying to each other, ‘Why did it take us so long to think that it would be cool to do a duets album?’ I guess it was logistics – just getting to the point where the stars all aligned.” It’s a record with a lot of history behind it: more than 40 years of hook-ups and break-ups, marriages and divorces, drug abuse and recovery, departures and returns, hits and misses. It’s a story that begins with pub gigs in the late 1960s and a fateful Tex-Mex dinner meeting in the early 1975 and ends with a final arena tour in the late 2010s, spanning nearly every continent (even Antarctica, if you count the band’s penguin mascot) and almost every style of rock, including Buckingham’s early acid-rock and McVie’s beloved blues. And yet, these two musicians, both so embroiled in their own dramas, never really had any drama between them.

“The idea of us working together wasn’t about what kind of album we were making, at least not initially. It was just about getting together and finding some common ground. The fact that she had stuff she wanted to work on was really intriguing, and as soon as we got in the studio – maybe a week in – we looked at each other and were like, Holy shit, this feels like… something… I don’t want to say a ‘duets album’, but it felt like something substantial. It had never occurred to us to pursue anything like that.” As he speaks, Buckingham glances out the window, which offers a perverse panorama of L.A swallowed up by low clouds. “It’s been raining for a while,” he says, “but we need it.” That might be an understatement. The city with which he and Fleetwood Mac have long been associated is under siege: it’s been pouring for hours, with a strong wind coming in off the ocean. Meteorologists call it a bombogenesis, or a weather bomb. Streets are flooding all over town. Traffic lights are going out. Fallen trees are blocking roads. There are reports of sinkholes opening up and swallowing cars whole. The scene is apocalyptic – if California is ever going to sink into the Pacific, today might be the day.

“I’ve grown up since I last worked with her”
Lindsey Buckingham

Buckingham, by contrast, looks the model of a gracefully ageing Golden State rock star, tanned and animated, his grey-green eyes still lively and his salt-and-pepper hair still standing on end. He’s sporting a black leather jacket over a plunging black V-neck and blue jeans: something of a uniform for the singer-songwriter-guitarist, producer. His hands fidget at the table, as though he’d much rather be playing guitar than talking to a journalist. Who wouldn’t?

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Continue reading Fleetwood Mac: The Saga Continues. Meet… Buckingham McVie | Uncut Magazine →

Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, UK Articles

Memories of Meantime | Uncut Magazine

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Christine McVie on her ‘lost’ third album

In September 2004, six years after retiring from Fleetwood Mac, Christine McVie released her third solo album, In The Meantime. It was a casual affair, Helped by her nephew Dan perfect and featuring contributions from former Fleetwood Mac member Billy Burnetts, ex-husband Eddy Quintela and singer-songwriter Robbie Pattern (with whom she wrote “Hold Me” in the early 1980s.

Recorded entilely in her garage in rural Kent, In The Meantime feature some of the strongest songs in decades, including the sweet opener “Friend” the globe-trotting travelogue “Bad Journey” and the devastating “So Sincere” (“Didn’t you like my love song darling? I was so sincere”). “It’s a great little record.” she says. “My nephew happens to be pretty handy with ProTools, and he plays a pretty good guitar. He did quite a bit of writing on it as well. He and I get on really well, I think because we share the same self-deprecating humour. It was a successful project inasmuch as it brought us closer together.

It was not a particular successful however, in other regards, and McVie blames herself and her fear of flying for the record’s failure to fine an audience. “I couldn’t even contemplate going on the road with it. I did fly to New York once, bit I had to get drunk to do it. So then album died a graceful death.

In retrospect, In The Meantime holds up surprisingly well, especially when compared to Fleetwood Mac’s more bombastic Say You Will, released the year before. It was the band’s first record in 36 years without McVie, and her love songs are greatly missed. “Even with John and Mick playing, it was a glorified Buckingham-Nicls album,” she says, referring to the duo’s pre-Mac release. “I think that element of me might have been missing, those love songs that are both intimate and commercial. So to be back in the band again is just magical.

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Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey Buckingham, Release Info, Solo Activity, UK Articles

Fleetwood Mac members announce new album – without Stevie Nicks | Sky News

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Entitled simply Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie, the 10-track album will come out on 9 June and will be followed by a US tour.

