Christine McVie’s favourite Fleetwood Mac proved one member was a “superlative genius”
The ups and downs of any relationship can push those involved to the breaking point. And if there was one band that had a habit of pushing its members directly toward such a fracture, it was Fleetwood Mac. It’s a wonder it ever had any band left at all. But Christine McVie stuck with Fleetwood Mac through thick and thin.
She was a key member of the outfit through the tumult of the 1960s and ’70s and helped usher in a new era of pop songwriting with her artful melodies and neat song structures. She was responsible for some of the band’s most powerful and enduring songs, including the impossibly beautiful ‘Songbird’, but never really embraced the spotlight.
The songwriter was a quieter part of the famously loud band. While Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham feuded in broad daylight, McVie would quietly go about writing some of the group’s best songs. Indeed, it took her passing in 2022 to confirm just how important her contributions were to the success of Fleetwood Mac. Here, she names her favourite song by the outfit.
McVie joined Fleetwood Mac in 1970, by which time guitarist Peter Green, drummer Mick Fleetwood and guitarist Jeremy Spencer had been performing together for a full three years and had already released their third album on Reprise Records, 1969’s Then Play On. That same year, McVie made her first live appearance with the band at Bristol University. She’d already had success with Chicken Shack’s rendition of ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’ by Etta James and had garnered a small but devoted following in her home country.
McVie went on to pen tracks like ‘Tell Me Lies’, ‘Don’t Stop’ and ‘Songbird’, establishing herself as one of the group’s key songwriters. However, when she sat down with BBC 2 to discuss some of her favourite recordings, it wasn’t one of her own songs she named as her go-to Mac track but one by the band’s original frontman, Peter Green.
Having lost himself to drugs, Green quit Fleetwood Mac in 1970. Of his song ‘Man of The World’, McVie said: “Awestruck—everybody was awestruck by Peter. Except for Eric [Clapton], there was only Peter. We all thought he was just a superlative genius. I just loved that song,” she concluded.
Released just a year before Green left the band, ‘Man of The World’ is essentially a cry for help. Like ‘Green Manalishi’ it sees the musician grapple with the realisation that no amount of money or fame can alleviate his lack of self-worth. “I guess I’ve got everything I need,” he sings. “I wouldn’t ask for more / And there’s no one I’d rather be / But I just wish that I’d never been born.”
Looking back on the song in a 2015 interview with Mojo, Mick Fleetwood said: “It’s a sad song. Had we known what Peter was saying… What’s that line? ‘How I wish that I’d never been born.’ You know, whoa. It’s pregnant with passion, it’s a prayer, it’s a crying out.”
As Green described it with a little more flippancy, one might expect that he either got over the issues at hand or found a place to bury them. Mojo spoke to Green in 1996, who said of the tune, “The lyrics are corny, hammy. Shall I tell you about my life?… My life! That’s Jewish for a start, isn’t it?!”
You can revisit ‘Man of The World’, McVie’s favourite Fleetwood Mac song, below.
