Category: Christine McVie

  • Christine McVie will record with Fleetwood Mac in March

    Christine McVie will record with Fleetwood Mac in March

    Christine McVie will be heading to the recording studio with Fleetwood Mac for the first time since 2003 (when she contributed vocals for Say You Will’s “Bleed to Love Her” and “Steal Your Heart Away”), according to Mick Fleetwood via the Maui News. McVie, who officially rejoined the band earlier this month, will start recording with the band in March.

    In December, McVie told the Daily Mail that she had already sent new songs to Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham for tweaking. The band will presumably record a new album and support it with a tour later this year.

    2013-0916-curzon-mayfair-in-your-dreams2

  • OFFICIAL: Christine McVie rejoins Fleetwood Mac, possible 2014 tour

    1977_rumours_press

    Christine McVie is officially back with Fleetwood Mac.

    The band’s publicist, Liz Rosenberg, has confirmed to Billboard that McVie has rejoined the band after departing the group in 1998.

    Rosenberg says that McVie “has indeed re-joined Fleetwood Mac and we are hoping to make an announcement about a possible tour for the full tilt Macsters some time in 2014.”

    McVie joined the band in 1970 after marrying the group’s bassist, John McVie. She continued on with the group for the next 28 years as a principle songwriter, vocalist and keyboardist.

    McVie wrote some of the act’s biggest Billboard Hot 100 chart hits, including “Say You Love Me” (No. 11 peak, 1976), “Don’t Stop” (No. 3, 1977), “You Make Loving Fun” (No. 9, 1977), “Hold Me” (No. 4, 1982), “Little Lies” (No. 4, 1987) and “Everywhere” (No. 14, 1988).

    Fans of Fleetwood Mac have been teased with a possible McVie reunion since last September, when word first broke that McVie was going to rejoin her bandmates for a couple concerts in London. She appeared with the band — for just one song each night — on Sept. 25 and 27 at the O2 Arena, to sing “Don’t Stop.”

    (Fleetwood Mac’s 2013 tour incidentally, was the 17th biggest tour of 2013, according to Billboard Boxscore, grossing $62 million from 45 shows reported.)

    Soon after guesting with the band at the O2, McVie told the Guardian that she would be “delighted” if the band were to “ask” her to play with them again. “But it hasn’t happened, so we’ll have to wait and see.”

    When Billboard caught up with Stevie Nicks late last year, while promoting her new “In Your Dreams” film and appearance on “American Horror Story: Coven,” Nicks said “If Chris wants to come back to the band, I said to her, ‘It’s your band. I don’t really think you have to ask. Because it’s your band. McVie. Fleetwood Mac-vie? So, it all depends, Chris, on you. How you feel. Do you want to take this on again?’”

    Finally, over the last weekend, the band’s Mick Fleetwood reportedly told a crowd at a Maui, Hawaii show that McVie had indeed rejoined the group.

    Undoubtedly, devotees of Fleetwood Mac are hoping for a new album from the famed “Rumours”-era lineup of the band, with singer/songwriters Nicks, McVie and Lindsey Buckingham. Together, the three were the principle writers of five studio albums from the group: “Fleetwood Mac” (released in 1975), “Rumours” (1977), “Tusk” (1979), “Mirage” (1982) and “Tango In the Night” (1987).

    Following McVie’s departure, Fleetwood Mac has released one new studio set, 2003’s “Say You Will.” The band also issued a four-song EP, “Extended Play,” in 2013.


    Keith Caulfield / Billboard / Monday, January 13, 2014

  • Mick Fleetwood: Christine McVie will be rejoining Fleetwood Mac

    Mick Fleetwood: Christine McVie will be rejoining Fleetwood Mac

    2013-0916-iyd-london-premiere-cruzin-mayfair

    On Saturday, Mick Fleetwood announced on stage at the 2nd Annual Uncle Willie K’s BBQ Bluesfest in Maui that keyboardist and singer-songwriter Christine McVie would be returning to Fleetwood Mac. McVie left the band in 1998 to pursue a quieter life in England. After appearing at two London shows with band last year, McVie realized that she deeply missed performing with her former bandmates. Rumors about McVie rejoining the band had circulated ever since the cameo appearances.

    According to a fan who attend the show, Fleetwood said “This is the worst kept secret there is, but Christine McVie will be rejoining Fleetwood Mac!”

    Special thanks to “aprilsrain” for sharing the news. See more discussion at The Ledge.

  • Fleetwood Mac's Stevie and Christine: 'We were like rock and roll nuns'

    Fleetwood Mac's Stevie and Christine: 'We were like rock and roll nuns'

    1977-fm-rumours-cropped-caption

    September 2013, and Stevie Nicks is about to perform Landslide at the O2 in London, where Fleetwood Mac are playing three nights. Before she does, though, she has a dedication to make. “This is for my mentor. Big sister. Best friend,” she says, and there are precious few people in the venue who don’t know she’s talking about Christine McVie, her fellow female bandmate and the Mac’s keyboard player, as well as one of its singers and songwriters from 1970 until she quit in 1998.