Members of the rock band Fleetwood Mac stand together on stage after performing a concert on NBC’s ‘Today’ show in New York City, October 9, 2014. REUTERS/Mike Segar

By Duarte Garrido, Entertainment Reporter

Members of rock group Fleetwood Mac have announced a new album that will bring together all of the classic lineup – minus Stevie Nicks.

Entitled simply Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie, the 10-track album will be the first for the band’s guitarist and keyboardist as a duo.

Christine McVie, who stayed out of the spotlight for years, rejoined Fleetwood Mac for a 2014-15 global tour alongside Buckingham.

The pair said in a statement that the two started working on new material when McVie joined rehearsals for the tour and “their natural creative chemistry was reignited”.

Drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie, two of the founding members of the group, joined their bandmates in the studio in Los Angeles – but not Nicks. Continue reading Fleetwood Mac members announce new album – without Stevie Nicks | Sky News →

Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham, Release Info, Solo Activity, UK Articles

Meet The Neighbours: Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac

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Henry & James
Property News, Belgravia & Chelsea
24th March 2017

Christine McVie and Lindsey Buckingham are releasing a duet album this summer. In a rare interview, Christine, the legendary Fleetwood Mac singer songwriter and keyboardist talks to us about her love of London, her inspirations and early years in the music business.

Q: How did you get started?
A: I was originally taught to play the piano at an early age. And became quite good at it, reaching Grade 7, my parents very generously supported me. One day I found some Fats Domino scores in a music stool and started to write a couple of songs, then I went to art college. Eventually, I left college and joined Chicken Shack, playing in blues clubs up and down the M1.

Q: What attracted you to the music business?
A: I really enjoyed blues music. It just felt right for me. I often find myself in that situation – things feel right. I naturally morphed into music.

Q: If you were stranded on a desert island, what three things would you take with you?
A: Umm, can I have electricity? [Yes]. Then I would take a hair dryer. I would eat fresh fruit and there would be plenty of fish in the ocean to eat. I would also like to take some French bread with me. And music? I would take an anthology of the Beatles – a good collection of their songs. And classical music? Possibly some Elgar. Plus some Jazz: oh yes, Miles Davis.

Q: Who or what inspires you in life?
A: It would have to be Fleetwood – it is a living, breathing eternity in my life. Fleetwood Mac will be playing in America with (15 concerts around June) and are coming to London in 2019.

Q: If you could sing with anyone in the world, who would it be?
A: It would have to be Paul McCartney because we would sing well together.

Q: What were your favourite Fleetwood Mac songs over the years?
A: I still play a lot of great songs: Dreams, Go Your Own Way and Songbird.

Q: How many albums did you sell?
A: Over the years, we sold millions and millions of records.

Q: What do you like about London?
A: I lived in the country for a while, in Kent, but now live in London. I have gone back to my roots. London is electrifying. We used to play and gravitate to the Berkeley Hotel in Knightsbridge, south west London.

Q: Do you have a new album coming out? Can you tell us a little about it?
A: Yes, I have duet album being released with Lindsey Buckingham. It will be released on June 9. You can buy it on iTunes and vinyl – it will be available everywhere! And that’s another good song… Continue reading Meet The Neighbours: Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac →

Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey Buckingham, Release Info, Solo Activity, UK Articles

Christine McVie: “Fleetwood Mac’s 2018 tour is supposed to be a farewell tour” | Uncut Magazine

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Tom Pinnock
March 16, 2017

McVie and Lindsey Buckingham reveal all about their collaboration in our exclusive interview

The pair’s debut as Buckingham McVie – also featuring Mick Fleetwood and John McVie – is set for release this summer.

“I’ve grown up a lot since the last time I really worked with [Christine],” explains Buckingham. “I realised: ‘Oh, here I am, a completely different person. I’m a father of three children. I’ve been married almost 20 years. I’ve had my journey, and Christine has had her own journey.’”

However, the singer, keyboardist and songwriter also reveals that the future of Fleetwood Mac is far from certain.

