“Fed up”: the song Christine McVie called a nightmare
This is the story of Fleetwood Mac having yet another fallout. What’s new? While admittedly, it can hardly be said to be a surprising or singular occurrence, the heights of the band’s fiery feuds are truly the gift that keeps on giving in terms of rock and roll lore. Christine McVie was no stranger to that situation, as although she maintained a quieter front than the likes of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, she still faced her fair share of dramas over the years.
With then-husband John by her side for the start of the journey, the pair’s power couple status was then marred by heavy doses of scandal and infidelity, in which McVie played her own major role. Indeed, it was the muse of one of her later affairs that prompted the songstress to write a seismic Fleetwood Mac banger – though the process turned out to be more of a nightmare than a dream.
At the turn of the 1980s, the band were somewhat down on their luck in a commercial sense, but ‘Hold Me’ was the key tune to reinvigorating that electrifying notion of purpose that had been seen on Rumours some five years prior. But true to form, getting the big hit over the line was far from easy.
As a duet sung between McVie and Buckingham, the song was inspired by the former’s failed romantic exploits with The Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson. Written alongside Robbie Patton, the whole thing proved to be fiery in more ways than one, however, as thanks to the dawn of MTV, it wasn’t enough any more to just record the tune – they had to commit it to camera.
At a time when tensions were already at fever pitch within the band, the last thing they really needed was to be placed in a searing physical landscape. But forced to film the music video for ‘Hold Me’ on a 110-degree day in the Mojave Desert, it was the boiling point at which the British-American fraternity was pushed over the edge. The video’s producer, Simon Fields, recalled: “John McVie was drunk and tried to punch me. Stevie Nicks didn’t want to walk on the sand with her platforms. Christine McVie was fed up with all of them. Mick thought she was being a bitch, he wouldn’t talk to her.” A tough day at the office, indeed.
It’s easy to see in this context exactly why McVie later called the whole process “a nightmare,” and it’s fair to say she wouldn’t use those words lightly. With all the blazing rows Fleetwood Mac found themselves embroiled in over the years, if this is to be considered one of the worst, then it just gives a glimpse into how horrifically tense the experience must have been.
Unfortunately for them, however, they weren’t able to forget the tune in a hurry, as it renewed the band with a vital success, scoring the number four spot in the US for a then record-setting seven consecutive weeks. It’s aptly fitting that the album it hails from is called Mirage, as that certainly epitomises much of the band’s Jekyll and Hyde image within the public and private sphere. As it turns out, Fleetwood Mac’s nightmare only continued to plummet their dynamic on a hellish descent.