    It is not the first time Nicks has talked about McVie. In 2009, she told the audience at Wembley Arena that she thought about her “every day”. Earlier this year she admitted to the Observer: “I’d beg, borrow and scrape together $5m and give it to her in cash if she would come back. That’s how much I miss her!”

    This time, though, was different. When it came to the end of the band’s set, McVie stepped onstage with them for the first time in 15 years to run through Don’t Stop, her enduring anthem about staying positive in the aftermath of a breakup.

    “It was like falling off a bike,” McVie says when I meet her in her south London apartment, a beautiful space situated so close to the banks of the Thames that it feels as if we’re floating above it. “I climbed back on there again and there they all were, the same old faces!”

    Was she nervous?

    “Not as much as I thought, because none of the band drink any more and I’ve seldom done a gig without a spritzer, you know?” She smiles, acknowledging the Mac’s status as doyens of debauchery. “But it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I thought. In fact, it felt great!”

    Performing Don’t Stop took on added poignancy for two reasons. First, it was discovered shortly after McVie’s former husband John McVie, the Mac of the band’s name and its bassist – about whom the song was written – had been diagnosed with cancer, although McVie says the “prognosis looks good” and the band expect him to be “up and running again in a couple of months” (they cancelled several Australian and New Zealand dates while he underwent treatment). Second, it seemed to trigger a realisation within McVie herself: she had previously seemed adamant that leaving the band had been the right thing to do because she was sick of the music industry, panic attacks had made travelling impossible and she longed for the quiet life she had made for herself in a 17th-century mansion in Kent.

    In fact, so settled and reclusive had she seemed – the odd rare interview found her talking about cooking for friends, tending to her garden and looking after dogs – that when I ask if she would ever consider rejoining permanently, I’m taken aback by her answer: “If they were to ask me, I would probably be very delighted,” she says, before explaining why she originally quit. “I think I was just musiced out at the time. I suffered from some delusion that I wanted to be an English country girl, a Sloane Ranger donning the old Hunter boots and Barbour jacket to slosh around in mud with the Range Rover. It’s quite isolated down there [in Kent]. It’s beautiful, but it’s miles from where my friends are. And it’s taken me 14 or 15 years to realise that it’s not really what I want at all.”

    So what does she want?

    “Well, I like being with the band, the whole idea of playing music with them.”

    Stevie Nicks onstage, 1978.
    Stevie Nicks onstage, 1978. (Photo: Richard E Aaron)

    A couple of weeks before the O2 show, I meet Nicks at the apartment she rents while staying in Paris. It’s suitably opulent – chandeliers, charcoal grey decor, huge bags of shopping everywhere – and also looks out over the capital’s river. Nicks settles down on the huge sofa – she’s less than 5ft 2in, and her legs barely reach the edge, let alone the floor – and tells me about her friendship with McVie.

    “We felt like, together, we were a force of nature,” she says. “And we made a pact, probably in our first rehearsal, that we would never accept being treated as second-class citizens in the music business. That when we walked into a room we would be so fantastic and so strong and so smart that none of the uber-rockstar group of men would look through us. And they never did.”

    What Nicks didn’t know until years later was that she would never have even joined the band were it not for McVie. In the mid-70s, Fleetwood Mac were struggling for an identity: their 60s incarnation as a blues band had been derailed by Peter Green’s LSD use and repeated lineup changes, and founder Mick Fleetwood was desperate to recruit the American Lindsey Buckingham as a guitarist. Buckingham, however, said he would only join if Nicks – his girlfriend at the time, as well as his musical partner in the up-and-coming Buckingham Nicks – was allowed to join too. The band arranged a meet-up, with Fleetwood, letting Christine have the decisive vote.

    “We went for Mexican food with them,” Nicks recalls, “and we laughed and laughed, because you English people have a very strange sense of humour. Even Lindsey had fun – he didn’t want to, but he couldn’t help it.”

    “It was critical that I got on with her,” McVie says, “because I’d never played with another girl. But I liked her instantly. She was funny and nice but also there was no competition. We were completely different on the stage to each other and we wrote differently too.”

    The next day, Buckingham and Nicks received the call telling them that they were in the band and the lineup that would record the classic Rumours and Tusk albums (and later, Mirage and Tango In The Night) was complete. It was a lineup that remained more or less intact until the point McVie left in 1998.