“The 2018 tour is supposed to be a farewell tour,” says McVie. “But you take farewell tours one at a time. Somehow we always come together, this unit. We can feel it ourselves.”

Buckingham and McVie are on the cover of the new Uncut, dated May 2017 and on sale March 16.

Click here to buy the issue digitally

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

Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’: 10 Things You Didn’t Know | Rolling Stone

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By Jordan Runtagh
Rolling Stone Online
February 3, 2017

Why “Silver Springs” was left off the LP, how the band’s Rolling Stone cover shoot fueled Steve Nicks and Mick Fleetwood’s affair, and more

“Drama. Dra-ma,” was how Christine McVie described the recording of Rumours to Rolling Stone shortly after its release on February 4th, 1977. And that wasn’t even the half of it. Sessions for Fleetwood Mac‘s masterwork have all the elements of a meticulously scripted theatrical romance – elaborate entanglements, enormous amounts of money and mountains of cocaine.

The Rumours saga is one of rock’s most famous soap operas, but here’s a refresher course on the dramatis personae: Stevie Nicks had just split with her longtime lover and musical partner, Lindsey Buckingham, while Christine was in the midst of divorcing her husband, bassist John McVie. Meanwhile, Mick Fleetwood’s extra-band marriage was on the rocks, leading to an affair with Nicks before the year was out. This inner turmoil surfaced in brutally honest lyrics, transforming the album into a tantalizing he-said-she-said romantic confessional. The musicians’ personal lives permanently fused within the grooves, and all who listened to Rumours become a voyeur to the painful, glamorous mess.

Drama aside, Rumours is among the finest work the band ever produced. “We refused to let our feelings derail our commitment to the music, no matter how complicated or intertwined they became,” Fleetwood later wrote in his 2014 memoir. “It was hard to do, but no matter what, we played through the hurt.” Continue reading Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’: 10 Things You Didn’t Know | Rolling Stone →

Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey Buckingham, Release Info, Solo Activity, UK Articles

Don’t believe the rumours: Christine McVie and Lindsey Buckingham’s duets album is bad news for Fleetwood Mac fans | The Telegraph

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The Telegraph
Neil McCormick
Jan 17th, 2017

Fleetwood Mac are celebrated as one of the great dysfunctional soap operas of rock and roll, a dynastic saga set to music. They are almost as famous for the bed-hopping, powder sniffing, emotional traumas they have inflicted upon one another over the years as for their era-defining monster hits.

So news that two of its most cherished members are making an album together is a cause for intrigue, a sense that there may still be a twist or two ahead in the long running and increasingly convoluted narrative.

It was revealed this week that guitarist, singer and songwriter Lindsey Buckingham has been working on an album of duets with keyboard player, singer and songwriter Christine McVie. It is tentatively scheduled to be released in May, under the name Buckingham McVie. That in itself represents an inescapable reference to Buckingham Nicks, the pre-Fleetwood duo made up of Lindsey and former lover Stevie Nicks.

To add spice to the rumour mill, the rhythm section of drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist (and Christine’s ex-husband) John McVie appear on the album. So the only one of the famous five missing is the elusive Nicks.

There have been 16 members over Fleetwood Mac’s 50 year career, in a constant shuffling of roles that would leave the scriptwriters for Dallas breathless. Most of the bit part players have been forgotten by now but the five leads who united in the mid-70s to create some of the most glorious pop rock ever heard continue to exert fascination.

Legendary albums such as Rumours and Tusk were created in a whirl of narcotic excess, sexual shenanigans and romantic betrayal that lent an undoubted frisson and emotional subtext to songs of love, longing, loss and reconciliation, in which tough emotions were glossed with glorious melodies and sparkling harmonies.

When the classic line up reunited with Christine McVie in 2015, it was intriguing to note that there were three former couples sharing a stage, taking into account that Mick Fleetwood romanced Nicks behind Buckingham’s back during the making of Tusk. Fleetwood has often described the band’s complicated dynamic as a form of ongoing “group therapy”. Continue reading Don’t believe the rumours: Christine McVie and Lindsey Buckingham’s duets album is bad news for Fleetwood Mac fans | The Telegraph →