Christine McVie’s favourite David Bowie song
In a list of her favourite songs of all time, Christine McVie made sure to honour the greats. Alongside the likes of The Beach Boys, Billie Holiday, and her own band, Fleetwood Mac, she picked out one David Bowie song as one of the defining tracks of her lifetime.
In culture and in history in general, it’s easy to go blind to crossing timelines. For example, Nintendo was founded while Jack The Ripper was still on a murderous rampage, as the idea of modern technology and the things we were taught in history class feel worlds apart. Separated by cultures, scenes, or even just invisible borders in our brains that keep one thing away from another, sometimes landmark moments get separated to the point where we don’t realise they happened side by side.
Fleetwood Mac and David Bowie feel like two of those things. While the Fleetwood Mac that the world knows best, with its lineup including Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood and John and Christine McVie, was dominating the American rock scene, it’s easy to forget that at the same time, the UK was deep in it’s glam rock obsession.
Rock and roll especially feels like an island. It sometimes feels difficult to connect the dots between acts that were all working away at the same time if they didn’t exist in the same scene. The California crowd of the Mamas and Papas, The Doors, Jefferson Airplane and so on feels easy to see as one collective musical moment, but when you throw in the fact that at the same time, The Beatles were getting experimental and The Rolling Stones were breaking into major fame.
But it’s important to note that for a while, Fleetwood Mac and Bowie were in the same scene. When the band first started, with Peter Green at the helm, they were a London-based unit that likely moved in somewhat of the same circles as Bowie, who, in 1967, was just getting started. For Christine McVie as both an early band member and a British musician living and working in London at the time, she was probably tuned into Bowie long before the rest of the world was.
Yet still, there’s something odd about realising that in 1975, right when Fleetwood Mac released Rumours and shot to a new level of success as the new favourite name in rock and roll, the UK was buzzing to a different sound. While America, and California especially, was still interested in a more classic band sound, the UK’s music crowd were getting into punk with the Sex Pistols, New Romantic and alternative sounds with Roxy Music and glam rock thanks to Marc Bolan and David Bowie.
When thinking about the evolution of Fleetwood Mac from their classic band sound into the more experimental influences on Tusk or their 1980s pop sound on ‘Little Lies’, perhaps some of that development can be chalked up to the band’s ability to look beyond their own scene. Buckingham was looking towards the blooming post-punk crowd, while it seems like McVie was still looking across the pond, towards her old home and its home-grown talent, like Bowie as she picked out ‘Let’s Dance’ as not only her favourite of his songs but one of her favourite songs of all time.