    When it comes to telling the Fleetwood Mac story, we hear much about the relationships that went wrong – especially Nicks and Buckingham’s tumultuous relationship – but not as much about the most stable and enduring of all, that between Nicks and McVie. Two women together in a band during the wildly decadent 70s, they supported each other through the madness that was Fleetwood Mac: the broken relationships and ill-advised affairs (in particular, Nicks’s doomed fling with Fleetwood) that played out over mountains of cocaine, gallons of alcohol and so much marijuana that McVie says she didn’t even need to smoke it: “You would just get high on the air,” she recalls. “Those guys would blow it in your face and you’d go: ‘Wow, that’s strong!’”

    At first, it was a simple friendship. As McVie puts it: “We shared rooms, did each other’s makeup and lived on Dunkin’ Donuts.”

    “We really were quite tame people back then,” Nicks confirms. “The band had two couples in it, plus Mick was married with two little girls – so we had to behave. We’d play a gig, get on an aeroplane right after the show and leave to the next place. And we were watched like hawks. We had security outside each of our rooms so Chris and I were almost like travelling rock’n’roll nuns.”

    She registers my suspicion at this. Fleetwood Mac, I suggest, are known for many things, but their dedication for living under vows of poverty, chastity and obedience is not one of them. “Well, it’s true,” she replies, laughing.

    “I wouldn’t say ‘nuns’,” McVie says, also laughing, when I put it to her, “but it was like the army.” She motions a jabbing finger at her watch: “It was regimented. The rock’n’roll lifestyle did have its perks but it wasn’t all limos and parties in the early days.”

    Fleetwood Mac in the late 70s.
    Fleetwood Mac in the late 70s. (Photo: Herbert Worthington, III)

    Yet when the lineup’s self-titled first album became a hit, it brought with it money, a jetset lifestyle and ever- increasing tensions in the band. As the group came to record its follow-up, Rumours, both couples in the band found their relationships unravelling.

    “We were cool onstage,” Nicks says. “But offstage everybody was pretty angry. Most nights Chris and I would just go for dinner on our own, downstairs in the hotel, with security at the door.”

    As McVie explains: “John and I used to be civil – ‘What key is this in? What do you want me to do on this song?’ – but Stevie and Lindsey were fighting all the time. Very volatile. Their relationship still is an ongoing battle.”

    The band had various ways of dealing with the tensions, one of which was through the nostrils. “It wasn’t like we woke up one day and everybody had bowls of coke on the tables,” Nicks says. “It was a gradual thing.”

    It was also a glamour thing. In Sausalito, California, where the two women were based during the recording of Rumours, McVie recalls the paraphernalia on offer fondly: “You could go to these shops and buy these little beautiful coke bottles that you wore around your neck – gold, turquoise, all sorts of colours with diamonds and a little spoon. So Stevie and I wore those – it was very aesthetic.”

    There was another, more productive method of escape. People often talk of Rumours in miraculous terms: how did the group make such a perfect album amid such turmoil? But of course it was the turmoil that forced the band to focus on the music.

    “I became really interested in the recording process,” McVie says. “I used to watch everything simply because it was more interesting than having a fight.”

    Perhaps the truly miraculous thing about Rumours is not that the music was so good but that McVie’s songs ended up sounding so positive. Aside from Don’t Stop, her Rumours hits include You Make Loving Fun – inspired by her new relationship with the band’s lighting director – and the beautiful piano ballad Songbird. Was she trying to escape the reality of the situation?

    “Yes, I suppose I was,” she says, as if the thought had never struck her before.

    On the set of Fleetwood Mac's 1987 "Little Lies" music video
    On the set of Fleetwood Mac’s 1987 “Little Lies” music video

    McVie was trained classically before discovering the blues through the sheet music for a Fats Domino song her older brother had left at the piano. “My writing ability all stems from the blues,” she says. “Don’t Stop, Say You Love Me … they all have that boogie bass, lefthand thing. Even the more recent things, like Little Lies and Everywhere, they’re all blues based.”

    Before Fleetwood Mac, she got used to being the “only girl, side stage with the piano” with the blues band Chicken Shack, but never gave too much thought to the notion that she was a pioneer. “There was Julie Driscoll and Sandy Denny,” she muses, “but not playing instruments I suppose.” Mick Fleetwood encouraged her to write songs (“I loved the stuff we did with Bob Welch [in the early 70s]: Mystery To Me, Bare Trees, Future Games”) but it wasn’t really until Buckingham and Nicks joined that her true talent as a hitmaker was set free.

    “I think I’m just good with hooks,” she says, looking to win some kind of award for understatement, although this does speak of the songwriting balance in the band that gives Fleetwood Mac their depth: Buckingham provided the darkness, Nicks the poetry and McVie the optimism. Buckingham added another dimension with his studio expertise, shaping the band’s sound and daring them to venture into brave new territory. It was his idea to follow Rumours with Tusk, a double album influenced by the emerging punk and new wave bands whose very existence had made Fleetwood Mac seem somewhat unfashionable.

