Fleetwood Mac musician Christine McVie performs at the Met Center in Bloomington (Image: Getty Images)
There was something about Christine McVie that evoked the character Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations: the jilted bride in her disintegrating wedding dress before a feast no one came to eat. Alone in her red-brick Kentish manor house in its sprawling 19 acres after quitting Fleetwood Mac in 1990, she would swirl from room to empty room, pour another drink and sit pondering the mad old days. How had she managed to survive all that? And really, had she?
Global superstars thanks to the success of their 1977 magnum opus Rumours – one of the biggest-selling albums in history and dubbed “the divorce album” as it catalogued, unintentionally, the catastrophic disintegration of the band’s romantic relationships – Fleetwood Mac lived a rarefied existence. It was all private jets and limousines, excessive drink and drugs, money and affairs within affairs. They were nothing if not their own travelling orgy. Their debauchery and hedonism knew no bounds.
But a bitter divorce from the Mac’s bassist John McVie, the collapse of her engagement to Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson, the discovery that her best friend Stevie Nicks had betrayed her by having slept with him, and the failure of her rebound marriage to Portuguese keyboardist Eddy Quintela, all took their toll. As did touring. The road may look like a glamorous existence, but it is always hell.
The music now deafened her. Echoes of her best-loved songs such as Songbird, Little Lies, Everywhere and You Make Loving Fun now tormented her. Worse, Christine fell victim to a common rock’n’roll affliction, the fear of flying.
She knew she must get off the cloud before she crashed and burned.
When she sold her Los Angeles home and her worldly goods to return home, she was 47. By the time her magnificent village manor house was fully restored, she was 55. Her fertility having expired, her dream of becoming a mother and raising a family in a corner that would be forever England, was over. She was single – deeply, unhappily so.
Fortune and fame having favoured her, she would never have to work another day. But money couldn’t buy her love.
Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks in 2018 (Image: Getty Images)
She got a couple of dogs and walked for miles. She learned to gourmet-cook, but ate lunch or supper most days by herself in the pub.
She could live another 30 years, it occurred to her one day. What on earth was she supposed to do with all that time?
A belief prevails that rock stars have it made – that, blessed with talent enough to bore into the collective psyche, mine our insecurities and create songs to soothe and deliver us, banking themselves millions along the way, they must sit around pinching themselves and laughing all the way to Coutts.
Having spent the past 30 years following musicians all over the planet, dipping into their lives and getting under their skin in the name of biographies and world exclusives, I can say that nothing is ever as it seems.
I have interviewed most rockers that most can name, and can tell you, hand on heart, that Christine was by a million miles the saddest. “Be careful what you wish for” might have been coined for her.
A war baby born in Cumbria and moved to the Midlands before she was three, her childhood was detached. Her music teacher father Cyril had never fulfilled his ambition of playing first violin in a symphony orchestra.
Her mother Beatrice was a psychic, medium and faith healer, who lived according to the advice of a spirit guide and conducted ghost walks. She was not the ordinary mother her daughter craved.
Christine studied classical piano until the day she discovered a piece of sheet music by Fats Domino in the piano stool. She got the blues and found an outlet for her baffling misery. Sabotaging her academic promise, she swerved to art school and studied sculpture with the intention of becoming a teacher. She fell in with fellow art students who were also musicians, found her way onto the local live music scene, and played in and out of groups.
She dated Spencer Davis; joined a line-up called the Bobcats and was beckoned into blues outfit Chicken Shack. They shared a bill with Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac at the National Jazz and Blues Festival at Windsor in 1967. Christine had the hots for Green but married McVie, the year her mother died, when she was 25.
Beach Boys drummer and singer-songwriter Dennis Wilson broke Christine McVie’s heart (Image: Getty Images)
Her plaintive rendition of the Etta James’s classic I’d Rather Go Blind gave Chicken Shack their only hit the following year. It also earned Chris Female Vocalist of the Year in Melody Maker’s 1969 Readers Poll. Not only did early success not go to her head, she had made up her mind to ditch the spotlight to become a housewife. When Fleetwood Mac took possession of a large Hampshire house and created their own commune, Chris became head cook and bottle-washer.
But one thing always leads to another. Needing a bit of keyboard here, some backing vocals there, they drew her into the band when she wasn’t looking.
The mental collapse of Peter Green, their ever-changing line-up, relocation to California and an unfortunate affair between Mick Fleetwood’s wife Jenny and Mac guitarist Bob Weston left them without a plucker to their name.
Mick Fleetwood discovered Lindsey Buckingham, who said he wouldn’t join without his girlfriend Stevie Nicks. Two females in one band? What was the world coming to? It worked, there being an abundance of harmony and chemistry. The classic Rumours Five was born. “It sounds like a fairytale when you sum it up like that,” was Chris’s reaction when we recapped the band’s history during discussions about her possible autobiography.
“But when you’re in it, it’s like being inside a snow globe with the world looking in. Every day, somebody shakes it. The flakes go up and down and all over the place.
“Wherever you happen to be that day, you are rooted to the spot while turmoil goes on around you.
“Looking back, I can see now that my life was never my own. I was always going to have to escape, however long it took. Many years had to pass before I knew that, and more years before I knew how.”
After 16 years, because she literally had nothing else to do, in 2014 she went back. But things were never the same.
John McVie, Mick Fleetwood, Bob Welch and Christine McVie in 1974 (Image: Getty)
The moment had passed. She was older and wiser. She could see exactly what Fleetwood Mac were… and, more to the point, what they were not.
She had also come to terms with her aloneness. Only in her seventies, long after she had stopped expecting her prince on his charger to rock up and save her, could Christine accept that the quest had been futile… but not her whole life. When she died in November 2022 at the age of 79, she had her answers.
Love, they tell us, is about compromise. As Christine knew better than most, there’s not a lot of that in this game.
Rock stars tend not to bend or defer. It is their spouses, managers and minions who do that. As for her obsession with finding The One, she knew at last, that’s a trap based on fear: of loving and losing again.
We regret the years, the goneness, the half-lived life to the dying of our days. We cast back now and then to the ones who got away. As Christine said: “Wasn’t it we who got away? Because we know. In the end, we know.”
She did, too. It’s all in the songs. Though her lyrics were lucid, there were always hidden meanings. It all makes sense to me now.
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