Christine McVie Wrote With Hooks and Reeled Us In
It would be easy, and not inaccurate, to envision Fleetwood Mac as a hurricane, careening across the popular music landscape for half a century with real-life drama that matched anything in their most popular songs, which not incidentally were some of the most popular in the world.
And in the middle of this vision, through all the crosswinds and crazy turns, would be a piano and the voice of Christine McVie: “And the songbirds are singing / Like they know the score.”
McVie died Wednesday at the age of 79, after a long unspecified illness. More than dozens of other departures from Fleetwood Mac over the years, her death closes a chapter.
A band named after its two male founders, drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie, was often anchored just as firmly by the woman who from 1969 to 1976 was married to John McVie. Since she played keyboards, wrote and sang, it is fair to say she was not the tagalong wife.
Christine McVie first started playing with the band in 1968, when she was Christine Perfect — her real name — and Fleetwood Mac was still known as a blues band led by Peter Green, whose guitar talent was as powerful as his demons.
She explained in a 1984 interview how the blues were, pardon the phrase, a perfect fit for her. “It was the starting point,” she said. “For people like me, Steve Winwood and Clapton.”
Like Fleetwood Mac, McVie didn’t stay at the starting point. Neither, she said, did she abandon it.
“I still love to play the blues,” she said in 1984. “It was great learning base. I still use my left hand in a bluesy way. But by itself, it’s not enough for me any more. To still be playing just 12-bar blues after 20 years would be frustrating.”
Fans of the band Fleetwood Mac became in the 1970s wouldn’t call McVie a blueswoman, not after she’d written and sang modern pop standards like “Don’t Stop,” “Say You Love Me,” “Songbird,” “Everywhere” and “You Make Loving Fun.”
She didn’t call herself a blueswoman, either. Like many musicians, she preferred to call herself a musician. .
“Our music is mostly called ‘adult contemporary’,” she said. “I don’t know that I care. I suppose I might call it melodic rock ’n’ roll. I write with hooks., which makes it easy to listen to.”
Also easy to say and not so easy to do. McVie did it. Ask radio programmers. Ask former President Bill Clinton, who used “Don’t Stop” as his 1992 campaign song and persuaded Fleetwood Mac to play it at his inauguration. Ask the ad agency for Chevrolet, which in 2022 is flooding the airwaves with a spot featuring “Everywhere.” Or ask the Recording Industry Association of America, which certifies that the 1977 Fleetwood Mac Rumours album co-anchored by several McVie songs has sold more than 40 million copies.
By all popular music norms, Fleetwood Mac should have been dead and buried in the early 1970s, when Green had left and the band was searching for a new sound on records that few people were buying.
The band survived, McVie suggested in 1987, because even as its music morphed from Green’s blues into the smoother pop sound brought in by the mid-1970s team of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, it kept Fleetwood Mac DNA.
“There’s always been an umbilical cord running through this band,” she said. “I don’t know exactly what it is, this thread, but as long as we have it, there will be a Fleetwood Mac sound.
“It’s somewhere in the region of the rhythm section, I suspect,” she said, laughing as she gave a nod to the least recognizable and most enduring members of the group, Fleetwood and John McVie.
Noting that she, Nicks and Buckingham all wrote multiple songs for Rumours and other 1970s albums like Tusk, she said their different styles and voices came out feeling of a piece.
“It would all fall together,” she said. “Maybe because you had all three voices singing.”
Nor, she said, did anyone get proprietary.
“We argued about a lot of things,” she said. “We were five strong-willed people. But we never argued about which songs would go on an album. It was understood that with three writers, we would each get a third of an album. There would never be, say, a 6–3–1 breakdown.”
That said, McVie didn’t think the albums themselves all came out equal.
“I quite liked our White Album,” she said, referring to the 1975 release simply titled Fleetwood Mac. “But it kind of got overshadowed by Rumours. Tusk to me was a very strange record, an elusive one. I can’t quite come to terms with it now. It feels really underproduced and incomplete. But it’s one of Lindsey’s and John’s favorites.”
McVie also expressed reservations about where the music business was heading in the early 1980s, when genres like techno-pop increasingly employed synthesizers and other electronic instrumentation.
“I’m bewildered,” she said. “I’m tired of synthesizers. They’re so bloody predictable. If you’re gonna put a flute on the record, play the flute. I’d like to hear it. Some synthesizers are good, but there’s a lot of overuse, and some are just awful.”
And then there were videos, thanks to the emergence of MTV as a hot promotional platform.
McVie had just released her first video, for the single “Got a Hold On Me” from her second solo album. That didn’t mean she was on the video train.
“It’s a performance video,” she said. “I’m old school. I’ve always thought music should be heard and not seen. I’ve never written with videos or visuals in mind. I’ve never thought what a song might look like.
“Someone did a home video for ‘Songbird.’ I’m not in it, but it completely ruined the song for me. If have images of the song, they’re private. When I hear ‘Billie Jean,’ all I see is Michael Jackson on the flagstones.”
Not that she thought videos were going to disappear.
“A band like Duran Duran writes songs with videos in mind. And sometimes videos are so good that they can make a mediocre song a hit. And at the same time a good song can suffer because it doesn’t have a good video and won’t get MTV play.”
Fleetwood Mac survived the video era. So did McVie, who played with the band and band members on and off until the late 2010s. She remained successful and underappreciated.
As much as anyone, including the rhythm section, she steered an unscripted band to monster hit records, in the process bequeathing the pop music world a wealth of melodic rock ’n’ roll.
