An extract from the biography of the Fleetwood Mac legend reveals how drugs, booze and illicit sex took a toll on the band’s relationships
A fascinating dynamic: John and Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac | Credit: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
By Lesley-Ann Jones 12 Nov 2024 – 07:15PM GMT
One of the great misconceptions about Fleetwood Mac is how Rumours came about. The band’s 11th album was designed, you often hear, to chronicle the breakdowns between three couples: Mick Fleetwood and his wife Jenny Boyd, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, and John and Christine McVie. As such, it’s often referred to as a “journey album”, even a “concept album”. There was no pre-planned structure. Drugs, booze, illicit sex and affairs simply took their toll, and as their relationships fell apart, Christine, Stevie and Lindsey all separately brought to the table cathartic pieces that laid bare their own pain, anger, despair – and a little hope.
As they began recording Rumours at the Record Plant Studios in Sausalito, California in February 1976, the band’s producer Ken Caillat soon got the measure of those five distinct personalities. Mick, for instance, was the leader, and a control freak: he would go all night if he could, and sod the home life. Stevie was “the new girl”, she and boyfriend Lindsey having joined the band only in January 1975, who was infuriatingly precious about “her words”. Woe betide anyone who suggested an alteration.
Dan Perfect, nephew of Christine McVie and co-producer of her final solo album, ‘In The Meantime’, tells Dig! how the record came together.
“This was therapy,” Christine McVie said, in 2022, of recording her 2004 album, In The Meantime. “I was coming out of a relationship and just got it all off my chest.” McVie’s third and final solo album was underheard and underappreciated on release. Now, with In The Meantime freshly reissued both on vinyl and in a gorgeous new Dolby Atmos mix, the time is ripe for its reappraisal – as Dan Perfect, McVie’s nephew and the album’s co-producer/co-writer, tells Dig! in this exclusive interview.
A mainstay of Fleetwood Mac throughout many of the band’s ever-changing line-ups, Christine McVie had not been a prolific solo artist. She had released one self-titled album in 1970 (Christine Perfect, issued under her maiden name) and another in 1984 (Christine McVie). Her incredible career in Fleetwood Mac, alongside the demands of touring with the band, had left her without much time and energy for writing and recording music under her own name.
McVie left the group in 1998. “I was tired of living out of a suitcase, tired of travel, plus I had a fear of flying,” she said in 2017. “I’d been doing it longer than Stevie [Nicks] and Lindsey [Buckingham], and I’d just had enough. Plus, my father was really sick and I wanted to come back to England and rediscover my roots, and I was quite adamant that this was what I wanted to do.”
Dan Perfect remembers how his aunt begin considering a return to recording. “Chris, in the late 90s, she pretty much thought she’d retired,” he tells Dig! “She came back to England, bought a country house, and got the dogs. The reality of it was that she was bored out of her brains. And it took her quite a bit of time for her to really realise that.” Continue reading ‘In The Meantime’: Christine McVie was “as revealing as ever”, says Dan Perfect | Dig→
The loss of longtime Fleetwood Mac keyboardist Christine McVie last year remains deeply felt by fans of the long-running group’s unbeatable pop/rock songs. Today, on what would have been her 80th birthday, Rhino Records is releasing unheard music by (and in tribute to) her, with plans to reissue two of her solo albums this fall.
On November 3, Rhino will reissue a remastered version of 1984’s Christine McVie on CD and vinyl, with a cola-bottle clear color variant of the latter available exclusively at Barnes & Noble. That same day, they will also release her belated 2004 album In the Meantime, not only remastered but newly remixed by her nephew, Todd Perfect, with “Little Darlin'” – an unreleased outtake from the sessions – available as a bonus track. It’ll be pressed on CD and double vinyl with a songbird etching on the fourth side, but it’s available digitally today. Continue reading Got a Hold on Me: Christine McVie’s Solo Works Returning to Print | The Second Disc→
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.
On her way: Christine McVie, AKA Chicken Shack singer Christine Perfect, April 16, 1969.
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.
Classic Rock Magazine, Feb 2023 Words: Bill DeMain
A ground-breaking artist and the calm eye of the decades-spanning storm that was Fleetwood Mac, she brought elegance and soul to the band’s sound through her voice, keyboard playing and some of rock’s most enduring hits.
And the songbirds are singing, like they know the score
Mick Fleetwood once called her “the steadying presence” of Fleetwood Mac. And in the days following her death at age 79, tributes to Christine McVie often reached for similar phrases – the hidden strength, the cornerstone, the heart and soul – to describe the role she played for more than 50 years in rock’s most tempestuous soap opera.
