The complicated life of Christine McVie celebrated in biography

Nearly two years after her death at age 79, Christine McVie is receiving overdue appreciation as the dueling doyenne in Fleetwood Mac.
“Songbird: An Intimate Biography of Christine McVie” (out Nov. 19, Hachette Books, 340 pages, $32.50), examines the transformation of the Birmingham-bred, keyboard-mastering Englishwoman from art student to understated anchor of Fleetwood Mac.
The book is named for McVie’s signature song, one of her four contributions to Fleetwood Mac’s legendary 1977 “Rumours” album. Never a major hit – it was the B-side to the ethereal Stevie Nicks-fronted “Dreams” – “Songbird” nonetheless became the band’s standard concert closer, a stark piano ballad both heartbreaking and romantic, that spotlighted the usually reticent McVie.
But her contributions to the band (“Don’t Stop” and “You Make Loving Fun” among her numerous penned hits), coupled with her quiet authority, were so necessary to the alchemy of Fleetwood Mac that Nicks and Mick Fleetwood have pronounced that Mac is no more without McVie.
British author Lesley-Ann Jones, a former Fleet Street journalist who has written bios of Freddie Mercury, Marc Bolan and childhood friend David Bowie, draws from her own conversations with McVie over the years, as well as exhaustive research and other interviews that are meticulously cataloged.
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While the “Songbird” biography doesn’t drop any scandalous revelations, it provides a solid summary of the woman born Christine Perfect, whose love life and musical motivations often intertwined to conjure magic.
Here are some highlights.
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Before she joined the blues outfit Chicken Shack (the term means “roadhouse”) in 1966, McVie planned to become a teacher, specializing in sculpture (she followed her father, Cyril, in his passions for art and music).
Her intention was a combination of genuine interest in the art form, particularly Egyptian and Greek friezes, and the thought of guaranteed employment.
“There was this idea in the back of my mind that if I chose a relatively unusual subject, I would always work,” she said.
But an introduction to other art students who happened to play blues music changed her trajectory and her involvement in Chicken Shack would lead her on a fortuitous path to joining Fleetwood Mac.
Though the tangled relationships in the band added to the soap opera that often was Fleetwood Mac and, intentionally or not, inspired the scalpel-to-heart songs crafted for “Rumours,” McVie believed that her six-year marriage to Mac bassist John McVie might have survived in another setting.
“In hindsight … I sometimes wonder whether I would have been happier if I’d stuck to the plan. Become a mum. Supported John in his career and kept in the background,” she told Jones in 1999, a year after she departed Fleetwood Mac.
McVie also told Rolling Stone that, “I just think it’s impossible to work in the band with your spouse. Imagine the tension of living with someone 24 hours a day, on the road, in an already stressful situation  with the added negativity of too much alcohol.”
John McVie’s drinking issues have been well-documented, and McVie confirmed the effect on their marriage, saying, “John is not the most pleasant of people when he’s drunk. Very belligerent. I was seeing more Hyde than Jekyll.”
When Mick Fleetwood approached the other band members with a recording of a duo called Buckingham Nicks and suggested they join the band (he really wanted only Lindsey Buckingham but was informed they came as a pair), McVie balked at the idea of another woman joining the gang.
But as soon as she met the beguiling Nicks, she was smitten with the new co-star who would become her complement.
“It was critical that I got on with Stevie because I’d never played with another girl,” McVie told BBC Four for a documentary that aired after her death. “But I liked her instantly. She was funny and nice, but there was no competition. We were completely different on the stage … and we wrote differently.”
Nicks concurred in a 2020 interview in The Face magazine, recalling that she was “awestruck” the first time she met McVie when she was 28 and McVie 33.
Nicks said elsewhere that she and McVie made a pact at their first rehearsal that “we would never accept being treated as second-class citizens in the music business.”
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McVie decided to “quit the rock ‘n’ roll madness” in 1998 and return to her English manor in Kent, longing for freedom and quiet. But once time-consuming renovations at the property concluded, she found herself isolated and ambivalent about the solitude.
She became a voracious TV viewer (“ER” and crime dramas) and reader (fantasy novels), but also a heavy drinker who relied on medications to help her sleep. A fall down the stairs prompted a life change when she realized that “there was no one to hear her screams” living alone.
She rejoined Fleetwood Mac in 2014, telling the Sunday Times that she felt like she had emerged from “mud and gray days, where your life is dark, your heart is dark and your brain is dark.”
The band’s On With the Show world tour played 120 concerts throughout 15 months and earned nearly $200 million. It marked the final time the “Rumours”-era members of the band – the McVies, Nicks, Fleetwood and Buckingham – would tour.