    “We didn’t really like [Tusk],” McVie admits. “We just kind of went” – she rolls her eyes – “okaaay. Because it was so different from Rumours. Deliberately so. In hindsight, I do like that record, but at the time me and Stevie would be like: ‘What the hell is he doing in the toilet playing an empty Kleenex box for a drum?’”

    Of course, recording percussion while sitting on the loo makes a certain kind of sense when you consider the escalation of the band’s drug use by this point.

    Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks during the '70s
    Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks during the ’70s

    “My habit didn’t really start until 1977,” Nicks says. “During 1975 and 76 we were too busy making the band work – everyone was aware that we had found the golden goose. But the drug use wasn’t as romantic as people like to think. I’d just get up and go to the bathroom and do a little bit of cocaine, stop and get a coffee and come back. We were tired and jetlagged, we’d sometimes play four shows in a row, and in those days management were just writing those gigs in: you’d start out with a certain amount of gigs and every day there’d be a new one. It gets scribbled in and you start to think it’s never going to end.”

    Where music was once an escape from the turmoil in the band, now the drugs were acting as an escape from the demands of the music. McVie is adamant they never helped the band creatively: “That’s a fallacy. It kept you going, but half the stuff we did when we stayed up late was rubbish.” She adopts a comedic, stern teacher voice: “So I do say – ‘Kids: Don’t do it!’”

    The fallout was different for each of them. McVie never succumbed to addiction: “I stopped around 1984, when I went over to Switzerland to make my first solo album. I was just sick of it.” Nicks, however, ended up in the Betty Ford Centre in 1986, and followed that by turning to the prescription sedative Klonopin, which led to far worse addiction troubles.

    Hers was a downfall leaped on by critics in a way that highlights a common double standard in rock: the Dionysian male is celebrated for bravely abusing his body in the pursuit of enlightenment, whereas women are seen as damaged and out-of-control. “The guys in the business were ‘supposed’ to do drugs, they were ‘supposed’ to sleep with a different chick every night, that was the romantic idea,” Nicks observes.

    The more you talk about life on the road with Fleetwood Mac, in fact, the more such double standards emerge. “We almost always had boyfriends, but they weren’t on the road because they’d just get stomped on,” Nicks says. “For me to have a guy out on the road with us, and have Lindsey glaring at him the whole time? Or for Christine to have a guy out and John just walk past and flip him off? No, we both learned very early on that we would never bring boyfriends on the road because it created arguments.”

    McVie recalls her bandmates’ reaction when they discovered her relationship with their lighting director: “When they found out I was seeing him he got fired shortly after – because of it! I didn’t really bring fellas on the road with me after that.”

    But the reverse was all right for the men?

    McVie laughs: “Oh, it was all right for them, yeah. But whatever keeps the lads happy, I suppose.”

    Pragmatism, and a sense that they really were above such petty things, seems to have kept the two women sane, and quite probably the band together. As Nicks says: “The boys brought girlfriends on the road but the thing about that was we didn’t care they had new girlfriends! Because we didn’t want to be with them! We were happy they had new girlfriends! Thrilled! Oh my God, they’re happy! The pressure is off!”

    Despite the men’s behaviour, it was Nicks who ended up with the diva reputation: tales circulated of her demanding that hotels repaint rooms pink. Almost all untrue, she says: “I never had to have a pink room! I’m not even a pink person. And I obviously never threw a television outside of the window in my life. Why would I do that? All I wanted, and this is what I got, was the presidential suite at hotels. We were elegant people and we wanted a place to sleep after the show that was beautiful. And the boys did not get those. We would each have a presidential suite, and if there was only one available, me and Christine would flip a coin.”

    While there’s something comical about someone denying their diva reputation by saying they only wanted a presidential suite, it’s hard to disagree that Nicks was the victim of music industry sexism. When she told a crowd one night her song Rhiannon was “about a Welsh witch”, rumour spread that it was she who practised witchcraft – again a tired cliche that the talented woman must be channelling evil powers. “Rhiannon was the only song I ever wrote about a sort of celestial being,” she says, “but that song and the fact I wore black, floaty clothes somehow became this, this … this witch thing.”

    She still sounds hurt by it all. “About three years into it, it actually started to scare me. People were writing me really weird letters that were scaring me. So I had Margi [Kent, still her personal designer] make me up a bunch of outfits that were just horrible – I call them the Easter Egg outfits because they were peach, mint green and blue … not colours for me. And I wore them and so did my girl singers. I thought: ‘I’m going to put the top on the box of this one.’”

    So what happened next?

    “Oh, after a while I said: ‘Screw that, I’m going back to black!’” She laughs: “And if they think I’m a witch I don’t care because I’m not a witch!”

    Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie at the London premiere of Stevie Nicks In Your Dreams. (Photo: Brett D. Cove)
    Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie together this past September at the London premiere of Stevie Nicks In Your Dreams. (Photo: Brett D. Cove)

    When I ask McVie if she has any regrets from her time with the band, her candid answers speak of the dichotomy between how men and women are treated in rock: “There were never any children [for me],” she says. “There was always a career in the way. It was a case of one or the other, and Stevie would say the same. The lads went off and had children but for Stevie and I it was a bit difficult to do that. So that was never able to happen. And I never found the right man. Not through want of trying.”

    Nicks once said that no man could accept her lifestyle and McVie agrees with the sentiment: “It would certainly be difficult for a chap to swallow if his wife or girlfriend is dashing off without being at home to cook his supper for him.”

    Given all of this, you wonder why – at 70, and having escaped the madness of the Mac so succesfully – McVie would want to rejoin one of the world’s biggest rock bands.

    There are no doubt several factors. For one thing she’s overcome her fear of flying, thanks to therapy. She’s also noticed the growing critical reappraisal of the band, to the extent that their once-derided music is now a vital touchstone for new bands (“I have friends with grandchildren in their teens and they’ve got Rumours, Tusk, all the live stuff – and they dig it, man, they really like it!”). And, of course, she’s watched the band playing live and seen what she’s missing out on. “You see Mick from the side of the stage, and it’s contagious,” she says. “He puts so much energy and joy into playing the drums. He looks like a big Santa Claus up there with his beard and belly – oh God, don’t tell him I said that. But he’s so incredibly strong for someone who is 67, 68, or whatever he is. He puts everything into it. He comes off stage and puts ice packs all over himself, then puts on a coat that’s three times too big for him, fastens it up and walks around so his muscles don’t get seized up. He even wears that on the plane until he gets to his hotel room, and it’s the same thing every night for him.”

    There’s also the fact that the band never wanted her to leave.

    “At the time, they tried to persuade me to stay so hard,” she says, “but back then I’d made my mind up that I’d done enough touring. I just couldn’t live out of a suitcase any more. Whereas now I would really rather like to again.”

    As she says this she averts her gaze, staring out of that huge window of hers with such a look of longing that it would seem almost too cruel if she never got to fulfill this desire. And it suddenly becomes completely obvious why she wants to play with them again. After all, it was she who sang Don’t Stop all those years ago.


    Tim Jonze / The Guardian (UK) Thursday, December 12, 2013

  • Stevie to Christine: 'It all depends on you'

    Stevie to Christine: 'It all depends on you'

    2013-1205-billboard

    Stevie addressed rumors about Christine McVie potentially rejoining Fleetwood Mac in a new interview with Billboard Magazine. When asked about Christine McVie mentioning to The Guardian that she would be interested in coming back to Fleetwood Mac if the band asked her, Stevie said, “I don’t know if I believe that.” She added that Fleetwood Mac had spent many years reestablishing itself without the benefit of having Christine in the band and that the decision lies solely on McVie.

  • Rumours abound: Will Christine McVie rejoin Fleetwood Mac?

    Rumours abound: Will Christine McVie rejoin Fleetwood Mac?

    (Photo: Sam Emerson)
    (Photo: Sam Emerson)

    Christine McVie wants to rejoin Fleetwood Mac

    Christine McVie is eyeing a return to Fleetwood Mac after 15 years away. Back in September, McVie hopped onstage with her former bandmates at London’s O2 Arena for a show-closing rave-up of their 1977 Rumours classic, “Don’t Stop.” 1998, following the band’s massive sold-out reunion tour, McVie quit the band, sold her L.A. home, her songwriting publishing, got divorced, and moved back to her native England to retire. Now, she’s having second thoughts, telling The Guardian, “I like being with the band, the whole idea of playing music with them. I miss them all. If they were to ask me I would probably be very delighted. . . but it hasn’t happened so we’ll have to wait and see.”

    When asked why she quit the band in the first place, McVie explained: “I think I was just music’d out. I suffered from some kind of delusion that I wanted to be an English country girl. . . and it took me 15 years to realize that it’s not really what I wanted at all.”

    When asked about how it felt to be back leading the band at the London gig — if only for one song — she said, “It was amazing, like I’d never left. I climbed back on there again and there they were, the same old faces on stage.”

    Fleetwood Mac is currently on hiatus after cancelling a tour of Down Under while McVie’s ex-husband, bassist John McVie undergoes cancer treatment. When asked about his prognosis, McVie said it was “really good. He’s having his treatment in L.A. right now, but they caught it really early so he should be up and running in a couple of months.”