“I don’t like being centre stage, I never have,” she told Uncut in 2022. “I like to be part of a group.” Watching her in concert, whether during the band’s heady late-70s era or what would be their final tour, in 2019, she was all business, more serious musician than rock star. Blue grey eyes peering out from behind blonde fringe, swaying and singing confidently at her keyboards, aligning herself with the rhythm section of Fleetwood and ex-husband John McVie, while Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham basked in the spotlight. But that cool reserve couldn’t alter the fact that Christine was the group’s most dependable and successful songwriter. When you look at their world-conquering statistics – eight multi-platinum albums, more than 130 million copies sold (the perennial Rumours alone responsible for 40 million) – at the centre are her evergreen hits like Over My Head, You Make Loving Fun, Don’t Stop, Little Lies and Everywhere. “I suppose I must be good with hooks,” she once reasoned modestly.
For all her success, it was always art and music that drove McVie. Born Christine Perfect in Bouth, a Lake District village, in 1943, she was the younger of two children. Her father was a violinist and college music professor, her mother a psychic healer. She began classical piano lessons at 11. A few years later she discovered her elder brother’s Fats Domino songbook inside the piano seat. “It was goodbye Chopin,” she said. She got hooked on the New Orleans-style boogie-woogie blues, and at 16 wrote her first song. That rolling-river left-hand feel would stay with her, lending a funky current to many of her best songs in the years ahead. “It always comes back to the blues,” she would often say of her writing style.
On a scholarship, she studied sculpture, needlecraft and dress design in art college. “Perfect for a future career in Fleetwood Mac,” she joked. But her heart wasn’t in it.
Reserved, intelligent singer and songwriter for Fleetwood Mac whose album Rumours was one of the biggest-selling of all time
Christine McVie in 1979: she wrote many of the band’s most famous songs RANDY BACHMAN/GETTY IMAGES
Under normal circumstances, when Christine and John McVie divorced, they would have gone their separate ways. There were no children to consider and nothing to keep them together — except that they were trapped in the same band, forced to see each other each day and share a stage together every night as they toured the world with Fleetwood Mac.
To rub salt into the wounds, after separating from her husband, Christine had started an affair with the group’s lighting director while at the same time two other members of the band, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, were also breaking up and Nicks began an affair with the fifth member of the group, drummer Mick Fleetwood.
If one had been writing a rock’n’roll soap opera, the emotional maelstrom of this torrid plot would surely have been rejected as too preposterous. Yet for the participants it was all too real and they dealt with the fallout in the only way they knew how. They wrote songs to each other about their collective trauma.
The songs became the 1977 album Rumours, which went on to sell more than 40 million copies worldwide and became one of the biggest-selling albums of all time.
Christine’s compositions for the album included You Make Loving Fun, addressed to her new lover, and Don’t Stop, a message to her husband, which was later famously adopted by President Bill Clinton as his campaign theme tune. On both of them, the jilted ex-husband played bass without missing a beat. Continue reading Christine McVie obituary | The Times (UK)→
Christine McVie, who played with Fleetwood Mac and wrote some of their most famous songs, has died aged 79, her family has said.
GETTY IMAGES
The British singer-songwriter was behind hits including Little Lies, Everywhere, Don’t Stop, Say You Love Me, and Songbird.
She died peacefully at a hospital in the company of her family, a statement said.
McVie left Fleetwood Mac after 28 years in 1998 but returned in 2014.
The family’s statement said “we would like everyone to keep Christine in their hearts and remember the life of an incredible human being, and revered musician who was loved universally”.
Born Christine Perfect, McVie married Fleetwood Mac bassist John McVie and joined the group in 1971.
Fleetwood Mac was one of the world’s best known rock bands in the 1970s and ’80s.
Their 1977 album Rumours – inspired by the break-ups of the McVies and the band’s other couple, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks – became one of the biggest selling of all time, with more than 40 million copies sold worldwide.
While it’s not known whether Fleetwood Mac will be recording or touring again, the band’s two female members have plans of their own in 2022.
While Stevie Nicks isn’t touring, per se, she has been adding live performance dates to her calendar one by one. As of April 19, the songstress has ten concerts planned this year, many of which are taking place at festivals. They span from May 7, where she’ll be the headliner on the final Saturday of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, through Sept. 30. Though McVie hasn’t announced any concerts, she is releasing a new solo collection, Songbird. The album is produced by Glyn Johns and emphasizes songs from her solo career. It arrives June 24 via Rhino. It first became available for pre-order on Apr. 19.
