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Browse by: Christine McVie (Biography) (0.15 seconds)
 
 
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A duck walked into my kitchen this morning.
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A lot of the old blues artists have influenced me. Then again, I'm sure the Beatles have... the Beach Boys, a lot of the older bands. I listen to Steely Dan an awful lot. Whether they influence me, I don't know, because they seem a lot more sophisticated than I.
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After I'd won the Melody Maker award, things were sort of confused. I was already with John, he was with Fleetwood Mac, and I was with Chicken Shack. We never saw anything of one another, so I left the band.
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At the moment I'm really happy.
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Dennis Wilson tried to get me more interested in Moogs, but I'm just not interested in electronics. Obviously I'm more fascinated by organic-sounding things, like plain ordinary pianos.
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Everyone started doing their solo albums. Stevie did two. Mick went to Ghana, Lindsey did Law and Order. At that time I just didn't want to follow suit. I was busy getting the house fixed up, happy being domestic. Inevitably, I woke up one morning bored, started spending more time in the music room.
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For Stevie, the words are of prime importance; the song moves around the words, rather than the words moving around the song.
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I always felt my songs are fairly structured: verse, chorus, verse, guitar solo... but I usually like to put some tag or little piece in somewhere, which is different from the rest of the song. I like to listen to a repeating refrain.
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I can't write about racial prejudice and, you know, Ban the Bomb... I can't do heavy messages in music. I've tried and never even recorded them. I sound like a pretentious twat.
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I chose to co-write a lot of the songs on this album. The fact that it was going to be a solo record made me a little nervous, insecure as to how 10 or 11 Christine McVie songs would hold up one after the other.
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I couldn't go anywhere unless there was a security guard with me. That spoiled my life. It was like being in captivity. Those days are gone, and I don't ever want to see that happen to me again. Now I can wander around the streets of Los Angeles on my own. I like it that way.
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I cover most of the sound that we use on records with what I have. And people tell us that we still sound pretty big for a band with four instrumentalists.
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I didn't feel the inclination to put myself out on a limb that much on my first solo album. I stayed with songs that are simple and unpretentious. That's what I do best.
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I do like my wine.
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I do ride a bicycle occasionally, but not those stupid stationary ones you see in gyms. I do have one of those, I must confess, but it's quite literally a pain in the arse, so I don't use it.
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I don't have a star-type attitude. I'm down-to-earth. I tend to laugh at my success. I don't take myself all that seriously. If you take yourself too seriously in this business, you'll get hurt badly.
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I don't really have a backlog of songs. I have more a backlog of ideas. I tend not to complete songs until I know there is something to complete for them. I have tapes full of chords and ideas, little bits and pieces, that I tend to put together whenever a project comes around.
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I don't separate my work with the band from this solo project-I'm sure the group could have recorded any of these, and they would have if the Fleetwood Mac project had come up at this time. I don't have any finished songs lying around.
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I don't think that some of Lindsey's drumming is the best that could be desired, but he needed to get that off his chest, and he did it.
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I don't think there's any particular sound I do for every night. I try to get whatever sound suits the track best when we're recording, and I just look for something that sounds good when we're playing live.
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I enjoy co-writing. I've been co-writing for a long time now. I'm sure the pendulum will swing back to writing alone. For the moment I just enjoy working with someone else.
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I enjoy my money, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. I'd certainly rather be rich than poor.
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I felt that I needed an injection of freshness from another writer to make this a good, flowing, easy-to-listen-to album. So I elected to write with a very good friend of mine, Todd Sharp. The combination of the keyboard and guitar writing together was interesting. We're very compatible as writers.
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I find it hard to get excited by just a sound. I have to have a song there, then I'll find what used I can make of that sound within the song.
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I had been domestic before, in between Chicken Shack and joining Fleetwood Mac. John and I were married but never saw each other, since we were both in touring bands. When I left Chicken Shack, I stayed at home for a while.
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I haven't turned into some rich monster. I've kept my perspective. But I am a bit spoiled. It's hard not to be a little spoiled by having a lot of money.
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I like a light touch, a sensitive piano. My wrists aren't that strong, and if I have to hack too hard, they start breaking down. Fortunately, after playing something like that I take a break and have a drink, or move over to the accordion, or just stagger off the stage until my arms recover.
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I never have thought about a video while I'm writing. I've always been of the mind that music should be heard and not seen. It's a strange thing that's going on. I don't know if it's good or not.
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I still like to play the blues more than anything else.
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I was happily thinking I was retired. That is why I left Fleetwood Mac.
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I was in Tower Records in San Francisco a few weeks ago, buying some cassettes, and a couple of people recognized me and ran up with albums, and I just wanted to cover my face and have a seizure or something. I want people to just go away.
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I was without a boyfriend for along time. I wouldn't settle for going out on a date just for the sake of going out. I was perfectly content. I'd rather have that than a string of non-meaningful relationships.
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I was, in essence, boxed in completely by keyboards. That's what was wrong; I was so stacked in with keyboards I never used that no one could ever see me. It was like being in a prison... Mick and I would laugh about it, because he had the same sensation, being stuck behind his drums all night.
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I wasn't a wild, honky-tonk piano player by any means. That's why I used to like listening to people like Freddie King, ho was pretty restrained, and B.B. King, who played a very sophisticated blues. It wasn't the Champion Jack Dupree barrelhouse stuff that I was influenced by.
