The first rock ‘n’ roll musician who hooked Christine McVie and how it shaped her songwriting
Despite not being one of the biggest names within the genre, Billy Gibbons was raised on the blues, and so his description of it is always pretty accurate.
When he was young, his dad, who worked in the music business, told him he was going into the studio one day and decided to bring a young Gibbons along for the ride. Recording that day was none other than BB King, who played some of the most heartfelt guitar solos Gibbons had ever heard, and he’s been obsessed with the genre ever since.
“My dad was an entertainer. When I was seven years old, he said, “‘Listen, hop in the car. I wanna take you with me. I’ve got business to take care of at the recording studio’,” he said. “We went into the studio, he parked me in a chair and said, ‘You’ll probably like this, they’re recording a band. I’ll be in the office if you need me…’ It turned out to be a BB King recording session.”
Gibbons understands that the blues doesn’t need to be a complex genre; instead, the foundation of a song is built on three or four root notes, and then the rest of the track is developed around those notes. It gives musicians great room to manoeuvre, as they can solo over these chords in different ways, diving deeper and deeper into different pockets of music.
“There’s a secret language to the blues,” said Gibbons, “You need to say it without saying it! There is a mystique in the poetry and in those simple three chords that have been stretched every which way.”
No matter what genre of music you’re listening to, there is blues lying at the heart of it. Even if the artist in question isn’t considered a blues artist, they are channelling the innovative style as they try to portray emotion both with their music and lyrics. The greatest artists know that they are building on top of foundations set by the blues, and Christine McVie was one of them.
While we don’t consider a lot of her work as blues music, it was these musicians who triggered her initial connection with sound. When she went on to write songs like ‘You Make Loving Fun’, the emotion she was able to embed within the words and her instrumentation were all inspired by the blues. In the same way that Billy Gibbons was inspired by BB King, the first artist that McVie felt a real connection with turned out to be Fats Domino, and as luck would have it, she came across his work completely by accident.
“My brother, who was four years older than me, was into jazz. He had a saxophone at an early age. I had piano lessons,” recalled McVie, “Well, I was playing piano one day, and I looked in the piano stool, and there was a music book of Fats Domino. Because I could sight-read, I started playing the boogie bass.”
She continued, admitting that that was a real turning point. She was instantly a fan of blues, so much so that when she started writing her own music, she did so thinking of the iconic genre. “I got hooked on it, then I just got hooked on the blues,” she said, “Even today, the songs I write use that left hand, it’s rooted in the blues.”
