Songbird stevie nicks9/25/2023 “For you there’d be no more crying…” It’s sort of like a little prayer for everybody.” “I couldn’t sleep, started to get a song rolling around in my head and I wrote it in half an hour,” she told The Guardian of the song’s genesis. Both would become celebrated tracks on the 40-million-selling ‘Rumours’, alongside McVie’s signature tune ‘Songbird’, which would often finish shows on their turbulent late-‘70s tours. Her affair with the band’s lighting engineer in the midst of her 1976 divorce from John inspired ‘You Make Loving Fun’, while ‘Don’t Stop’ espoused the positives of moving on from the past. While the band’s subsequent success is often attributed to the incoming couple’s country pop influence, it was McVie’s composition ‘Over My Head’ that first made Fleetwood Mac a US Top 20 proposition, and her ‘Say You Love Me’ that is considered – alongside Nicks’ ‘Rhiannon’ – one of the major highlights of their seven-million-selling self-titled 1975 breakthrough album.Īmid the emotional and relationship turmoil which enveloped the early years of the Buckingham-Nicks era Mac, McVie emerged with the most optimistic musical outlook. Within a year they had recruited struggling songwriting duo Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham to replace departing guitarist Bob Welch. With the band beginning to find their feet in the US charts by the time of 1974’s ‘Heroes Are Hard To Find’ – their first Billboard Top 40 hit – McVie decamped to the States with the core remaining members John McVie and Mick Fleetwood. McVie became a key songwriter and vocalist for the band, helping to steer their sound in a pop-rock direction over the course of five early ‘70s albums, as the band struggled to find a unified direction amid shifting line-ups following the loss of Green. They came out of the rehearsal room and said: ‘Hey Chris, do you want to join?’…The style had to change because I was a keyboard player, and it developed a more commercial bent.” “They were rehearsing at Kiln House ,” she told The Guardian in June this year, “and I was down there with all the wives. ![]() The following year she quit Chicken Shack, recorded a debut solo album entitled ‘Christine Perfect’ and then joined Fleetwood Mac in 1970, in the wake of Green’s departure. ![]() On the circuit she met Blue Horizon labelmates Fleetwood Mac – then fronted by the legendary Peter Green – and married their bassist John McVie in 1968. Moving to London, in 1967 she joined her ex-Sound Of Blue bandmates Andy Silvester and Stan Webb as pianist in Chicken Shack, who became a name on the British blues circuit over the course of their first two albums, thanks to a hit with a cover of ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’, a McVie vocal for which she won the Melody Maker’s Female Vocalist Of The Year in both 1969 and ’70. While studying sculpture at the Mosely School Of Art in Birmingham, McVie fell in with local blues musicians and began playing with Sound Of Blue and singing with Spencer Davis. Even the more recent things, like ‘Little Lies’ and ‘Everywhere’, they’re all blues based.”Ĭredit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images ![]() “’Don’t Stop’, ‘Say You Love Me’ … they all have that boogie bass, lefthand thing. Her classical training began at the age of eleven, and gave way to a love for the blues when she hit fifteen, when she flipped open the sheet music of a Fats Domino song her elder brother had left on the family piano. “My writing ability all stems from the blues,” she told The Guardian in 2013. ![]() Her grandfather was organist at Westminster Abbey and her father a concert violinist and music lecturer, while her mother was a psychic medium and faith healer. What’s more, having risen through the ‘60s and ‘70s blues scene to become one of Fleetwood Mac’s main songwriters during their post-Peter Green era, and then the calming core of one of rock history’s greatest success stories in ‘Rumours’, McVie has stood as an icon of pioneering female songwriting for decades, held dear by music lovers even through a 16-year reclusive period from 1998 to 2014.īorn Christine Anne Perfect on Jin the Lake District village of Bouth in Lancashire, A certain spiritual musicality was built into McVie’s psyche from the off. And woven deep into the fabric of modern pop and electronica are the sublime textures of her 1980s masterpieces ‘Everywhere’ and ‘Little Lies’, effectively the bedrocks of the ‘80s revivalism which has set the tone for so much 21st century music. In the immortal grooves of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’, one of the best-selling and best-respected albums of all time, the immaculate songwriting and crystalline voice of Christine McVie, who died yesterday (November 30) aged 79, is a thread of purity and stability cutting through the album’s emotional maelstrom and set to endure for generations.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |