Christine McVie once named the best lineup Fleetwood Mac ever had: “Very authentic blues”
When music fans think of Fleetwood Mac, they rightly think of the five members who wrote and recorded Rumours.
Creatively bonding through personal trauma, this unlikely group of transatlantic musicians took the band Mick Fleetwood had been trying to make work for years to stratospheric heights of fame. There was a surprising sense of balance between Christine McVie, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham as songwriters, and in Rumours, they created a coherent record of multiple narratives.
In Nicks, especially, they had a bona fide star. Mick Fleetwood only wanted Buckingham as the band’s new lead vocalist and subsequently had to be convinced by the Americans that letting his partner Nicks into the band was also the right thing to do. But once she was in, all question marks were answered as she immediately showcased her brilliance with tracks like ‘Rhiannon’, ‘Landslide’ and ‘Dreams’.
Moreover, Nicks and McVie built a much-needed friendship in the band. As the personal drama of each member swirled around the band, the pair developed a sisterhood. “It was critical that I got on with her because I’d never played with another girl,” McVie told The Guardian in 2013. “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.”
Because up until that point, McVie had experienced life as part of Fleetwood Mac, the blues band. As part of the London blues scene, they were a rock and roll band in the truest sense of the world. They were rubbing shoulders with the likes of Led Zeppelin, The Yardbirds and The Who, bands that were taking this blueprint of crunching blues rock and making it more expansive.
McVie was an integral part of that scene, playing in the band Chicken Shack before joining Fleetwood’s blues outfit. While she experienced wild success in the later incarnation of the band and developed a special bond with Nicks during those days, she still can’t help but look back on the blues days of the band as her favourite.
She said, “The old Fleetwood Mac was much better; they did some beautiful and, to my mind, very authentic blues. Chicken Shack did pretty well in Europe, but after I left, it was over.”
A large part of her enjoyment of that period was playing with the enigmatic Peter Green. Before the days of Buckingham and Nicks, Green was the real star of the band and a musician McVie was consistently in awe of. She explained, “Awestruck – everybody was awestruck by Peter. Except for Eric [Clapton], there was only Peter… We all thought he was just a superlative genius…”
On their 1969 album Then Play On, you can hear the sort of genius McVie was talking about and the blueprint of blues greatness they were laying down. Sure, they found their voice later on with the dream pop sounds of their ‘70s lineup, but if it wasn’t for Green’s spiral into madness, could they have eclipsed it with him at the helm?