Fleetwood Mac last toured in 2019, with Mike Campbell and Neil Finn joining Nicks, McVie, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie. News of Nicks‘ 2022 appearances began trickling out in January, when the Bonnaroo festival announced its lineup.
Stevie Nicks 2022 Dates (Tickets are available here and here)
May 07 – New Orleans, LA – Jazz Fest
May 11 – Morrison, CO – Red Rocks Amphitheatre
May 14 – George, WA – The Gorge Amphitheatre
Jun 19 – Manchester, TN – Bonnaroo
Sep 04 – Snowmass, CO – Jazz Aspen Snowmass
Sep 08 – Highland Park, IL – Ravinia
Sep 10 – Highland Park, IL – Ravinia
Sep 17 – Asbury Park, NJ – Sea Hear Now Festival
Sep 24 – Bridgeport, CT – Sound on Sound Festival
Sep 30 – Dana Point, CA – Ohana Festival
McVie‘s last studio effort was 2017’s collaboration with Lindsey Buckingham. The title track of the 2022 release originally appeared on Mac’s 1977 Rumours album. Other songs are culled from various aspects of her career, including her solo work. McVie says the songs, with a string orchestra, “sound completely different.”
The album includes a selection of songs from two of her solo albums – 1984’s Christine McVie and 2004’s In the Meantime – plus two previously unreleased studio recordings.
The first release, “Slow Down,” was originally written for the 1985 film American Flyers. Of the song, McVie says, “I was asked to write a song for a film about a cycling competition. So, I thought we’d give it a go. So that’s why the lyrics are sort of muddled up with a little bit of a love song, a little bit of cycling. And it turned out really well, but they didn’t end up using it. We thought it was a pity to waste it, so it’s on here.”
Christine McVie will release a new solo album this summer.
The singer-songwriter helped take Fleetwood Mac to the top of the charts with classic hits such as Say You Love Me, You Make Loving Fun, Everywhere and Little Lies.
Now, she’s set to revisit some of her best-loved compositions for a compilation album of reimagined recordings.
She told Gary Barlow’s ‘We Write The Songs’ podcast: “I’ve just finished an album, which is a compilation of my biggest hits, but they’ve all been produced again by Glyn Johns, Vince Mendoza on strings – who does this fantastic version on Songbird.
“So that’s gonna be released – but they all sound completely different.”
Elaborating on the new recording of the group’s classic piano ballad, she said: “We’ve just now actually re-cut it with a complete string orchestra and it sounds beautiful.”
Christine released her self-titled first solo album ‘Christine Perfect’ in 1970 and, 14 years later, returned with ‘Christine McVie’, featuring the UK Top 40 hits Got a Hold on Me and Love Will Show Us How.
Two decades later, she released its follow-up ‘In The Meantime’, and in 2017 collaborated with Lindsey Buckingham on their eponymous duets album.
While there’s new music in the pipeline, Christine is less certain about the future when it comes to returning to the road.
Asked whether there are plans for live shows, she confessed: “That, I daren’t comment on yet. I’m very cagey about things like that.”
While firm release details have yet to be confirmed, the album is due in June.
Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie has sold her 115-title song catalog to Hipgnosis, making her the fourth of the band’s five members to sell their publishing rights within the past nine months.
CHRISTINE MCVIE (PHOTO: THOMAS COOPER)
In January, Lindsey Buckingham also sold 100 percent of his publishing rights to Hipgnosis, which has spent more than $2 billion in the past three years to acquire the rights to a collection of popular songs from artists, including recent deals with Shakira, Barry Manilow, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Neil Young.
Earlier this year Mick Fleetwood also made a similar deal with BMG, while Stevie Nicks sold off rights to her work to Primary Wave, which recently acquired a large portion of Prince’s rights, in December of 2020.
Hipgnosis has acquired worldwide copyright, ownership, and financial interest, including the writer’s share of McVie’s compositions and neighboring rights, according to the official announcement.
“Christine McVie is one of the greatest songwriters of all time, having guided Fleetwood Mac to almost 150 million albums sold and making them one of the best-selling bands of all time globally,” said Merck Mercuriadis, founder Hipgnosis, in a statement. “In the last 46 years, the band has had three distinct writers and vocalists but Christine’s importance is amply demonstrated by the fact that eight of the 16 songs on the band’s greatest albums are from Christine.” Continue reading Christine McVie Sells 115-Song Catalog, Including Fleetwood Mac Songs, Solo Material | American Songwriter→
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