“It made me get my skates on”: the one album Christine McVie was intimidated by
The last thing that any artist wants to be is washed up in the industry. The whole point behind any great songwriter is to keep pushing until they have better chops on every single project they release. Although Christine McVie hardly has a single bad song in her entire catalogue with Fleetwood Mac, there were moments when she had to take a step back and switch up her usual formula.
But when she first joined the band, the whole point behind Christine’s role was to be a breath of fresh air. This was when the group was still one of the leading figures in blues rock, and the idea of bringing in someone to play keys and sing the odd vocal was a far cry from the lowdown and dirty model that Peter Green had been fronting the band with for the past few years. Then again, that didn’t mean that Christine was going to change everything overnight.
Despite her penchant for the most soulful ballads in their catalogue, Christine could lay down a fantastic blues groove when she wanted to, and listening to her go back and forth with the other members of the band was a thing of beauty, especially when Bob Welch was brought in to add his jazzy guitar style to the group after Green left. Christine had become a co-frontwoman by this point, but there was no way that she was going to carry the rest of the group by the time Welch decided it was time to pack it in.
While Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks were barely a blip on the radar at the time, Buckingham Nicks was being woodshedded slowly a few doors away. Since Fleetwood Mac was working in the same studio, Mick Fleetwood was the one who listened in to see what this new band was working on, but after hearing Buckingham’s playing, he knew he would be the perfect foil to the rest of the group.
“It made me get my skates on.”
Christine McVie
But when going back to the rest of the group, it had to have been a super-convincing argument. After all, both Buckingham and Nicks had no other credits to their name at the time and only one album that flopped on the charts, but as soon as Christine had a listen to the record, she realised she was dealing with people who might even give her a run for her money if she wasn’t careful.
Years later, Christine remembered hearing the album and feeling like she might end up being displaced in the band if she didn’t step things up, saying, “We all met at Mick’s flat, and Stevie and I were so completely different from each other that we got along fine. I was intimidated by the quality of the songs on Buckingham Nicks. It made me get my skates on.”
Although most of the band hit it off fine on the first album, it’s a testament to Christine’s writing that her songs were some of the finest right out of the gate. ‘Rhainnon’ and ‘Landslide’ did have a certain aura about them when Nicks sang them, but ‘Over My Head’ and ‘Say You Love Me’ were a great way of getting people acclimated to the band’s more pop-oriented sound rather than their bluesy origins.
But let this be a lesson to anyone who thought that hitting the big time meant taking one’s foot off the gas. Most people can try to play it a little safer, but it sometimes only takes one record, song, or even chorus to knock someone down all over again.
