#Anne Christine McVie

[justforbooks]

Fleetwood Mac were Brit-rock stalwarts when, in 1974, they hit on the idea of pepping up their lineup. They invited a folky Californian, Lindsey Buckingham, to join, but he refused to come without his girlfriend, Stevie Nicks. The band agreed, on one condition: their sole female member, Christine McVie, had to feel comfortable with Nicks.

They met over dinner in Los Angeles, and McVie, finding Nicks “funny and nice, but also, there was no competition”, waved her through. That decision led to the enlarged band becoming the sultans of soft rock, underlining McVie’s status as the quiet pillar of the Mac apparatus. (And she was right; Nicks complemented rather than competed. She was the ethereal conjuror, McVie the “very, very, very English” – in Nicks’s appraisal – countermeasure, and neither ever upstaged the other.)

McVie, who has died aged 79, was co-lead singer, keyboardist and author of many of the group’s canonical tunes, including Say You Love Me, Over My Head and You Make Loving Fun. Understatement shaped her identity, with Rolling Stone magazine rather insultingly calling her “the epitome of rock’n’roll sanity”. That kind of thing riled her: “I was probably the most restrained, but I was no angel,” she protested, claiming that one of her most acclaimed compositions, Songbird, owed its existence to “a couple of toots of cocaine and a half-bottle of champagne”.

Nevertheless, she avoided the spotlight, often literally. At gigs her domain was a relatively modest keyboard set-up at the side, safely away from stage centre, and despite her talent – “the finest blueswoman and piano player in all of England,” the drummer, Mick Fleetwood, maintained – she was self-deprecating about her abilities.

Deeply melodic love songs, burnished by her warm alto, were McVie’s stock in trade, but she could address her unhappy ex-husband, John McVie, with equal tenderness. The 1977 Top 3 hit Don’t Stop, later used as the theme tune for Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, did just that. Written during sessions for the landmark Rumours album, when relations between the pair were at their worst, it sunnily encouraged John, the band’s bassist, to look forward rather than brood about the past. (She blamed their periodic break-ups, culminating in divorce in 1976, on the stress of being in the same group, and her husband’s heavy drinking: “John is not the most pleasant of people when he’s drunk,” she said in 2003. “I was seeing more Hyde than Jekyll.”)

She didn’t deliberately write commercial songs, she insisted; they just came out that way. Which was just as well – in 1975, as the group were grinding through an American tour, their US label chose Over My Head to soundtrack a radio campaign for their self-titled new album. The LP duly became their first real smash, selling more than 9m copies. For that matter, the 1977 behemoth Rumours arguably owed a good chunk of its 45m sales to the two McVie tracks released as singles, Don’t Stop and You Make Loving Fun, which remain soft-rock touchstones to this day.

The younger child of Cyril Perfect, a music teacher, and his wife, Beatrice (nee Reece), Christine was born in Bouth, then part of Lancashire and now in Cumbria, and raised in Bearwood, West Midlands. Her mother’s avocation was spirituality and Christine was uncomfortable around her circle of faith-healer friends, but an even heavier burden was being saddled with the name Christine Perfect. “Teachers would say: ‘I hope you live up to your name, Christine.’ So, yes, it was tough.” She so disliked it that after her divorce she kept her married name.

As a child, she studied classical piano and cello, only becoming interested in rock at 15, when her brother left Fats Domino sheet music on the household piano. She was an instant convert to the blues, developing a driving, boogie-woogie left-hand piano style, but music became secondary to her other consuming interest, art. Five years at Birmingham Art College yielded a sculpture degree, but she emerged with a revived passion for music, thanks to having spent her university time busking with her friend Spencer Davis and playing bass in a band called Sounds of Blue, led by Stan Webb.

Listlessly working as a window dresser at Dickins & Jones department store in London after graduation, Christine was delighted to be asked to join Webb’s new outfit, Chicken Shack, as keyboardist and vocalist. One of the only women in the mid-1960s British blues scene to both sing and play an instrument, she got noticed. Though she later dismissed Chicken Shack as a “mediocre sort of white blues band”, she sang lead on their only Top 20 song, a dreamy cover of Etta James’s I’d Rather Go Blind, and was voted Melody Maker’s top female vocalist of 1969 (she won the same award in 1970, after releasing a solo album entitled Christine Perfect).

