(Credits: Far Out / YouTube)
Sat 25 October 2025 18:45, UK
Fleetwood Mac had to usually count on a few miracles to get them to where they are.
As much as people like the idea of their music reaching the people thanks to the quality of the tunes alone, it takes a lot more power to get people to listen for a few seconds, let alone play one of your records for decades at a time. And while Mick Fleetwood never took a second of his time in the spotlight for granted, he knew that it wouldn’t have happened were it not for the legends that he had by his side.
Then again, it’s hard to talk about Fleetwood Mac without looking at the different iterations of the band that have come and gone throughout the years. Many people may like to think that the version of the band that went their own way and had the rain wash them clean is the only one that people ever give a shit about, but leaving out their origin means losing half their identity.
Because as much as people like to ignore the first decade of their career, no one would have imagined that their beginnings were in the blues. Fleetwood was already one of the best drummers in England at the time, but after having one stint in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, forming a group with Peter Green was the best thing that could have happened to them. Green was a musical god in many respects, but he was bound to become a musical casualty as well.
Like many wayward geniuses before him, Green was bound to have a hard-fought battle with substance issues that ultimately resulted in him frying his brain a little too much. But even with the several frontmen that had come in to replace him, one of the biggest strengths of their songwriting was actually off to the side of the stage.
While Christine Perfect was far from the frontwoman role when she first joined the group, she had the chops to become the band’s foundation. The rhythm section may have been the one unchanging part of the band, but Fleetwood knew she was a necessity when he first saw her, saying, “They saw that Christine could write music, play piano, sing like an angel, rehearse all day with the men, and cook a big dinner without batting an eye. What kind of superwoman was this?”
But while Christine would eventually marry John McVie and become one of the focal points of the band during the Rumours era, a lot of people forget that she still had the blues chops to back her up. She wasn’t giving Janis Joplin a run for her money or anything, but she knew everything that made a band jump when she started to put a bit more boogie into the way that she played.
It might seem alarming that we’ve gone this long without talking about Stevie Nicks or Lindsey Buckingham in any capacity, but even when they catapulted the band to even greater heights, Christine was the one still powering through strictly on the power of her songs. Every one of her tunes from around that time was always some degree of good, and even on the band’s worst albums in their later years, she still found a way to stand out next to whomever she was playing off of.
That angelic voice may have seemed like the furthest thing from Green’s voice when the band first started, but if there was one thing that the band knew better than most, it was the importance of taking risks. Any other band would love to stay in their little bubble, but if they had stuck with the blues the rest of their lives, they would have never had Christine there to write their iconic hits.
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