Christine McVie on Her Friendship with Stevie Nicks – Rolling Stone

When Stevie Nicks posed solo for a January 2015 cover of Rolling Stone, in the middle of a Fleetwood Mac tour, it wasn’t a particularly popular move among her bandmates. But one member of Fleetwood Mac did agree to give a secondary interview for my cover story on Nicks — her longtime “best friend in the whole world,” Christine McVie, who had just rejoined the band after many years of retirement. Here’s our conversation from December 2014, published in full for the first time.

I’ve just seen two shows in a row, and it’s wonderful to see you back with the band. 
Oh, it’s the most amazing thing for me. Just fantastic. It’s almost like being in the middle of a soap opera again. It’s phenomenal. These people are across the stage from me, and it’s as if the years never existed. It’s absolutely dumbfounding.

In some ways, it does feel like you never left.
Yeah, well, I mean, everyone says that… so those years never existed! I’m going, “What the hell did I do?” For the last 15 years, I was living my country life.

Well, that sounds nice too, frankly.
It wasn’t bad.

There’s long been this sort of sexist assumption that it could be a problem to have two women in Fleetwood Mac, but in fact, you two seem to have always been happy to have each other. How did your relationship work?
When Mick first heard the Buckingham Nicks album in the Valley at whatever the recording studio was called, he listened to Lindsey’s guitar on that album and thought, this guy is bloody brilliant, we want him. And then we pushed Lindsey and he said, “Well, we are a duo, we come as a couple.” And so Mick came to me and said, “They have a girl involved here. You’re gonna have to meet her and see if you like her.” And we met and I instantly liked her. She and I are not competitive in any way at all. We’re totally different, but totally sympathetic with each other. We are dear, dear friends. We don’t have any competition on stage. She is who she is. I am who I am. Easy, easy, easy.

What makes you so different from each other?
I’m a tomboy, hanging out with the guys. I love men. I love hanging around with men. And Stevie is kind of a girly-girl. She loves hanging out with her girlfriends. Having grown up with Mick [Fleetwood] and John [McVie] all of those years prior to Stevie and Lindsey, I’ve grown to have rather a dark sense of humor. Which sort of comes with the territory with Mick, walking around with his wooden balls onstage. It’s just very comical to me. Stevie probably blushed a bit at the beginning. It’s just part and parcel of how I’ve been for the last 40 years of my life, living with Mick and John, and [original Fleetwood Mac member] Jeremy Spencer, who used to have a dildo on stage, you know. I’ve grown up with all of that stuff.

What’s it been like for you to witness the sort of endless soap opera between Stevie and Lindsey?
Well, I haven’t been, obviously, there for 15 years or so. So I had a bit of a break. But they coexist, and there is love between them and there is also angst. And that is something that make us who we are and why we are what we are. One just tries to be the mediator. They love each other and hate each other at the same time. I don’t really know how else to say it than that.

Has anything changed in that department over the time you were gone?
No, I don’t think anything’s changed. They are these incredible individuals, and they have this thing with each other and that’s never going to change. They have chemistry, enormous chemistry. For good or for bad. It’s real. Everything onstage is real, at that time, and offstage sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad. And that’s the truth. But it’s always interesting. They create fire. That’s a good thing.

 Why has the band survived through all these endless changes?
I think it’s Mick. At the bottom of it all it’s Mick, he holds everything together. He’s the big daddy, the big cheese. He holds us all together and will not let this band die and he just goes on and on relentlessly making it the best it can be, and I think he’s succeeding. Because we all believe in this band. I mean even after me being gone for so long, I wanted to come back. And I said, “How would it be if I did come back?” They all wanted desperately for me to come back, and it has been astonishing. Really astonishing.

You’re obviously an accomplished keyboardist. Stevie, by her own admission, is not, but she’s such a great songwriter. How do you think that works?
Personally, I think it could be destructive to be too technical. So if you have piano lessons and you understand all your harmonies and arpeggios, et cetera, that can make you a bit too much of a muso. I think Stevie had the capability just to play the chords that make her happy, that make her sing. It would…