Christine McVie reveals why she returned to the spotlight with new duet album

FLEETWOOD Mac star Christine McVie reveals why she returned to the spotlight with her band... and a new duet album.

By CLAIR WOODWARD
Express

The new album from Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie feels like a big, warm hug.

The great melodies, intimate harmonies and terrific arrangements are instantly recognisable as coming from two of the band’s songwriters yet they’re new and intriguing enough to make it more than just another side project from an iconic group.

And for Christine, 73 – the understated genius behind the keyboards in Fleetwood Mac and writer of some of their most recognisable songs (Don’t Stop, Little Lies, Say You Love Me, Hold Me and Everywhere) – the sensation of reconnecting with old friends was the inspiration behind the new collaboration.

She officially retired from the band in 1998, after stepping away from touring a few years earlier, and it was her return to it for the 2015 reunion tour that sparked the collaboration with Lindsey.

“We’ve always had a particular musical relationship since he first joined the band – it was immediate,” Christine explains in her warm, honeyed tone.

“The whole band was just chemistry abounding but Lindsey and I, me being the piano player and him the guitar player, understand each other musically without saying anything.

“We’ve always worked well together over the years but never thought about doing an album together until recently and now we wonder why we didn’t think about doing it before.

“The moment I knew I was going back into the band I flew over to Santa Monica to start rehearsals but, before that, I’d sent Lindsey a few demos of stuff I’d recorded and he went into his studio to arrange them. He played them back to me and I said, ‘These sound really great.’ So we decided to go and record them properly. (Fittingly, fellow Mac members Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, on drums and bass, also perform on the album.)

“After we finished the world tour, Lindsey got in touch and said, ‘What are we going to do with these songs, they’re too good to just shelve?’ So we decided to go ahead with releasing a duet album.”

Christine’s return to Fleetwood Mac and her new burst of creativity comes at a time when many people thought that, after several years away from the hurly-burly of rock star life, she would never be seen on stage again.

In the intervening years she moved from California where she had lived for the best part of 30 years (she grew up in Birmingham and moved to London after attending art college), and bought a beautiful country home in the village of Wickhambreaux, Kent, which she spent several years restoring.

“I felt very at home in California but the place is prone to earthquakes and the one in 1994 scared the life out of me. For months afterwards I felt that every time I sat down I should have put on a seatbelt. It was really bad and I thought, ‘I’m going to get a house in England.’ I got to a point where I’d been in a band for 40 years and wanted to get back to real life.”

Yet being a lady of leisure eventually proved to be not enough for Christine.

“I started to say, ‘OK, now what?’ I had my two dogs there, they were my life. My marriage (to keyboardist Eddy Quintela) fell through, so I was living on my own and felt isolated. Most of my friends were in London or Los Angeles and worked nine-to-five for a living.

“I did have some friends living with me for a while but, eventually, I reached a point where it was time to start changing things.”

The catalyst for this change was Christine’s need to overcome her fear of flying and the intervention of Mick Fleetwood.

“I had a horrible terror that the next plane I got on would crash,” she remembers.

“So I had therapy to get over that, and other issues I’d developed through isolation, and sorted myself out. My therapist and I discussed the idea of me writing songs again and trying to reach out to the rest of the band as well.

“The therapist asked where I wanted most to fly if I could and I said Maui (one of the Hawaiian islands), as Mick lives there and I have a lot of friends there. So I just bought the ticket without knowing if I’d actually go. I’d always stayed in touch with Mick and soon after I bought the ticket he said he was coming to London, so we met up and I flew back to Maui with him. I didn’t even notice the wheels leave the ground. Since then, it’s been great. I’ve even flown in Africa in one of those prop jobs.”

While with Mick in Maui, he persuaded her to get on stage with his local band, gradually coaxing her back into the idea of returning to her musical career.

“Steven Tyler, from Aerosmith, was there. We belted out a few songs and I just thought, ‘This is good...’”

Christine admits that it was performing live that sustained her through her final years before she left Fleetwood Mac.

“When I first left, I didn’t miss it as I was tired of the travelling. The gigs were the only thing that really sustained me.”

And after her long break, being back with her bandmates has given her a new lease of life.

The closing track on the Lindsey Buckingham/ Christine McVie album is called Carnival Begin, written by Christine and with its lyrics of “I want it all... a new merry-go-round” it is clear that she has a strong appetite for change. Fleetwood Mac’s famously colourful previous life, where sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll made for a potent combination, is now a thing of the past and they are enjoying better personal relationships and new respect from audiences.