She fancied the guitarist Peter Green of the rival blues act Fleetwood Mac, but it was John McVie who asked her out. “It was Peter Green I had a bit of an eye on,” she said during a Desert Island Discs broadcast in 2017. “I started talking to John and fell head over heels with him.” They married in 1968, and a few months later, deciding she was not seeing enough of her husband, she left Chicken Shack with the intention of being a housewife. It lasted only until her manager persuaded her to make the solo LP, an “immature” effort she later preferred to forget. The next step was joining Fleetwood Mac as a permanent member in 1970, having already played uncredited on several studio sessions.

She was dubious about the band’s decision to relocate to Los Angeles in 1974, but reconciled herself to Californian rock-star life, buying Anthony Newley’s old house and a pair of Mercedes-Benzes with her lhasa apso dogs’ names on the number plates. While making the follow-up to Rumours, Tusk, she dated the Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, but her next significant relationship, with the Portuguese keyboardist Eddy Quintela, was happier and more productive. He played on her second solo album, Christine McVie (1984), and after their marriage in 1986 the pair wrote one of Mac’s biggest hits of the 80s, Little Lies. The marriage foundered, however, when McVie found herself craving a quiet life in England; she quit the band in 1998 and bought a Tudor house in Wickhambreaux, Kent.

Fifteen years of “this country life with the welly boots and the dogs and the Range Rover” proved enough, and matters definitively came to a head when she fell down a flight of stairs and became dependent on prescription painkillers. It was, she said, a bleak time, not least because another attempt at a solo career had failed to launch. She had made the album In the Meantime with her nephew, Dan Perfect, in 2004, purposely veering away from Fleetwood Mac’s big-ticket lushness. But without it, the relaxed, mid-tempo songs had little zing; moreover, a fear of flying kept her from travelling to promote it. Innately a team player, after therapy to overcome her phobia she rejoined Mac permanently in 2014.

Reaction to her return was roaringly positive, both from fans and the band themselves; to Mick Fleetwood, it made the group “complete” again. In the same year, she received an Ivor Novello lifetime achievement award. McVie’s last recording was a self-titled joint album with Buckingham, a Top 5 British hit in 2017. It caught her in a reflective mood but her gift for melody was undimmed. Her final public performance was at a tribute show for Green in London in February 2020.

In June this year, a solo compilation, Songbird, was released, but McVie was adamant that she wouldn’t tour again. “I don’t feel physically up for it. I’m in quite bad health. I’ve got a chronic back problem, which debilitates me. I stand up to play the piano, so I don’t know if I could actually physically do it.”

She and Quintela divorced in 2003. Her brother, John, and nephew survive her.

🔔 Anne Christine McVie, musician, born 12 July 1943; died 30 November 2022

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Follow up on my last post

This years

International Women‘s Day

dedicated to

*Girls in Rock*

70s trailblazers

[the-summer-sun-au]

Source: champagne_and_vinyl , Instagram

[krispyweiss]

Quarter Notes: Blurbs & Briefs from Sound Bites

- In this edition: Pink Floyd; Sarah Jarosz; Paul McCartney; & Christine McVie

DARK SIDE OF THE MOON RISES ON THE CHARTS: Pink Floyd’s the Dark Side of the Moon eclipsed another record - its own - by bagging its 985th nonconsecutive week on the Billboard 200, Forbes magazine reports.

Sitting at No. 193, the 1973 LP is the longest-charting album in the history the top-200 list.

A SARAH JAROSZ SATURDAY MORNING: Sarah Jarosz will appear on “CBS Mornings” on Dec. 16, ahead of the Jan. 26, 2024, release of Polaroid Lovers.

MCCARTNEY CALLS III BACK AGAIN: Paul McCartney on Dec. 15 will re-release McCartney III in three colored-vinyl-and-lyrics-sheets-or-sketches configurations to mark the album’s third birthday.

