Credit: Far Out / LastFM
Sun 30 August 2026 0:00, UK
Christine McVie didn’t ever want to stir the pot whenever she worked with Fleetwood Mac.
She could always be counted on to have a level head throughout everything that they worked on, and even though her heart was breaking partway through Rumours, she was always willing to put on a brave face and make songs that would have broken anyone else’s heart if they tried to write them. But even though she had a lot less to worry about after their musical soap opera, the hard times weren’t suddenly over, either.
In fact, a lot of the biggest albums that the band released after their magnum opus all had a little bit of baggage attached to them in some form or another. A lot of that came down to Lindsey Buckingham being more than a bit overly controlling of what he wanted from everyone, but it’s not like Christine had to go with the flow every single time they began working on one of Buckingham’s strange creations.
She was the first to say that Tusk was one of the strangest recording processes she had ever been a part of, and when looking at how the band shaped out throughout the 1980s, she was far more content to make music that had a bit more of a mellow groove to it. Buckingham was still trying to push the needle and find everything that he could to test himself, but there’s a reason why some of the biggest songs from the MTV age came from Christine singing tunes like ‘Little Lies’ and ‘Everywhere’.
But even after spending time not speaking to John McVie whenever they were onstage together, they at least were able to let the dust settle and be cordial with each other whenever it came time to put on a show later in their career. She didn’t need to carry that kind of emotional baggage around anymore, but things were bound to turn tragic when she began dating Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys.
On the surface, though, there was nothing all that abnormal about her getting together with one of the finest singers in America. He was trying his best to make a name for himself on his own, and while he was always going to be overshadowed by his older brother, Pacific Ocean Blue already proved that he had the same kind of musical chops to hang with just about any other songwriter at the time. But after not taking care of himself for so long, Wilson’s body gave out when he drowned in the early 1980s.
And while Christine had already faced her own issues with Wilson, she couldn’t imagine that he would have been taken from her so soon, saying, “I tend to go for these half-little-boy characters. When Dennis was like that, he was just adorable. He was really a sensitive, sweet man. My secretary called me up at eight in the morning. I knew something was wrong. She said, ‘Dennis drowned today.’ And my first reaction was to say, ‘My God, is he all right?’ I still really can’t believe it. He just seemed indestructible.”
Further reading: From The Vault
Wilson’s death snuffed out one of the most unsung talents in American music, and even though the rest of the band was left to carry on without him, a lot of the best songs on their 1970s records came from him. Sunflower was already one of the most experimental albums they had made since the 1960s, but ‘Forever’ will always be one of the greatest love songs they have ever written that isn’t called ‘God Only Knows.’
Wilson had a natural talent for melody just as much as his brother Brian did, and while Christine felt that he was one-of-a-kind, his legacy wasn’t going to die along with him that fateful night in 1983. He had already become a legend of American music, and the rest of his bandmates had no problem shouting his praises every single time they played one of his tunes every time they toured.
