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Wed 3 December 2025 20:00, UK
In the grand tale of Fleetwood Mac, Christine McVie could have been seen as the peacekeeper through the worst of times.
Although anyone would have been liable to explode when working on the album Rumours, Christine was more than happy to be the mother of the group and put anyone in their place if they said something out of line. But even if she could put her differences aside for the good of the band, there were often limits on her patience that people were more than willing to cross.
Then again, her relationship with John McVie was bound to be one of the biggest hurdles for her to get over during the band’s best years. The thought of them continuing on in the group after getting a divorce couldn’t have been an easy decision, but the idea of Christine eventually writing tunes like ‘You Make Loving Fun’ about the guy that she was seeing after John would have been enough to put subzero vibes in the room when they played.
But if there was one loose cannon in the group during those days, it was Lindsey Buckingham. While those fights have been water under the bridge for a while, the fact that Buckingham went so far as to strangle an engineer during recording and got into physical fights with Stevie Nicks onstage wasn’t going to earn him any points as one of the most reasonable members of the band or anything.
If Christine could have stomached that kind of behaviour, though, getting someone else in to take his place should have been a walk in the park, right? Well, yes and no. You see, if Buckingham isn’t in the band, you don’t get nearly as many blowups, but that also means that you lose a lot of great songs in the process. And it’s not like Billy Burnette was exactly the best replacement anyone could have hoped for on Behind the Mask.
Although Christine felt that the album was best left forgotten after Nicks eventually moved on to her solo career, Time was a disaster from the start. Once it was clear that The Dance was a one-off and the group wasn’t getting back together, getting Dave Mason and Bekka Bramlett into the mix made the band feel like a husk of what they once were when they began making music under the Fleetwood Mac name.
Christine tried for as long as she could, but she felt that any chance of her having a good time were diffused the minute Mason walked in the door, saying, “Dave Mason and I did not get along, and I thought the music was suffering. I think Mick thought it was the end of the road as well, for the first time.
“Also, I was more gone than them during the making of Time. Emotionally not there, physically not here. I just didn’t show up. I left Mick and John holding the baby. I couldn’t bear watching it all fall apart. And I couldn’t keep peace with Dave Mason, I’m afraid. It was very acrimonious with him and I just bailed.”
So when one of the last legendary songwriters in the band is recording without the rest of the group and bails halfway through, it’s clear they weren’t going to be delivering another Rumours or anything. Even when talking about it later, Bramlett remembered that Nicks had a few choice words for her singing style when she caught a performance of them playing, recalling that the ‘Gold Dust Woman’ that she oversang a lot of her famous parts.
I don’t begrudge Bramlett for making the best of a bad situation, but the idea of Mason barging in and stirring up controversy with Christine was never going to be the best foot forward. And considering the amount of heartache, booze, and bullshit that she had to deal with throughout her career, you know that something is messed up within Fleetwood Mac when even Christine couldn’t be asked to stick around.
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