“Very sexy”: the 1980 song Christine McVie always adored
As the songbird that made Fleetwood Mac soar, Christine McVie saw the whole circus of music for a celestial height a few leagues above it all.
She joined amid their boozy blues days and rubbed shoulders with the likes of BB King. She was there when cocaine ruled the roost and pop-rock roared to the fore with Rumours. She was eternally exposed to everything that music has to offer, and she seemingly remained soulfully singular throughout.
Few other artists stayed in their lane quite as formidable. She was one of the greatest songwriters that the music industry has ever been graced with, and yet, despite her commercial triumphs, she seemed to exist outside of the industry.
But of all the outsiders observing the madness and refusing to yield to it, Steely Dan are perhaps the kings. Much like McVie, they seemed to be motivated by music alone. Thus, it is perhaps unsurprising that McVie fell in love with the band. But she also wondered if the Dan secretly loved the Mac too. “I love Steely Dan,” McVie told Mojo. “Of course, we were doing that sound before them. I wonder if we were an influence?”
In fact, McVie loved the band so much that she cited them among her three favourites alongside the Beach Boys and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Of all the elements that this trio shares, perhaps the facet that McVie could also join them in is bringing a hidden complexity to the world of pop. When it comes to Steely Dan, one song stood out on this venture for the ‘Songbird’ singer.
Appearing on BBC Radio 2’s ‘Tracks of My Years’, the late star stated that ‘Babylon Sisters’ was her favourite song by Steely Dan. Introducing the 1980 track, she explained, “This is one of my favourite songs ever”. The song itself is taken from what is also one of her all-time favourite albums, Gaucho.
If she was wondering whether Steely Dan had been influenced by Fleetwood Mac at this time, she might have also wondered whether they were the band who inspired this very song. You see, ‘Babylon Sisters’ used the biblical notion of a fallen people to discuss the decadent rabbit hole that many artists were tumbling down at that time. The song discusses cotton candy (cocaine) and the destructive behaviours that go along with it.
At the time, Fleetwood Mac were making their way through a line of cocaine that Mick Fleetwood claimed would be around seven miles long if you laid it end to end. This was pushing them to the brink of collapse. But it was also, in its own mad way, contributing to the same fantastic music.
Music not unlike the entirely subverted pop of Steely Dan, who were standing on the outskirts of the scene and skewering it with satire, not that McVie minded, she was self-aware enough to laugh about it all.
By the time the band were releasing Guacho, McVie had set them out in a league of their own. “It sounds like very sexy music to me,” she said in praise of the record, “much more so than their earlier albums, and every time I listen to it I hear something else in there.”
She concluded with a wry line that the Dan would no doubt appreciate, “Since then they have been plagiarising themselves. But that’s OK; I think they’ve earned the right. If you can’t plagiarise yourself, who can you plagiarise?”
With ‘Babylon Sister’, the group makes that perfectly clear. They sound entirely like themselves, somebody had to.
