Who did Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie write ‘You Make Loving Fun’ about?
During the recording of Fleetwood Mac’s defining album Rumours in 1976, tempers were flaring all over the place. The band’s main talents, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, who’d join the band together as long-term romantic partners, were just about finished with each other. But they weren’t the only ones.
Husband and wife, John and Christine McVie, were going through a divorce. “It was awful,” John told Uncut reporter Nigel Williamson in 1997. “You’re told by someone you adore and love that they don’t want you in their life any more”. In fact, McVie had already set her sights on someone else. It wasn’t the first time she’d strayed from the marriage, as she took up with the band’s sound engineer Martin Birch after becoming increasingly disillusioned with her husband’s “belligerent” behaviour during bouts of heavy drinking.
But this time, it was the final nail in the coffin of their relationship. Christine was seeing her new lover at the same time as recording an album together with John. “Wherever John was, he couldn’t be,” she told Williamson. “There were some very delicate moments.” Still, she managed to pull off the balancing act, even writing a song about her affair and recording it with the man she was effectively cheating on.
It’s ironic that one of John McVie’s best bass lines in Fleetwood Mac’s entire discography comes on ‘You Make Loving Fun’, the song his wife had written about her new romantic partner. The lyric “I don’t have to tell you, but you’re the only one” must have been particularly painful for the bassist when he found out what the song was really about. At the time, Christine had come up with the rather dubious cover story that she’d penned the track about their dog.
So, who was it really about?
Having already had her dalliance with the band’s sound man, this time McVie fell for Fleetwood Mac’s lighting director, Curry Grant. While Grant was making loving fun of Christine, she and John essentially ignored each other, aside from the minimum they had to say to continue their working relationship in the band.
“We literally didn’t talk,” she told Cameron Crowe in 1977. “We were as cold as ice to each other because John found it easier that way.” It also made it easier for Christine to carry on her affair without raising any suspicion.
At the same time, John McVie buried himself in his drink and likely consoled himself in the room full of groupies Mick Fleetwood had invited over to the house where they were staying while recording Rumours. Before long, Fleetwood and Nicks would be embroiled in an affair that threatened to derail the group altogether.
If there was a classic example of the best music being produced on a knife-edge, it was Rumours. The dramatic tension between the McVies must have been palpable during the recording of ‘You Make Loving Fun’. Yet, it clearly made for a great record.
