Credit: Far Out / Warner Bros Records
October 30th, 2026 · 6:54pm GMT
In a world that could be as volatile as Fleetwood Mac’s, it sometimes pays to have someone like Christine McVie in the group.
As much as Mick Fleetwood was considered the group’s core leader every single time they made one of their records, Christine was normally the one acting as the parent of the group half the time, usually putting someone in their place when they screwed up or working on her own mature attempts at pop compared to what everyone else was doing. Amid all the fighting, she offered some small sense of peace, but there were always moments that could get her pissed beyond belief as well.
Because had it not been for her joining the band, there’s a good chance that she would have stayed with John McVie for the rest of her life. She knew that they needed a lot more space than they were being given, and when you look through all of the problems that come with being on tour and surrounded by your bandmates 24/7, Christine was not going to deal with her husband’s drinking problem any longer.
It had gone much too far for her taste, but that was only a drop in the bucket compared to what Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks were going through. Both of them had a rough reaction to their breakup, and while Nicks managed to take the high road and write tunes like ‘Dreams’ on their record, it’s almost like Buckingham was going out of his way to be malicious on tunes like ‘Second Hand News’.
There were a lot of emotional casualties going on there, but there came a point where all of that needed to stop. And while Buckingham leaving the band in the late 1980s would have been the straw that broke the camel’s back in a way, things started to escalate even further for Christine when the band started hashing out the album Tusk, which made for their most disjointed project yet.
The band had already been through their fair share of ups and downs, but rarely have they all happened on one record at the same time. The whole album sounded like solo projects smashing into each other just like The Beatles’ White Album, and while Christine could still hold it together for the recording sessions, she had absolutely no tolerance for when Buckingham decided to openly humiliate Nicks whenever the band started to tour for their records.
After one of their shows during Rumours resulted in Buckingham attempting to kick Nicks during the show and escalating the tension with every song, Christine admitted that she needed to take care of him once and for all, saying, “I think he’s the only person I ever, ever slapped. I actually might have chucked a glass of wine, too. I just didn’t think it was the way to treat a paying audience. I mean, aside from making a mockery of Stevie like that. Really unprofessional, over the top. Yes, she cried. She cried a lot.”
Further reading: From The Vault
Given that’s what happened during that time, it’s a miracle that they even managed to get through the rest of the 1980s. The breaks in between albums worked wonders for them, and even though Nicks did have problems with not getting as much airtime on Tango in the Night, Christine could go the other way as well, usually yelling at her by reading her the riot act about not showing up to the sessions.
Christine may have had her own agenda whenever she made some of her greatest records, but she always knew how to play fair as well. She wasn’t going to make music just for the sake of satisfying one band member, and when her bandmates were getting a bit too angry, she was going to tell them when they were acting like a child.
