Christine McVie rejoins Fleetwood Mac and joins them for a fall tour. NBC Today will host a special Fleetwood Mac mini-concert on October 8.
Forget the “Rumours,” and “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow).” It’s true: After 15 years, Christine McVie is rejoining Fleetwood Mac. McVie and the band confirmed the news with Carson Daly on TODAY Thursday.
When asked if she was rejoining the band, McVie didn’t hesitate. “I think that can be said with a definite capital ‘Yes,'” she said.
McVie also revealed for the first time why she stopped touring with the group years ago. “I had a fear of flying,” she explained. “I hadn’t flown for 15 years.”
Bandmate Stevie Nicks thought at the time that the group had seen the last of Christine. “She had us all seriously convinced that she would never come back,” Nicks said.
But McVie did join her former group onstage in London last fall to sing their famous number, “Don’t Stop.” It was an emotional experience. “Walking out in London was sensational,” she said.
Her bandmates agreed. “I had to get the Kleenex out,” said Christine’s ex-husband John McVie.
“All of us were very moved, you know. Very moved,” said Mick Fleetwood.
Just a month after the onstage reunion, emotions ran high again when the band announced that John McVie had cancer. He told Daly he was “gettin’ better,” and now undergoing “chemo, basically. … I’m out and about.”
It’s been a long, strange trip for the band. “At the beginning of 1975, I was a waitress and a cleaning lady,” Nicks recalled. “When we came home from the tour, Lindsey (Buckingham) and I were almost a millionaire together.”
But the band famously went through emotional turmoil, though Nicks said it did not affect their music. “When it was very bad, when Chris and John were breaking up and when Lindsey and I were breaking up, what we did not do was we did not take the horribleness into the studio.”
Their massive success took its toll on their romantic relationships. Nicks and Buckingham said one song in particular, “Landslide,” takes them back in time. “That was written at a time when there had been a breach in trust, probably from both sides,” Buckingham said. “And, you know, we were still together. But it was one of the first things that kind of heralded the beginning of the end of our relationship.”
But the band’s way of expressing their passionate ups and downs through music allowed fans to relate to them even more. “People could buy into us and our stories,” said Buckingham. “They could identify with us. They could care about us as people, and it also fueled the music in a subjective, powerful way.”
All five members of Fleetwood Mac will be back on tour later this year, including a special TODAY concert on Oct. 9.
Gael Fashingbauer Cooper / Today / Thursday, March 27, 2014