CHRISTINE MCVIE BIOGRAPHY DUE NEXT YEAR: Lesley-Ann Jones’ “Perfect: An Intimate Biography of Christine McVie” is scheduled to hit bookshelves June 20, 2024.

12/12/23

[woodencup]

A Land Of Hopeless Glory

Badfinger - No Matter What Chicken Shack - I'd Rather Go Blind (BBC Live) Faces - Cindy Incidentally Wings - Letting Go Sandy Denny - Listen, Listen Rory Gallagher - For The Last Time (BBC Live) Anne Briggs - Living By The Water John Martyn - Fly On Home Jeff Beck Group - Greensleeves Peter Green - In The Skies Bert Jansch - A Woman Like You Led Zeppelin - Over the Hills and Far Away

[kenpiercemedia]

Fleetwood Mac Announces The Passing of Christine McVie (1943-2022)

Fleetwood Mac Announces The Passing of Christine McVie (1943-2022)

The band Fleetwood Mac has announced the passing of their keyboardist/vocalist Christine McVie. I have added the official statement down below. “The are no words to describe our sadness at the passing of Christine McVie. She was truly one-of-a-kind, special and talented beyond measure. She was the best musician anyone could have in their band and the best friend anyone could have in their life.…

[doyourememberrocknrollradio]

Christine McVie - Got A Hold On Me

RIP Christine Anne McVie July 12, 1943 – November 30, 2022

[ultra-francesca-mercury]

july 12

1943

Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac is born Christine Anne Perfect in Bouth, Lancashire, England.

[odk-2]

Christine McVie 1943 - 2022

Christine McVie Christine Anne McVie (née Perfect) July 12, 1943 – November 30, 2022

English Musician | Fleetwood Mac | Keyboardist | Singer | Songwriter

Christine McVie, of Fleetwood Mac, is Dead at 79 - NYT As a singer, songwriter and keyboardist, she was a driving force behind one of the most popular rock bands of the last few decades.

Christine McVie, Keyboardist and Singer for Fleetwood Mac, Dead at 79 - RollingStone The singer-songwriter was responsible for some of the group's biggest hits like "Don't Stop" and "Little Lies"

Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac Singer-Songwriter, Dies Aged 79 - BBC

Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie Dies at Age 79 - The Guardian Family say the musician, who was in one of the best-known rock bands of the 1970s and 80s, died after a short illness

Christine McVie - Wikipedia

[rogeriswater]

Maggie Robinson and women of rock

From top left to right: Ann and Nancy Wilson, Patti Smith, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Nicks, Maggie Robinson, Christine McVie, Debbie Harry, Grace Slick, Janis Joplin

Requested by @iloverocknrollstuff

[thats-h0w-th3-light-g3ts-in]

Christine at the beginning of her career in the late 60s in England.

She was born Christine Anne Perfect

She studied sculpture at Moseley School of Art in Birmingham

She worked at a department store as a window dresser

She played in a band called Chicken Shack with Andy Sylvester Stan Webb

She won Melody Maker awards for best female vocalist in 1969 and 1970

She eventually married bassist John McVie of FleetwoodMac and the rest is history

[bawnjourno]

no, fleetwood ass hasn’t been my favorite band since 2019, yes, miss christine anne mcvie still has one of the most angelic and precisely gorgeous voices to ever sing rock music

[hyenaswine]

Christine Anne Perfect McVie 💔 (12 July 1943 - 30 November 2022)

[manitat]

Christine Anne McVie (née Perfect; 12 July 1943 - 30 November 2022) was an English musician, and the vocalist and keyboardist of Fleetwood Mac, which she joined in 1970. She also released three solo albums… Christine Perfect is the eponymous debut solo album of former Chicken Shack keyboardist and singer Christine Perfect, later known as Christine McVie… Christine died in hospital at age 79 on 30 November 2022, following a short illness…

[nebris]

Christine Anne McVie (née Perfect; 12 July 1943 — 30 November 2022)