    • Bandmate Stevie Nicks has long been pining for Christine’s return — but respectful of her decision to retire from the band. Lindsey Buckingham on the other hand, has shown slight resentment for Christine splitting on them just as their personal lives seemed to finally settle down and the lucrative brand finally restored to its former glories. Christine said, “Fair enough. From his point of view, it was a business thing. (Promoters) would be asking why I wasn’t playing in Amsterdam or Berlin. They obviously wanted headlines about them, not me, and I quite agree with that.”
    • When pressed about her rejoining the band on tour, she diplomatically offered up: “It’s a long way down that path if it ever were to happen. John’s got to get well first, so it hasn’t been talked about. We’ll have to wait and see.”
    • Lindsey Buckingham says that although the band missed Christine McVie terribly on a personal level — he didn’t feel as though losing her really affected the band that much in practical terms: “I don’t think anyone felt that that was a negative, y’know? I mean, in the spirit of Fleetwood Mac reinventing itself, we saw it — yes, it was a challenge, but it was also an opportunity to flex our muscles in a different way.”

    Stevie Nicks reveals Lindsey Buckingham tensions with Christine McVie

    With the rock world buzzing about Christine McVie’s possible return to Fleetwood Mac after 15 years, Stevie Nicks reveals that Lindsey Buckingham might be the one to block it. The December issue of Mojo magazine features an interview with Nicks conducted in September just before McVie joined the band at London’s O2 Arena to close the show with her 1977 Rumours classic, “Don’t Stop.” Nicks admitted that there are some tensions that need to be ironed out, explaining, “She’s just emerged to do one song. It could have been a few songs, but Lindsey’s very funny about that. Chris left in 1998, and we didn’t start (the) Say You Will (album) until 2002. It took us that long to figure out what the hell we were going to do without her — or even if we could do without her.”

    When the interviewer told Nicks that Buckingham had asked the magazine not to use a group shot featuring McVie on the cover of Mojo’s recent Rumours retrospective, Nicks went on to say, “I think his words to us we, ‘She can’t just come and go.’ That’s important to him, but it’s not quite so important to me. . . Much as Lindsey adores her — and he does; she’s the only one in Fleetwood Mac he was ever willing to listen to, he doesn’t want the first might reviews to be all about Christine’s one song, rather than the set we rehearsed for two months.”

    Although Fleetwood Mac still performs some Christine McVie material — “Don’t Stop” and “World Turning,” her 1975 co-write with Lindsey Buckingham — he told us that he and Stevie Nicks don’t feel the need to go overboard in filling the setlist with McVie’s songs: “Obviously we’re not doing too much of the Christine stuff. We’re trying to show her the respect just by including one or two. We don’t feel like we have to go out and do all of her songs.”

    Internet Comments

    via USMagazine.com and Eonline.com — agree or not?

    Jmw26red wrote: “I hope she does. I saw them in Vegas back in May and it was a bummer in the fact that they didnt do any of the songs where she sang lead vocals. The concert was still awesome as it was on Stevie’s birthday.”

    Pat Geary wrote: “They all miss the spotlight – and the money”

    Drea wrote: “I highly doubt they are hurting for money.”

    Jim Bodkin wrote: “I’d love to see her back in one of the great bands of all time.”

    Mark wrote: “Lack of money changes everything! Realizing you are now 70 also has an effect!”

    gary wright wrote: “That would be so heavy if she did, in fact, rejoin the band. Her contributions, without exception, were a real asset to their style. She was able to adjust to all of the band member changes, and still maintained that blues rock, that worked well with even in their rock tunes. Man, I have always thought that she had class and although she wasn’t flashy like Stevie Nicks, when she joined the band, she didn’t take a backseat either. Good news on McVie as well. That group would probably be as good as it was thirty years ago.”

    Michael wrote: “I’m 75 and that news brought tears to my eyes, I can ‘t wait.”

    Blossom wrote:  “McVie is CRUCIAL to the band’s over all sound. Stevie may be the queen soloist but without McVie it’s just Stevie and her backup band. McVie is where the signature FM sound comes from. Not the same without her, imo.”

    cfred wrote: “I’d love to see Christine back in the band. Brilliant songwriter, keyboardist and vocalist.”

    Fast Facts

    • Christine McVie wrote some of Fleetwood Mac’s most enduring hits, including 1975’s “Over My Head” (#20) and “Say You Love Me” (#11); 1977’s “Don’t Stop” (#3) and “You Make Loving Fun” (#9); 1979’s “Think About Me” (#20); 1982’s “Hold Me” (#4) and “Love In Store” (#22); and 1987’s “Little Lies” (#4) and “Everywhere” (#14).
    • She scored a solo Top 10 hit with 1984’s “Got A Hold On Me” (#10)
    • In 2003 McVie was credited as an additional musician on Fleetwood Mac’s last full-length studio set, Say You Will. She contributed keyboards and backing vocals on “Bleed To Love Her” and “Steal Your Heart Away.”
    • In 2004 Christine McVie released her third solo album, In The Meantime, which she collaborated on with her nephew, Dan Perfect.

