
They were “simple, you-and-me songs”, her bandmates point out, and she had a “great instinct for what’s going to keep people’s attention”.
#Songbird for mac mac#
This is where we get an insight into how McVie shaped the distinctive sound of Fleetwood Mac with her British blues sensibility, universally accessible lyrics, and catchy pop choruses. We get a glimpse into the production of Rumours, the enormously successful breakup album, complete with McVie’s bittersweet ode to her ex-partner, Don’t Stop, as well as You Make Loving Fun, a song written for her new lover, Curry Grant. With McVie’s songwriting talent, the band finally began to score both commercial and critical success. “My role was not being a frontliner,” she demures, and Nicks confirms that if McVie was ever hungry for centre stage, she never let it be known. At one point, McVie confesses that she did become momentarily envious of the constant attention Nicks received yet at the same time, she also recognises that she could make better use of her songwriting abilities behind the keyboard. Not that both could be in the spotlight, of course, however talented. Sexism, of course, plays a part here Nicks explains how, at the time, the world of rock and roll was firmly a boys’ club, and having not one but two talented women in a band was considered radical. As Nicks cast a spell over the audience with her raw, husky vocals and bewitching stage performances, McVie retreated into the shadows. It was here that Fleetwood Mac became the iconic lineup that we’re most familiar today, and the passionate yet turbulent relationship between Buckingham and Nicks began to dominate the spotlight. In 1974, the band metamorphosed once again when Mick Fleetwood invited folk-rock duo Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks to join the band. McVie, of course, knew all the songs, and with her creative input, the band began to reclaim its identity. All that changed when the band asked McVie, who was touring with her husband, to come on board.

At this point, Mick Fleetwood claims that the band were lost “babes in the wood” another wannabe British rock band with no direction. Things went awry, however, after Peter Green, the guitarist and original creator of Fleetwood Mac decided to leave in 1969.

Six weeks later the pair were married, and the merging of the two chart-topping bands began. We then meet John McVie, the bassist of Fleetwood Mac, who recalls spotting McVie playing the piano at a jazz festival and subsequently asks her out. Although she was initially tasked with playing keys and singing background vocals, when the band scored a hit with a cover of Etta James’ I’d Rather Go Blind with McVie on lead vocals, it quickly became evident that she was destined for greater things. We learn that McVie was working as a window dresser in the department store Dickins & Jones, until she moved back to Birmingham to join her old friends Andy Silvester and Stan Webb in a blues band called Chicken Shack. How and why the driving force behind one of the world’s best-selling bands was overlooked for so long is a question that is slowly unravelled in this fascinating profile of the legendary singer-songwriter, which traces McVie’s early beginnings in Birmingham, the British blues explosion in 1960s London, and her first foray into music.
