July 12, 1943 – November 30, 2022

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.

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