The Fleetwood Mac song John McVie didn’t realise was about him
Music history is busy with drama. Bands across all genres and eras seem to be rife with stories of fallouts and fights, sometimes even totally destroying an entire group. Usually, they get into a series of blow-up arguments and have to decide to call the whole thing off. Normally, the working relationships become so totally impossible that the project has to cease existing. I mean, how could you stand in a studio and work alongside someone who hurt you so badly? How could you ever pen another song or write about the situation with the culprit present? Well, it seems that Fleetwood Mac were always immune to that.
The band went through the worst, time and time again, but stuck it out regardless. Stories of the Rumours sessions especially are now infamous, making it mindboggling that those fights weren’t the end of it all. Really, they should serve as the ultimate cautionary tale about mixing business and pleasure, reminding everyone that dating your co-worker or bandmate is not a good idea. But when the music was that good, and their career as a group managed to endure way beyond those 1976 sessions, they’re the exception to the rule.
The story goes that before Rumours, Fleetwood Mac was a band of couples. Christine and John McVie had been married for eight years. Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham were brought into the group as a package deal, having been dating and making music together since 1966. Mick Fleetwood was really the only free agent, but his moment for chaos would come in 1977 when he and Nicks had an affair.
For a while, that had worked great. But when it came to making Rumours, every single dynamic seemed to blow up. Nicks and Buckingham split and began writing increasingly callous songs about each other, like ‘Go Your Own Way’ or ‘Dreams’. However, at least they were open about their drama. The McVie’s tracks the other hand, were being more covert and infinitely crueler.
Christine McVie’s songs on the record always feel overwhelmingly optimistic and light amongst the drama. There’s the beautiful ballad, ‘Songbird’, or the seductive ‘You Make Loving Fun’. There’s also ‘Don’t Stop’, a track that has become the ultimate anthem for attempting to look on the bright side and keep on keeping on. It feels like a totally harmless track but actually contains a veiled knife.
Both ‘You Make Loving Fun’ and ‘Don’t Stop’ were written while McVie was having an affair with the band’s lighting guy Curry Grant. Her husband didn’t find out until the recording sessions when he was then forced to endure playing on songs his wife wrote about another man.
In this context, ‘Don’t Stop’ feels somewhat passive-aggressive. “Why not think about times to come / And not about the things that you’ve done,” McVie sings as if she’s trying to will forgiveness from both herself and her husband. It gets even worse when she sings, “I know you don’t believe that it’s true / I never meant any harm to you,” as a clear message to the man she cheated on. As if trying to gloss over her infidelity with an air of lightness and joy, ‘Don’t Stop’ is her attempt to make things better, as she didn’t make things bad.
It took her husband a while to cotton on to the message, unlike ‘You Make Loving Fun’, which is the song that blew up the marriage. “I never put that together,” he told Mojo in 2015. “I’ve been playing it for years, and it wasn’t until somebody told me, ‘Chris wrote that about you.’ Oh really?”
Maybe what you don’t know can’t hurt you, and maybe not realising the true nature of the song made it easier for the McVie’s to keep playing the hit over and over for decades. Their marriage, however, couldn’t be saved by blissful ignorance. In 1977, the pair divorced but somehow managed to keep their working relationship intact.