    WMMR / Wednesday, November 27, 2013

  • Christine McVie to rejoin Fleetwood Mac?

    Christine McVie to rejoin Fleetwood Mac?

    Christine McVie: I want to rejoin Fleetwood Mac. Singer and songwriter says she would like to return to band she left 15 years ago – if they want her back.

    Christine McVie

    When Christine McVie joined her old band, Fleetwood Mac, onstage during their recent shows at the O2 in London, it was billed as little more than a special treat for fans.

    Yet the group’s singer, keyboardist and songwriter seems to have caught the bug and has said she would like to rejoin permanently. “I like being with the band, the whole idea of playing music with them,” she said. “I miss them all. If they were to ask me I would probably be very delighted … but it hasn’t happened so we’ll have to wait and see.”

    McVie was with the band for 28 years before quitting in 1998. “I think I was just music’d out,” she said. “I suffered from some kind of delusion that I wanted to be an English country girl, a Sloane Ranger or something … and it took me 15 years to realise that it’s not really what I wanted at all.”

    McVie was the band’s main songwriter and central to its transformation from a blues group to the current incarnation featuring Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham that created the pop-oriented sound behind huge-selling albums such as Rumours and Tango in the Night. McVie wrote Don’t Stop, Songbird and Everywhere, among many others.

    She has never before expressed regrets about leaving and has spent the past decade living a reclusive life in a 17th-century mansion in Kent. Despite this, she thrilled fans during Fleetwood Mac’s current tour by joining the band for a run-through of Don’t Stop. McVie said playing with the band again was like riding a bike. “It was amazing, like I’d never left. I climbed back on there again and there they were, the same old faces on stage.”

    Fleetwood Mac are on a tour break after cancelling several Australian and New Zealand dates after news that their bassist, John McVie, has cancer. They plan to resume touring when he is better. McVie said her ex-husband’s prognosis was “really good. He’s having his treatment in LA right now, but they caught it really early so he should be up and running in a couple of months.”

    Nicks has often said she wants Christine McVie to rejoin. However, recent reports suggest guitarist Buckingham is worried her appearance could steal the limelight. McVie said this was “fair enough. From his point of view, it was a business thing. [Promoters] would be asking why I wasn’t playing in Amsterdam or Berlin. They obviously wanted headlines about them, not me, and I quite agree with that.”

    McVie accepts rejoining is a long way off. “It’s a long way down that path if it ever were to happen. John’s got to get well first, so it hasn’t been talked about. We’ll have to wait and see.”

    Her remarks were made in a Guardian interview with her and Nicks to be published later this year. During the interview, in which they discuss their  friendship, their decadent 1970s lifestyle and experiences of sexism in the music industry.


    The Guardian (UK) / Friday, November 22, 2013

  • FAN REVIEW: Christine McVie and me at the O2

    FAN REVIEW: Christine McVie and me at the O2

    (Lolly Does London)
    (Lolly Does London)

    In an 11-month, 13-country (so far) adventure there have been plenty of “I’d die happy” moments.

    But, despite an ever-burgeoning passport, a self-satisfying list of European sights and South American escapades, and mastering the art of slipping through the masses to score the last empty seat on the Tube, I’ve struggled to think of another moment to top my list of moments since setting off on the Big OE.

    Yes, folks, you might have tickets to Vector Arena but I defy you to trump seeing Fleetwood Mac belt out folksy rock jam after jam at London’s O2 Arena.

    The evening did not start off the way I hoped.

    After making the mistake of first heading to a bar in the Square Mile for some pre-show drinks (oh sure, I’ll pay [PndStlg]19 for a shared cocktail that arrives in a miniature bathtub filled mainly of ice- cubes not booze, and, oh sure, I’d love to be surrounded by Hooray Henrys loudly discussing how many zeros are in their salaries! That doesn’t sound irritating at all) we came to our senses and decided to venture to the surely packed-to-the-brim bars around the stadium.

    From there the night was on a steady, skyrocketing improve.

    In a moment of sheer brilliance, a consensus to buy some cheap Sav at a mini Tesco was reached so, upon arrival in Greenwich, we joined the troupe of concert-goers lounging around the concrete, supping in both London’s tacit approval of public drinking and the surprisingly balmy autumn evening.

    (The evening’s warm-up entertainment: peering at the group of people taking part in the newest craze for London singletons, a group blind-date version of Up At the O2 — getting strapped into a harness and venturing out onto the 52m-high walkway, in the dark no less, is one way to sort the men from the boys, I s’pose.)

    Then it was time for the night to reach what I thought would be its pinnacle — hours of live Fleetwood Mac listening pleasure.

