Christine McVie 1943-2022

In the soft-rock soap opera of Fleetwood Mac at the height of their global fame, Christine McVie was a calming presence. While no stranger to the relationships freefall and wild substance abuse that unwittingly became shorthand for the making of Rumours, there was something steady and reassuring about her ice-cool voice on You Make Loving Fun, Oh Daddy and possibly the finest 200 seconds of her entire career, Songbird.

- Terry Staunton

Then there’s Don’t Stop, written by McVie and with lead vocals shared between herself and Lindsey Buckingham, the California-raised, few-years-younger comparative newcomer to the lineup, whose volatile on-off romance with Stevie Nicks would have made the couple a shoo-in for a 21st-century reality TV series. Buckingham opens the track with tightly wound aggression, before the soothing purity of Christine’s rounded English vowels (and she always sounded English) in the second verse: “Why not think about times to come/And not about things that you’ve done?”

It was ever thus. Think of the stately elegance of her pre-Rumours contributions to Mac (Say You Love Me, Warm Ways), subsequent pristine gems like Think About Me (an oasis of pragmatism in the maniacal whirlwind of Tusk), or Tango In The Night’s Everywhere and Little Lies – the latter one of the defining texts of 80s AOR sophistication; a pocket melodrama of heartbreak and resignation, conjuring fanciful images of Dusty Springfield pouring drinks at a Shangri-Las slumber party.

More specifically, both 1982’s Mirage and Tango In The Night five years later illustrate how a group already elevated to the echelons of all-time greats addressed – and embraced – the sonic palette of the times. In the face of the slick, clinical preferences of the industry, it was arguably McVie and her innate sense of pop classicism who most confidently found a way to work within those modern parameters.