“Underlying the band now is a great sense of affection,” reflects Christine.

“We bind together my style, Lindsey’s style and Stevie’s (Nicks) style as songwriters, and it’s a democratic band in that we make sure everyone has the same amount of songs to sing both onstage and on record, although I have to say, it’s Lindsey that really directs the band.”

Next month, Christine and Lindsey are touring the States with the new album and she is looking forward to it after Fleetwood Mac’s triumphant world tour in 2015.

“We had such a great range of ages in the audience, from people who bought our albums the first time around to their children and grandchildren.

“I think we’ve become a hip band to the younger generation. After being seen as middle-of-the-road, we are now fashionable again.”

Christine is now living in London and when she gets back from touring in America she will decorate her new house, which is currently “an empty shell filled with cardboard boxes”.

Who looks after her beloved dogs when she’s away, I ask?

“They passed last year. They were very obliging,” she laughs.

“My other house was for sale. They were 16 and had had a good life. It was sad but things came together at the right time. Everything is for the good in the end.”

The single In My World is out now; the album Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie is released on June 9 on Rhino Records.

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Stevie Nicks addresses a few rumours... head on!

Why I've gone my own way: On the edge of 70, Stevie Nicks addresses a few rumours... head on!

By CRAIG MCLEAN
Dailymail

Turning her back on Fleetwood Mac. Teaming up with Chrissie Hynde. And ditching drugs with a little help from Prince. The rock icon confronts all those rumours... head on!

Now this is a treat. It’s Saturday night in a cavernous rehearsal facility in the San Fernando Valley, over the hills from Hollywood, and I’m enjoying a private concert from rock ’n’ roll’s greatest woman – a living, breathing, dancing, sunglasses-indoors legend. Ahead of an American tour, Stevie Nicks is running through a selection of hits from her multi-million-selling career as a solo artist and as frontwoman with Fleetwood Mac.

Rhiannon, Gold Dust Woman, Stand Back, The Wild Heart, Edge Of Seventeen: these are some of the best-loved songs of the past 40 years. And the woman who wrote them – more used to wowing arenas – is standing a few feet away, singing them to me, bashing a tambourine as if her life depended on it, swirling in a vision of black scarves and drapes.

During a break, I sit down with Nicks and, as she cradles her beloved terrier Lily, she talks. And talks. At the age of 69, this warm, witty woman remains as irrepressible as ever. As is usual in the world of Fleetwood Mac, there’s a lot to discuss. One topic is her upcoming US shows with fellow icon Chrissie Hynde, in support of Nicks’ 24 Karat Gold album. Another is rumours of a Fleetwood Mac tour – a tour that’s possibly a farewell one.

But more pressing is the imminent release of Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie. It’s ostensibly a duo album from Mac guitarist Buckingham and keyboard player/singer McVie. In the set-up and billing, it feels like a successor to Buckingham Nicks. This legendary ‘lost’ 1973 album was made by Stevie and Lindsey – then a couple – before the Californians joined a mouldering English blues band led by drummer Mick Fleetwood and assisted by bass player John McVie.

Their duo act didn’t last, and neither did their relationship. But Nicks’ and Buckingham’s songwriting contribution – not to mention their split, as famously documented in their songs on 1977’s 40-million-selling album Rumours – helped rocket-power Fleetwood Mac to Seventies rock’s mega-league.
When we speak, Nicks hasn’t heard the Buckingham/McVie album. ‘I was gone when they were doing it,’ she says. ‘I was in Nashville making 24 Karat Gold. And when they were finishing it, I was on this last tour. I’m sure it’s pretty great, because why wouldn’t it be?’

John McVie (Christine’s ex-husband) and Mick Fleetwood also play on the album. Which begs the question: if Nicks had contributed, would it have been a Fleetwood Mac album? The band haven’t made an album since 2003’s Say You Will, so it feels like time...

‘It probably would have been, but I had just given three years to Fleetwood Mac [for the last tour] and I wanted two years off. And they decided to go into the studio and I said: “I’m not going. But you guys can do whatever you want.”’

She understands why Christine was keen to make the album. The English keyboard player rejoined Fleetwood Mac in 2014 after a decade-and-a-half’s retirement in Kent.

