The Fleetwood Mac album Christine McVie had no memory of recording
Life in a successful rock band is always fast-paced. If you aren’t writing, recording, or mixing, then you are most likely on the road, visiting every major city across the globe to spread the gospel of your band. In all the chaos and rock anarchy, it can be easy to forget certain details about your time together. Forgetting an entire album, however, is something that could only happen to a member of a particularly tumultuous, drug-fueled, and chaotic band like Fleetwood Mac.
Fleetwood Mac might have started out life as a brilliant—if understated—blues outfit led by Peter Green, but their mid-to-late 1970s material most often defines the band. Records like Tusk, Rumours, and their eponymous 1975 record helped to define the mainstream rock sound of the decade. Nevertheless, the band was as renowned for the strength of their material as they were for the intense conflicts and arguments which occurred within the line-up of the group.
Throughout the golden period of Fleetwood Mac, its respective members were constantly at each other’s throats. Spurred on by a cocktail of cocaine and infidelity, the band were constantly taking shots at each other both within their songwriting and their everyday lives. The relationship between John and Christine McVie was a particular cause of conflict for the group.
John McVie had been a member of the band from the very early days. In 1970, he recruited his wife, Christine McVie, to join the group, and she quickly became one of Fleetwood Mac’s defining members. Penning a vast array of their greatest hits, McVie proved herself to be an essential aspect of the band’s most commercially successful period during the 1970s. Nevertheless, all that success put a strain on her marriage, which eventually broke down in 1976.
Being in a successful band with your ex-husband must be a pretty difficult thing to handle, particularly when you and every other member of said band are self-medicating with drugs and alcohol on a daily basis. As a result, there were parts of Fleetwood Mac’s history which were pretty cloudy in the mind of McVie, most notably the recording of the 1982 album Mirage.
After such a conflict-ridden time for the band, Mirage attempted to create a safer recording atmosphere for Fleetwood Mac. “That was Mick’s idea,” McVie recalled to Mojo in 2017, “So we could get back to that bubble idea again, something like we did in Sausalito with Rumours: see what would come out from a confined space, pull the reins in and do something more commercial.” Although the resulting album was pretty commercial and certainly continued the band’s run of success, the atmosphere Mick Fleetwood tried to create did not necessarily go to plan.
“I’m not sure it worked,” McVie said, adding that Mirage was a “strange record”. What’s more, the songwriter could not even remember the recording process. “I don’t have many memories of it,” she recalled, “Although the room I was in was meant to have been haunted by [author] George Sand. Me and [producer] Ken Caillat would sit in the studio in the night with a bottle of Courvoisier waiting to see if there were any noises. Nothing came.”
This memory loss could be a result of numerous factors, including the various substances that were involved in its production. Equally, it might have been the case that McVie simply blocked out the recording process, as it cannot have been a particularly harmonious affair. Either way, the record remains a good example of music that can be crafted by a group of people who hate each other’s guts.
