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An extract from the biography of the Fleetwood Mac legend reveals how drugs, booze and illicit sex took a toll on the band’s relationships
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One of the great misconceptions about Fleetwood Mac is how Rumours came about. The band’s 11th album was designed, you often hear, to chronicle the breakdowns between three couples: Mick Fleetwood and his wife Jenny Boyd, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, and John and Christine McVie. As such, it’s often referred to as a “journey album”, even a “concept album”. There was no pre-planned structure. Drugs, booze, illicit sex and affairs simply took their toll, and as their relationships fell apart, Christine, Stevie and Lindsey all separately brought to the table cathartic pieces that laid bare their own pain, anger, despair – and a little hope.
As they began recording Rumours at the Record Plant Studios in Sausalito, California in February 1976, the band’s producer Ken Caillat soon got the measure of those five distinct personalities. Mick, for instance, was the leader, and a control freak: he would go all night if he could, and sod the home life. Stevie was “the new girl”, she and boyfriend Lindsey having joined the band only in January 1975, who was infuriatingly precious about “her words”. Woe betide anyone who suggested an alteration.
But of all the dynamics within the band, the McVies’ was the most fascinating. Singer and keyboard player Christine was the reluctant member, having quit her own fledgling music career to marry their bassist John, intending to become a housewife and, hopefully, a mother. Drifting into the line-up because she happened to be around when they needed backing vocals here, a bit of piano there, she quickly became an essential component, contributing not only cohesive keyboard-playing and blues-inspired songwriting but her aching and irresistible voice.
It was obvious to anyone who was paying attention that John, Mick’s trusty collaborator, “loved” her – but he also had the most dangerous mistress: the bottle. Christine knew that John was a drinker when she married him. ‘He drank to cope,’ she said, ‘with who he was and who he wasn’t.’ Divorce in the late sixties was a dirty word, but they lasted only eight years. Having called time on their impossible marriage, Christine appeared resigned. She was, nonetheless, able to rise above her feelings: she was still willing to work with John, provided he controlled himself and behaved like a mature adult. He could do this when he was sober, but he lamented their distance when in his cups. He must have known as well as Christine did that they were beyond reconciliation.
He may also have been wracked by jealousy. For Christine was now, in 1976, having an affair with a Fleetwood Mac hand: their suave lighting director, Curry Grant. Their relationship provided light, no-strings relief from the shame and heartache of her ruined marriage. Although the couple lived together for about a year at her West Hollywood home, she regarded their set-up as a convenience and reflected its status in her song You Make Loving Fun.
Christine’s affair with Curry was not her first. She had, three years previously “got tangled up… as my mother would say” with Martin Birch, the band’s married sound engineer. At 25, he was five years her junior. John was aware, and played tit for tat, with a string of groupies. He drank even more. The atmosphere during recording sessions for their 1973 album Mystery to Me became unbearable.
Although Birch, a loyal servant, had engineered five albums for the band, Mick and John fired him. (Grant was also fired, but only for a few months, to teach him a lesson – he was indispensable.).
Christine could have walked away – she was only 30 years old, talented and in her prime. She might have divorced John, cut her losses and resumed her solo career. Chicken Shack, the second-division pre-Fleetwood Mac blues outfit with whom she famously scored a hit with the Etta James cover “I’d Rather Go Blind”, would have had her back in a beat. But Christine knew the magical harmonies that she, Stevie and Lindsey conjured together were too precious to throw away.
Christine’s hesitation to walk away from such a destructive situation, she explained to me in the 90s, had been to do with a fear of “losing everything”: “I wasn’t brave enough, frankly. There was still the stigma of being divorced in those days. My pop [her father] would have been very, very disappointed in me. I didn’t dare do that to him. In some ways, thank God my mother wasn’t still alive to know about it.