‘Christine had been gone for 16 years and she had [only] done one tour and she needed to work. She needed to stand in front of those keyboards and write songs and play. And that’s why Fleetwood Mac will probably go back out next year and do a farewell tour,’ Nicks reveals. ‘Because Chris really wants to. Because she was gone for so long.’

For her part, Nicks can’t conceive of retiring. In that regard, her current partner is the perfect musical compadre. Both Nicks and Hynde have been through the sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll wars. Tragically, The Pretenders’ frontwoman lost two band mates to drugs, while Nicks has had her own well-publicised battles with addiction in the Seventies and Eighties. She’s also had her share of intense love affairs: with Buckingham, with Fleetwood, and also with Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh and producer-turned-Apple-exec Jimmy Iovine.

These days, though, she’s contentedly single, surrounded by a wide circle of musician friends and various godchildren. Nicks’ homes in Los Angeles – one on the beach in Venice and one in the nearby hills – are retreats where she can indulge her love of writing poetry, reading the Twilight novels and watching Game Of Thrones.

That said: while both Nicks and ardent vegetarian Hynde, 65, are now both the epitome of clean and serene, they’re also capable of kicking up an onstage storm.

‘We became really good friends,’ says Nicks. ‘She calls me the Elizabeth Taylor of rock ’n’ roll. Because I always arrive in [hair] rollers with my big Elizabeth Taylor sunglasses, and my hair’s usually wrapped because it was cold when we first went out on tour.

‘But on stage, we don’t feel old. And hopefully we don’t look old! When we feel it’s not cool any more, we’ll change our shows. We’ll do more intimate shows and we’ll do more ballads. We’ll never be age-inappropriate.’

As for her ‘day-job’ band, their shows remain as huge, hits-filled and entertaining as ever. ‘When we did the last Fleetwood Mac show, on my birthday,’ Nicks recalls, referring to the band’s gig at London’s O2 in May 2015, ‘it was the nicest birthday I’d had in ten years. Harry Styles brought back a cake. Mick [Fleetwood] has kind of adopted him. There are just women in Mick’s family and Harry is that tall, lanky musical son he always wanted, so they keep in touch.’

Indeed, so do Styles and Nicks. A few weeks after our meeting, she joins the visibly awestruck 23-year-old onstage for three songs at LA’s Troubadour. Even the hottest 20-something in pop has his fanboy moments.

No doubt Nicks’ UK fans, celebrity and otherwise, will be out in force at London’s Hyde Park in July. As part of the British Summer Time concerts, she’s playing with headliners Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers. She counts Petty as her lifelong musical brother, and she pops up several times in the Florida rocker’s recent authorised biography, Petty. And the affection between the pair goes both ways.

‘There was a point when Tom thought I was probably not going to make it,’ says Nicks. ‘He said, “I started to expect I would get a phone call to say that Stevie had died from a drugs overdose”.’

Nicks has always been wholly honest about her years abusing drugs, notably cocaine. But she’s come out the other side, not just intact but shining. The same, tragically, can’t be said for her friend Prince. The pair collaborated on Nicks’ 1983 solo album The Wild Heart, and the two remained close.
‘He was as against drugs as anybody I’ve ever known. But what happened with him was that from the very beginning, he was doing insane things like jumping off six-foot risers in little Argentinian heels – and smashing down into the ground.’

Prince was reported to have died from an accidental overdose of the prescription painkiller Fentanyl.

‘He thought I absolutely was going to die of a drugs overdose. This guy gave me a lecture on over-the-counter cough medicine!’ she exclaims. ‘That’s when I was totally a drug addict and he was straight as an arrow. He’d bring me cough medicine when I was sick and then I’d ask for another spoon of it, and he’d go, “I didn’t come here to start you on a new drug!” I’m like, “Come on, really, please, seriously?” ’Cos I’ve done way worse.’

That, however, is a long way behind her. Now Nicks gets all her highs playing shows. ‘When I go up on that stage, that arena is my own personal house of love. And I’m going up there to tell these funny stories and to make people pump their fists in the air. I want to bring joy to these people.’

The same applies to Fleetwood Mac. Nicks ‘of course’ will take part in the band tour she mentioned earlier. But will it really be a farewell trek? ‘Well, we’re not young. The thing is, I’m probably still going to be performing long after next year. But as for everybody else, I don’t know. We’ll be skating into our seventies.’

For her part, performing is what keeps Nicks youthful and rocking – and with an energy and enthusiasm artists half her age would kill for. ‘Totally!’ she says. ‘It’s the love of my life.’