Movies

The Unbreakable Bond of Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks – Rolling Stone

December 3, 2022

The creation of Fleetwood Mac’s most notable lineup was that Christine McVie loved Stevie Nicks. By 1974, McVie had been with the band for several years, joining shortly after his marriage to founding member John McVie. She was the only girl in the group of men, a dynamic she was used to.

Mick Fleetwood was the first member of the band to hear a Buckingham-Nicks song and suggested they invite Lindsey Buckingham to be their new guitarist. But Buckingham told the group he and Nicks were a forfeit.

“Mick came up to me and said, ‘They’ve got a girl involved here. You’re gonna have to meet her and see if you like her,'” McVie recalled in a 2015 interview with rolling stone. “And we met and I liked her straight away.”

Nicks and Buckingham would officially join the band on New Year’s Eve, a life-changing decision for the entire band. Since the 1975s MacFleetwood on, the band would become one of the biggest in the world. At the helm were three singers, each unique in their performance style and songwriting approaches, but unified in creating soulful and evocative rock music with a pop sensibility that would take them to the top of the charts for a while. more than a decade until their first real split. at the end of the eighties.

Fleetwood Mac would fall apart and come back to life again and again, thanks to their decadent, drug and alcohol fueled tours and dramatic double breakups that would inspire the 1977s. Rumorsan album so enduringly popular that it surpassed Billboardthe year-end rock charts just this year.

Braving it all, McVie and Nicks, a unified female force against the overwhelmingly male rock energy of the era and their very band. To be a woman in music is to be constantly compared and only supported against other women in music. Regardless of genre, female performers are considered to be in a tight competition where few are expected to succeed, even though they all bring something unique to the table.

Editor’s Choice

But McVie and Nicks found the secret, reveling in the fact that there was strength in brotherhood. They didn’t see each other as competitors, mainly because they were both so different from each other in almost every way. On stage they provided such unique energies and in the studio their styles diverged almost completely. Combined, they were able to play out their divergent personalities on each other’s songs, providing the yin to each other’s yang, depending on the track or the day. They weren’t just musical allies, but best friends, finding companionship and trust in each other as their relationships with their ex/bandmates threatened to derail the whole thing.

“We were cool on stage,” Nicks recalled of Rumors breakups of the era in a joint interview with McVie in 2013. “But offstage, everyone was pretty angry. Most nights, Chris and I went to dinner alone, downstairs from the hotel, with security at the door.

At the heart of Fleetwood Mac’s success was the couple’s mutual love and respect. Nicks reiterated that McVie was her best friend in a heartfelt, handwritten tribute following McVie’s sudden death this week. Over the years, Nicks has praised and celebrated what McVie was able to give him, especially in the early days of the band. Five years apart, McVie had a head start on experience and wisdom which she easily passed on to Nicks. And they provided crucial emotional support during the most difficult times.

“She was my therapist and go-to person for just about everything,” Nicks said. vogue in 2020. “We met to get through this really difficult situation where no one was going to leave the group. Christine and I kept it all together saying to the three men, ‘You’re quitting because we won’t quit.’ Thank God I had her, but on the other side, thank God she had me.

While the story of Fleetwood Mac has stirred romantic turmoil through the ages, it has given us a true, great love story. It was the love between two best friends, an unbreakable bond that made everyone around them even stronger.

As Nicks said, “We really were a force of nature.”