“Martin was never going to leave his wife. I loved him, but I didn’t want to be a mistress – horrible word – forever. It wasn’t as if I could leave John and go straight into a new set-up with Mart. That was never an option – he made that clear. Neither of us had money, it was still only wages. And I was, you know, John’s missus, not a person in my own right. There was no future in it.
“There was something seedy about [the affairs],” she went on, despondently, “that dented my self-respect. Maybe that was how the others made me feel. If they did, that would have been subliminal – nobody actually said anything, which in some ways made it worse. I didn’t like myself during that whole period. I sank very low.”
Maybe another part of her, I ventured, had thought it might work out with John eventually? “I don’t know,” Christine said. “I disliked my husband intensely for what he’d become, for what he was doing to me and to our marriage. We should have had kids by then. At least one, maybe. But in a way, thank God we didn’t. I could understand completely how things had gotten so bad. We hated the sight of each other. The booze numbed the pain, as did the drugs.
“Fleetwood Mac had become the mistress of us all. There was a sense by then that we could be on the verge of something, a breakthrough – dare I say it, the big time. The band had us by the short and curlies. She wasn’t going to let us go.”
Though the McVies’ union was over (and would be finalised in 1978), both remained married to the band. As for the Fleetwoods, Mick and Jenny had divorced in 1976, remarried four months later, but fell apart again almost immediately. Stevie and Lindsey had disintegrated. Stevie and Mick had a damaging affair. Now international superstars thanks to Rumours, 1977 became “their year”. They toured the world triumphantly, a travelling soap opera, knowing that nothing would ever be the same again. In 1979, they released their punk-infused album Tusk. That same year, Christine met and fell hopelessly for “The One”, Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson. The notorious, four-times-married, hell-raising womaniser was so wrong for her that she couldn’t let him go. She believed that she could fix him. He proposed.
Though when, given their punishing schedules, were they going to have time to get married? What about children? She’d had her fallopian tubes tied around the time of her divorce from John but she told me later that she’d looked into the possibility of reversing that.
Five years before her death, Christine would discuss her childlessness with Kirsty Young on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. She now insisted that she had never wanted to be a mother.
Turning 40 proved devastating – her motherless status haunted her. Although she remarried in 1986, to Portuguese keyboard player Eddy Quintela, the marriage was a dud before it got off the ground.
The self-confessed ‘Daddy’s girl” was floored by her father Cyril’s death in July 1990. She found herself reliving the loss of her mother 22 years earlier, when she had swept her grief under the carpet. Her father’s passing rekindled that long-buried, unprocessed agony. “Losing Pop made me begin to look at my life differently,” she told me. “I could suddenly see that so much of it was pointless. Devoid of worth.
“A lot of [life],” she went on, “was going through the motions, and I was deferring actual living. For what? To satisfy the insatiable, ever-increasing demands of a record company? To keep the band going? To help keep the rest of them, the profligates, afloat? To make sure the fans carried on buying our records and seeing our shows, which in turn fed the record company? And there was that moment when I saw myself as a hamster in a wheel. I was rich beyond anything 15-year-old me could ever have imagined, ‘just’ from making music. But no amount of money, I knew, could buy me love or peace of mind. I woke up. I just didn’t want to live that lifestyle any more.”
Christine withdrew in 1990, and bought a manor house back in England. The band played on. Stevie Nicks was now immersed in a massive solo career. They regrouped for Bill Clinton’s presidential inauguration in January 1993, and four years later toured a live album, The Dance. After the New York performance at the Grammys, Christine left the band for good, blaming aviophobia, and moved into her renovated Kentish manor.
Rattling around in her huge home, lonely and depressed, she took up drinking and pills again. A fall down the stairs snapped her out of it. She could only go back. After therapy for fear of flying, she rejoined the Mac in 2014, 17 years after she had left. But her second coming would be short-lived. The health problems that blighted her final forays with the band ended her life in November 2022. She was 79.
Extracted from Songbird: An Intimate Biography of Christine McVie by Lesley-Ann Jones, published by Bonnier Books on Nov 14
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