Even as Fleetwood Mac announced a new tour for 2013, the question remained: What about Christine McVie?
A stalwart in the band from the early 1970s through the late 1990s, McVie wrote and sang a number of Fleetwood Mac’s best-known hits — including “Don’t Stop,” “Over My Head,” “Think About Me,” “Little Lies,” “Hold Me” and “You Make Loving Fun,” among others. But she declined to rejoin the group before its 2003 studio effort Say You Will, choosing instead to retire completely from the music business.
She has rarely been seen since, even by her former bandmates.
Fleetwood Mac, which has seen a staggering number of lineup changes since its late-1960s founding under the aegis of Peter Green, has continued forward with original bassist John McVie (Christine’s ex-husband) and drummer Mick Fleetwood, along with Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham.
The addition of Buckingham and Nicks, of course, helped propel the band to superstardom in the late 1970s, and now they’ve taken a central role in the band’s on-going journey..
This new tour, which will hit 34 cities, is set to kick off in April of 2013. Nicks has said that they could be performing as many as two new songs.
[SOMETHING ELSE! INTERVIEW: Co-founding guitarist Jeremy Spencer talks about Fleetwood Mac’s early days with Peter Green, and his amazingly diverse 2012 solo album.]
Meanwhile, McVie has attended just one of the Fleetwood Mac concerts since her departure, and she declined to perform. Buckingham, in a new talk with K-Earth101, says McVie has completely disconnected from the life she once knew.
“She ended up getting a divorce, she ended up selling her house in L.A., she moved back to England, she quit the band, she sold her publishing,” Buckingham said. “She didn’t necessarily have to burn as many bridges as she did. Everyone sometimes wonders whether or not there might have been more of a middle ground for her to strike, not necessarily in terms of her staying in Fleetwood Mac. But she just wanted to reinvent herself. She seems to want to lead the antithesis of the life she led before, and I don’t pretend to understand such a radical change but it was obviously something she needed.”
Asked if Fleetwood Mac might consider following the Rolling Stones’ template of inviting back former members for gala concert events, Buckingham says he doubts that the newly sedentary McVie would take them up on the offer: “I would be shocked if she ever expressed any interest to do anything with us. Shocked and pleased.”
He adds that in McVie’s absence, his guitar has taken more of a central focus.
“It’s an odd thing for me,” Buckingham tells K-Earth 11, “in many ways I’m having a better time in the band as a foursome, only because it opens up a range of things that I can do. Except for maybe ‘Don’t Stop,’ we don’t do a lot of her stuff. It opens up the amount of material we can play, it allows me to be more of a ‘guy,’ to be more of who I am up there.”
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