What was the first band Fleetwood Mac’s bassist John McVie played in?
Alongside Mick Fleetwood, John McVie is the only ever-present member in the long and fragmented history of British-American rock supergroup Fleetwood Mac. In fact, the ‘Mac’ in their band name is a reference to the bassist, who eventually joined on original guitarist Peter Green’s insistence at the end of 1967.
At the time, McVie was the longest-serving member of John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, along with their legendary founder. He’d been recruited to the group by Mayall at just 17 years of age, immediately after he left school and began training to be a tax collector. Soon after McVie’s first gig with the group at a pub in south London, they began performing at the more central Marquee Club, where the Rolling Stones and Jimmy Page were among their contemporaries. He went on to record four studio albums with the band, including their celebrated 1966 effort Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton.
As Green put it in a 1969 interview, “John usually chooses the people he wants, chooses very carefully. He knows what he wants, he usually gets it too.” McVie didn’t hang around in the Bluesbreakers a minute longer than he wanted to, despite Mayall’s relative loyalty to him as a band member compared to the string of other musicians who’d come and gone, many of them after being shown the door by the band’s leader. Likewise, he only joined Fleetwood Mac when he was ready to, even though Green had named the group after him months before he arrived.
Upon his arrival, he, Green, Fleetwood and Jeremy Spencer immediately set about finishing what would be the first of 17 Fleetwood Mac studio albums, all of which feature McVie on bass guitar. For 59 years between 1963 and the band’s final split two years ago following the death of McVie’s ex-wife Christine, he was effectively never out of work as a bass player.
So, he started out with the Bluesbreakers?
Yet he was already a jobbing bassist even before John Mayall came calling. At just the age of 15, he joined the Krewsaders, an instrumental rock band started by boys living on his street in Ealing, west London. “We had jackets, a logo, the whole deal,” McVie recalled to De Gitarist in 1998. In spite of their professional get-up, however, he admitted that their main audiences were guests at “weddings and parties”.
It was a start nonetheless, and one that got the attention of another bassist in the band of British blues pioneer Cyril Davies, called Cliff Barton. It was Barton who would refer McVie to Mayall, and the rest is history.
Mayall saw enough promise in the inexperienced young musician to give him the job and gave him a grounding in the kind of bass parts he’d need to learn. “He gave me some records of Willie Dixon and B.B. King,” McVie explained. That was all the education he needed. Six decades on, he’s regarded among the greatest ever to slap the four strings.
