The 2004 album Christine McVie wanted to forget about: “It got buried underneath the pits of hell”
Given how many of the other previous members of Fleetwood Mac tend to get praised ahead of her, there’s a case to be made that Christine McVie was perhaps the most criminally underrated member of the soft rock group during their most successful period, if not ever.
Having written songs like ‘Songbird’, ‘Everywhere’, ‘Don’t Stop’ and ‘Little Lies’, McVie is the one behind some of the band’s most enduring hits, and has a repertoire arguably equal to those of her bandmates, not least her husband, John. However, with the likes of Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, and even earlier members such as Peter Green having passed through the ranks of the British-American band, there are many people who are thought of in much higher regard than her, which has to have been one of the most frustrating elements of her career.
When you’ve evidently contributed so much to a project and yet don’t get the same levels of acclaim as a songwriter as the other contributing members do, often unfairly relegated to simply being a singer, it’s surely going to take its toll on your confidence.
With this constant underappreciation weighing down on you, there must be moments when you’d want to escape from the environment where you’re not appreciated enough and go out on your own so you can show what you’re really capable of.
However, while much of McVie’s work in the band was done without any assistance from other members, she ended up only ever releasing three studio albums’ worth of material as a solo artist. Given her pedigree and talents as a songwriter, she would certainly have been strong enough to cope in this sort of environment without the backing of her bandmates, and perhaps deserved to have had more time in the spotlight to demonstrate just how integral she’d always been to Fleetwood Mac.
That said, the sole solo record she made after having officially departed from Fleetwood Mac happens to also be her final album, In the Meantime, and it’s not one that she ever looked back on particularly fondly due to how nightmarish the process of creating it proved to be for her.
Since 1998, when McVie left Fleetwood Mac to pursue making her own music, the songwriter had lived in rural Kent and spent around three years assembling the songs that would turn into this 2004 album. However, she found herself experiencing extreme isolation in the countryside, which didn’t particularly help when it came to the undertaking of giving it the required fanfare following its release. “I did make a solo album in my house when I was there,” she told Rolling Stone in 2014, “And because I was just afraid of flying, I wouldn’t promote it, and I wouldn’t tour.”
In fact, not only did McVie feel unable to tour the record or give it the appropriate publicity, even a decade after its release, she found it to be underwhelming. “Actually, it wasn’t a very good album anyway,” she added, “It got buried underneath the pits of hell, I suppose”.
Going through her second divorce, stranded in the middle of nowhere and without her former bandmates to bounce ideas off, it was evident that the circumstances that surrounded McVie for her first and only post-Fleetwood Mac album were less than conducive to manifesting a creative spark. She may have been a talented songwriter, but it was the circumstances she’d previously found herself in that permitted her to be at her best, and in the early 2000s, she’d steered herself as far as possible away from those environments and found herself unable to muster up her usual magic.
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