The Chain is Finally Broken… R.I.P. Christine McVie

Christine McVie has died. Aged 79. You’ll likely have read many tributes already, maybe you spent a part of yesterday revisiting your favourite songs by Christine, or at least your favourite Fleetwood Mac album…because whichever album that is there’s a chance Christine McVie contributed at least one of the shining gems.

She was a singer and keyboardist, and she was one of the songwriters in a group stacked with gifted pop composers.

But she had the longest run at the front of the group through the most line-up changes. She was there at the end of the 1960s when the group was still proudly all about the blues. And she was there through all of the tumult of a nearly different line-up for every album across the first half of the 1970s, and then for the second half of that decade when they became one of the biggest bands in the world.

I know that I’ve told readers of this newsletter often enough that I love Fleetwood Mac. Really, really love Fleetwood Mac. One of my all-time favourite groups. And I mean every version of the band: Peter Green’s original tribute to Chicago blues, the wild psychedelic and spiritual blues shaman act that grew from that, the American-influenced soft-rock under the helm of Bob Welch, and then the mega-stardom of the Buckingham-Nicks era. Heck, I even love the albums most fans hate (and the ones many never bothered to even listen to). I am always there for Fleetwood Mac

I know that I’ve already told you how much I love reading about Fleetwood Mac, and about Revisiting Rumours (which I do regularly) and I also wrote here about how much I love Lindsey Buckingham. Well, I could write a piece like that about every member of the band. And now, sadly – given the circumstances – it’s Christine’s turn. Time to shine the light.

Over on my Off The Tracks site, I’ve written dozens of entries about Fleetwood Mac, the two times I saw them live, the fact that Tusk is my all-time and forever-favourite Mac album; there was even a time I got to speak for 45 minutes non-stop about them on the national radio carrier. But the piece that has resonated the most – I still get emails from fans around the world thanking me for this one – was the time I decided to write about the very sad story of Bob Welch.  I considered him the under-sung and least valued member of the band.

Christine McVie was part of the legendary line-up. And she was there before and after Lindsey and Stevie. So, it might sound crazy to say this, but I think she was also sometimes undervalued in the context of the group’s success.

It's important to remember her as one of very few females to make an impact in that late-60s British Blues Boom. She was a member of the group Chicken Shack, and though they were often rough and rowdy and very ‘blistering bar-room’ in their blues, when Christine (then Christine Perfect) got up to sing Etta James’ I’d Rather Go Blind, or one of her own compositions, she changed the tone of the group for the better.

She fell in love with Fleetwood Mac’s bassist, John McVie, when Chicken Shack and Fleetwood Mac started sharing the bill. John and Christine decided to share their lives. They married and she was happy to quit music. She painted the cover for a Fleetwood Mac album (because the British Blues Boom is forever linked to the art school scene) and drifted into the line-up as a cameo backing vocalist and occasional keyboardist. It wasn’t until 1971 that she was officially credited as being a full member on a record, but she joined a year and a half before that, just days before Fleetwood Mac appeared on stage in America as part of their first attempt to rebuild.

Christine was there for most of the rebuilding ever after.

She helped usher in Bobs Welch and Weston, singer Dave Walker, and then of course Lindsey and Stevie. She was the big sister Stevie Nicks needed on the road. And she was songwriting support for Welch and Buckingham, and others. All the while she was doing the quiet heavy lifting by helping to arrange the songs, by adding her delicate but sure piano lines, by being a skilled backing vocalist, and by churning out quality songs. Snappy little rockers and beautiful, lilting ballads.

It all started to crystalise with 1975’s eponymous Fleetwood Mac. Stevie Nicks wowed the world with Rhiannon, but Christine McVie set the tone for that rebuild with Warm Ways and Over My Head and Sugar Daddy and collaborated with Buckingham for the sublime concert-favourite, World Turning.

We know – and love – the giant hits that Christine contributed. Don’t Stop. Say You Love Me. You Make Loving Fun. Everywhere. Little Lies. Hold Me. As Long As You Follow. And of course, Songbird.

