[ Christine McVie, 1943-2022] Fleetwood Mac's Songbird

She was an oasis of sanity in pop’s most dysfunctional family and a universally beloved piano woman who wrote and sang decades of unquestionable classics

- By Rob Sheffield

Christine McVie always came on like the grown-up in the room, which admittedly might not be hard to do when the room is Fleetwood Mac. But McVie was the emotional glue in a band that has spent the past 50 years breaking up over and over — the most stable, sensible, down-to-earth member of rock’s most unstable, senseless, lost-in-space circus: the universally beloved piano woman who wrote great song after great song, the one all the others got along with. Christine kept singing like the songbird who knew the score, and that’s because she always did.

That’s why the world is still in shock and grief after the news of McVie’s death at age 79 arrived out of the blue on 30th November last year. As she told Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene just a few months earlier in 2022, “I was supposedly like the Mother Teresa who would hang out with everybody or just try and [keep] everything nice and cool and relaxed.” Yet she admitted, “Even though I am quite a peaceful person, I did enjoy that storm. Although it’s said that we fought a lot, we actually did spend a lot of our time laughing.”