    There aren’t many bands that sound as good live as they do on their polished- to-perfection iTunes downloads. Even fewer that can make that claim, when the average age of its five “classic” members clocks in at 66.4 years.

    Fleetwood Mac is not one of those bands.

    Ignoring the buzz-kills who seem to crop up at every concert — I kid you not, the guy next to me had his fingers in his ears the whole time — and the burning in my heel-clad feet, I was one of those who defied the posse of lemony ladies, and the security guards they tried to enlist, who kept insisting everybody “sit down.”

    At. A. Concert.

    Most people have one act that serves as their happy place.

    For me, that’s Fleetwood Mac, who have been a constant presence during summers in Wanaka, house parties, and road trips since ages ago.

    So to be in the audience at the O2 — a venue that would be hard to beat, no matter who you’re listening to — was magic.

    To be in the audience to witness Christine McVie — arguably the band’s most underrated member — perform with them since the Nineties, was even better.

    That, my friends, was the pinnacle.

    (Of the night, and possibly also my life.)

    The only disappointment, apres- concert, was watching the video clips I somehow managed to shoot, and being confronted with now-irrefutable proof my alleged singing is actually more like tone-deaf warbling.

    Once, I made a special point to thank Mum in public for teaching me all the words to Fleetwood Mac.

    I’m not sure the people around me would agree — and maybe that explains the dude next to me — but what I said then still stands.

    © Fairfax NZ News


    Alana Dixon / Uptown Girl Abroad / The Southland Times (NZ) Monday, October 14, 2013

  • AUDIO: Christine McVie chooses the 'Tracks of My Years'

    AUDIO: Christine McVie chooses the 'Tracks of My Years'

    Christine McVie picks her 'Tracks of My Life' with Ken Bruce. (BBC Radio 2)
    Christine McVie picks the ‘Tracks of My Life’ with Ken Bruce. (BBC Radio 2)

    This week, former Fleetwood Mac band member Christine McVie chooses the Tracks Of My Years and she opens with a classic Beach Boys song from their groundbreaking album Pet Sounds along with a Steely Dan track featured on their acclaimed long player Gaucho. Plus there’s the Record and Album Of The Week and the Monday round of PopMaster. Christine McVie joined Fleetwood Mac in 1970 while married to founder member John McVie. She left the band in 1998 shortly after Fleetwood Mac was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Christine is currently working on new solo material which is planned for a forthcoming album which she describes as marking a return to her musical sound from the seventies.

    Christine McVie – Tracks of My Years
    DURATION: 15:26
    Former Fleetwood Mac band member Christine McVie picks the music for Tracks of My Years.

    Tracklisting

    God Only Knows – The Beach Boys
    Babylon Sisters – Steely Dan
    I Know You’re Out There Somewhere – The Moody Blues
    Man Of The World – Fleetwood Mac
    Let’s Dance – David Bowie
    That Ole Devil Called Love – Billie Holiday
    Raspberry Beret – Prince
    Races Are Run – Buckingham Nicks
    Smoke On The Water – Deep Purple
    Mexico – James Taylor

    Listen to Christine McVie’s comments

  • It's Not Only Rock 'n' Roll, Part 2

    It's Not Only Rock 'n' Roll, Part 2

    Here is another excerpt from Jenny Boyd’s new book, It’s Not Only Rock ‘n’ Roll: Iconic Musicians Reveal the Source of Their Creativity. The following passages describe how Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie became interested in music.

    “…songwriter, singer and guitarist Lindsey Buckingham got positive signals from his family to follow his heart: “In general, my parents were supportive of everything; they were supportive of me as a person. When I first started playing music at age six, I didn’t take lessons; I just learned to play by ear and by listening to my brother’s records. It was a hobby, something ingrained in me at a very young age, so the guitar has always been there. I never felt like I had to sit down and learn to play the guitar. It was something that excited me, that animated me; that charged me up. It meant a great deal to me. I would just play along to songs and learn chords, and my style just sort of evolved. I don’t think my mother was of a mind that music would be something that I should pursue professionally. I think she knew the entertainment business was a rough one, and that there was a lot of pitfalls and a heavy lack of stability. So she didn’t encourage me to seek that out, but she certainly encouraged me to play.”

    Music was an essential part of her childhood, recalled songwriter, singer and pianist Christine McVie: “There was always a piano in the house, and I started playing it when I was about five years old. My dad wanted both my brother, John, and me to play. His father had played the organ in Westminster Abbey, but when he died, Dad had to become chief breadwinner. He had wanted to go to college to pursue his musical studies, but he couldn’t. Instead, he had to get a job playing in the orchestra pits during pantomimes and things like that. Later on he finished his studies and became a music teacher. I learned to play the cello at school when I was 11, and my dad also used to give me lessons. Our family had a string quartet playing in the house at Christmas time: my dad and John on violin, my mum on viola, and me on cello. It was fun.”