But there were also the deeper album cuts that really resonated. Several of Tusk’s deepest moments for me come from Christine. Album opener, Over & Over is one of my favourite and most played songs. Then there’s Brown Eyes and Never Make Me Cry. Just beautiful. And yes, sure, it’s so much a Lindsey Buckingham album – but it’s bookended by Christine songs. So, when I finally get to Never Forget, 19 songs after hearing Over & Over, I always think of how Christine subtly had the first and last say on the album. In that sense, she owns it.

There are gorgeous songs though on the albums you don’t really know – or have forgotten all about.

A couple on Future Games and Bare Trees. Three or four on Penguin, Mystery to Me and Heroes Are Hard To Find. Several on Mirage. And several more on the album that’s always mocked, or maybe isn’t even thought of, the one I said I proudly loved, Behind The Mask. I mean, just listen to Save Me and tell me that’s not a classic Christine gem.

So many of the very best Christine McVie songs have such simple lyrics, deceptively simple. Because she was always singing her heart. Hearts are simple. But only ever deceptively so.

The Songbird won’t keep singing now. But we’ll always remember her calling out, “I love you, I love you, I love you, like never before”. On its own – in print there – an unremarkable lyric. But always a lump in the throat moment when you hear it. Part of the Fleetwood Mac mad-magic is knowing that it arrived as if a dream, in the middle of a mostly restless night, after a big bump of cocaine of course. Well, it wouldn’t be the Mac in the 70s if it hadn’t.

Oh Daddy.

It filled my heart with joy to hear 2017’s Buckingham McVie album; it’s basically a secret Fleetwood Mac album (John and Mick on drums and bass, just Stevie absent from view). And Feel About You in particular was the moment for me. So joyous. Almost effortless. And yes, a little bit naff. That’s okay too. There was always that. With Christine’s solo stuff. And with so much of what my favourite band has delivered. That’s a bit part of why I love them.

Because they sold out stadiums, people that only ever seemed to know Don’t Stop and Go Your Own Way from far too much radio play dubbed them sell-outs. But even as they were elevated to rock gods, Fleetwood Mac was a band of fallible humans. Christine seeming the most natural and real of them. The least caught up in the madness. Or the first to properly escape it.

When it all got too much for her – a fear of flying and crippling agoraphobia – she stayed home. For years. And the first time I got to see my heroes play was without her, but I went anyway because John and Mick and Lindsey and Stevie were there. And it was still incredible of course.

But what a treat to see them again, this time with Christine. A shame to never see her and Lindsey on stage together, given they collaborated so well as co-writers. But I got to see two of the versions of Fleetwood Mac in concert in one lifetime. That’s more than good enough!

Now Christine is gone. And in the ever-winding soap-opera of this band it might just mean that Lindsey joins again, and they tour in tribute to Christine McVie. Who knows. But at 79 she lived a life, probably 146 is a more accurate age if you’re calculating 79 Rock Star Years back into Mere Mortal.

I became a Christine McVie fan when I was about 10 or 11. I watched this incredible documentary for the first time. I mention it nearly every time I talk about Fleetwood Mac. It’s easily the movie I’ve seen the most in my life. I became a fan of all of them – that’s when I got all their names down-pat, that’s when I started buying the solo records  and side-projects, finding them popping up on albums by others and diving right down into the deepest of their cuts; the records that other fans hated, the ones the critics ignored.

So, I’m sad, absolutely. One of the legends from within this legendary band is no longer with us. But the songbirds will keep singing. They know the score.

I compiled as many of the great Christine McVie songs – solo and with the band – into this playlist for you/for us.

R.I.P. Christine McVie.

And I’m going to share with you – once again – my all-time favourite music documentary: Fleetwood Mac at 21:

Now, because it’s Friday, I’ve also made another playlist. Our regular A Little Something For The Weekend…Sounds Good. This here is Vol. 93. A very different vibe from Fleetwood Mac. So it might come in handy.

Happy weekend all and thanks for reading. Would love to know any Christine McVie stories, memories or favourite songs written by her that you might have…