Christine McVie another icon passes away

 Subject: Christine McVie, another icon passes away.



The announcement this morning of the death of Christine McVie  saw another musical icon fall from this mortal experience but few leave behind gems,  such as the songs ‘Go your own way’, ‘Little lies’, ‘Don’t stop’, ‘Hold me’.

As with many bands constructed from husband and wife members the spotlight is often the off stage antics. ABBA were famous and made even more intriguing by the human emotional roller coaster which seemed to overtake their hot house stage life and it’s so with Fleetwood Mac after the infusion of the American talent, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Bellingham. The emotional cross flow between the tort musical talent of Nicks and Bellingham heightened eventually by their break up seemed to play out on stage through the lyrics which Stevie Nicks wrote about love and break up (again mirroring ABBA) which seemed offset by the more apparently phlegmatic life of the British duo Christine and John McVie.

I didn’t know the music scene that well in those days, living in the Calvinistic atmosphere of South Africa where television was strictly under government control and our only portal on the outside world of pop music came via LM Radio broadcast from Lorenzo Marques in Mozambique. To those in the South African Dutch Reformed Church this was devil music but as with most things modern, the waves rolled bringing down the barriers and defeating the strictures from the Pulpit whilst we in our bedrooms tuned in on a Sunday night to listen to this new powerful idiom “Pop Music” of which Fleetwood Mac were a part.

Their songs were meaningful to our lives, the sheer edge Bellingham’s guitar playing with its frenetic drive whilst Nick prowling the stage like a black tarantula staring at her lover Bellingham both in stark contrast to the cool McVie’s. The demonic drumming of the band leader Mick Fleetwood simply added to the show attraction, this cacophony of rhythm and sound designed to launch the audience into a sort of hysteria.

It’s amazing how music, in what ever form, releases that inner tension. People cry when listening the unrequited love pouring out in Cio CIo Sans lament for the return of her lover Pinkerton in Madam Butterfly, or the tantalising synthesis of sound in a musical score written by Gustav Mahler, Chopin’s superb warmth and musical depth all excite a different but similar excitement pluming the depths of our psyche. Heightened by the connection we make and the commonality of those with us we become different, larger, more alive by removing the shackles which bind us to a life of conformity.