By Derek
Anglotopia (UK)
Monday, April 22, 2013
Christine McVie may be the most underrated of the five members of Fleetwood Mac’s “classic” lineup. She’s been with the band since the days with Peter Green, wrote songs like “Don’t Stop,” “You Make Loving Fun”, and “Say You Love Me,” and you probably didn’t know that she hasn’t been in the band proper since 1998. Since then, she has repeatedly refused to perform live with the band (despite performing on two songs on their last album, Say You Will). And Mick Fleetwood has given up on asking her to rejoin, but apparently, Christine has softened her stance.
In September, the band will perform three gigs at London’s O2 Arena, and Christine has said that she would be willing to do a duet at one of those concerts. Quoth Christine McVie: “If they wanted me to, I might pop back on stage when they’re in London just to do a little duet or something like that.”
Also, quoth Mick Fleetwood: “A lot of bands, including us, never know when the audience is going to finally disappear,” he said. “But we have a whole influx of new fans, young people who’ve been brought up on us by their parents or picked us up on the internet. There’ll be people on this tour in their seventies and others seeing us for the first time, and that’s really cool.”
And because I have two other Fleetwood Mac articles in my queue, one dating back all the way from February, and this article is short, I may as well cover those two here.
Earlier in the year, Mick Fleetwood spoke about the interpersonal dynamics of the group: “The biggest misconception to me is that these people really don’t like each other. That’s the worst rumour about Rumours. There’s bands out there, usually a bunch of guys, who don’t give a — about each other. They just come to an arrangement. We can’t do that. We’re all ex-lovers, so we don’t have that corporate, guy thing where it’s just ‘get the job done’. I think it bodes in our favour that, in a funny, shaky way, there is some integrity. We do actually love each other, for real. Unfortunately. ‘Cause it’s tough.”
And on the subject of ex-lovers in the group, Lindsey Buckingham had this to say about his relationship with Stevie Nicks: throughout their songs, there’s a “Subtext of love” between the two of them. Though they broke up while making Rumours, they still maintain a professional relationship.
Quoth Buckingham: “There’s a subtext of love between us, and it would be hard to deny that much of what we’ve accomplished had something to do with trying to prove something to each other. Maybe that’s fucked up but this is someone I’ve known since I was 16, and I think on some weird level we’re still trying to work some things out. There will never be romance there, but there are other kinds of love to be had.”
When asked how he can work with an ex-girlfriend, he said: “You get used to it. And for me, getting married and having children was a positive outcome. I wonder sometimes how Stevie feels about the choices she made, because she doesn’t really have a relationship — she has her career. But there are a few chapters to be written in the Stevie-Lindsey legacy.”
Stevie Nicks replied that, while it was difficult at first, the duo recognised their priorities: “We never, ever, with everything that happened to us, ever, let love affairs break Fleetwood Mac up.” Well, at least they worked out their problems better than Richard and Linda Thompson did. Stay tuned for another Gallagher Brothers article in the near future.