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I wasn't raised with money, so I had to get used to having it. I think I've adjusted to it pretty well.
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I went to London, where I became a window dresser for an exclusive store. I was actually qualified to be an art teacher, but I didn't want to teach.
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I won the Melody Maker award for vocalist of the year.
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I wouldn't think a blues album would be that commercially successful, but I don't really care. I'd do it for the love of blues, not for the money. I've got plenty of money.
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I'd never want a studio guy. I wouldn't mind working with another keyboard player, but not a studio guy. It sounds very odd, but we're really snobbish about doing everything ourselves whenever possible, so I'd rather just play the piano lines myself.
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I'm definitely going to do another solo project down the line some time. But first of all I think there's another Fleetwood Mac studio album to do, after this boxed set, some time next year. I'm not in a hurry to do the solo project. I've got to be ready for that.
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I'm looking more like my dogs every day-it must be the shaggy fringe and the ears.
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I'm rather old-fashioned about this video business. It's all relatively new. We really don't do videos, Fleetwood Mac. We've only done two.
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I've been with a guy since August. He's an engineer-musician. He's level-headed. This star business doesn't affect him in the slightest.
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I've got a new Prophet T-8. I like to use them as colors, but I very rarely write on them. I get the best results writing on electric piano, grand piano, or organ. Maybe it's not very adventurous of me. Synthesizers are pretty new to me.
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I've got... domestic hoo-ha going on at the moment. I've got a house in England I'm restoring, and I need time. I have got to have a lot of songs, and you need to be committed for a good six months to a year, to get the material together. I need to be... focused... that's the word.
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I've never written with the intention of writing hits. I guess I'm a commercial writer, though. My songs do tend to come out two verses, bridge, guitar solo, last verse, and tag. When I've finished a piece I do have my opinion about whether it will sell, of course, but I'm not always right.
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If all the songs were autobiographical, I'd probably be 105 years old by now, I would have gone through so many different emotions.
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If you're playing on a soft-sounding instrument like a Rhodes, you're not going to write honky-tonk raucous rock and roll. The character of the instrument will be imbedded in whatever you write.
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In general there's a lot of sameness in the songs and videos today. It all runs in to one mishmash... I'm definitely of the old school. I like melodies and I like real instruments. I like to see a smiling face across from me rather than a bank of computers. I like to play with real people.
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It might be an interesting thing to do for the next Fleetwood Mac record... to write a song for Lindsey to sing or vice versa... or for Stevie to write a song for me and see what would happen... That would be an interesting direction to go in.
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It really comes down to Mick. He's the one who was constantly trying to get these five people in one room together. This is his love, his baby. It's his band, and there's nothing more he loves to do than get up on stage and play with us.
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It was like getting together with a great friend and having a drink. All of that animosity was swept aside.
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It was too much responsibility for me to do the producing. I didn't trust my skills to that degree. I felt I needed someone to lean on.
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It's an entity that exists between us. Mick's in there, John's there, it's this kind of amoeba thing that is impossible to describe. There is no way of defining the sound.
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It's extremely gratifying... we had no idea when we were making Rumours that 20 years later it would hold up with such freshness, even to us. It's been enjoyed by another generation, people are handing the songs down to their children. It's another rediscovery. We're rediscovering ourselves.
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It's particularly hard on women in my position. Men tend to look at you differently. I don't want that kind of man. I don't want to be involved with somebody who's going to be gawking at me and treating me like some goddess. Lord knows I'm not a goddess. I want to be treated like a real person.
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John and I used to basically ignore each other. We were cold as ice to each other. He found it easier that way.
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Learn your instrument. Be honest. Don't do anything phony. There is so much crap floating around. There is plenty of room for a bit of honest writing.
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Lindsey's not really close friends with anybody... I think that he respected me as a musician, and I certainly repected him as a musician. We weren't close friends. You couldn't say that.
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Mick and John are happy with me writing songs for the band at this particular point in time. I don't know what's going to happen down the road a couple of years.
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Mick had this huge bass drum at the top of the stairs at Benifoids that made this enormous noise, 'cause there was no furniture in that huge house. That was a goody, nice slide playing from Bob Weston.
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My range seems to have been getting higher. I just can't sing as low as I used to. I don't know how I ever recorded some of the old songs in such low keys. Lindsey often changes his songs, too. He records a song in E, then changes to F. That can affect the vocal blend a lot.
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My songs are self-explanatory... somebody pointed out to me that... my songs pretty much speak for themselves.
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Normally there's a characteristic in each song, either a riff or an underlying musical theme, that makes the keyboard part clear if you look for it.
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Of course I get writer's block. It's terrible.
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Other people seem to write about love, don't they? It seems to be the least pretentious subject to write about. I've been taking a lot of criticism for it, but at least it's honest. But one shouldn't go and make a solo album if they can't take a little knocking, should they?
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Since there's only room for me to write a few songs on each band album, I really have to use my songs. But on my own album I had room to use songs I wanted.
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Some of the best songs I've written, I've written in 10 minutes.
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Stevie writes ethereal mystical lyrics, but the moment I write words like that, I get this chill up my spine, kind of getting embarrassed and not feeling sincere about it. But if you're sincere, you can write anything you like. In this stage of my musical life I don't feel honest doing that.
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Suddenly the desire to write tricked back into my life again, not that I would want to tour or go on the road. Once you have been writing all of your life, it is part of what you do. What else do you do?
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The band wanted me to expand my role and have a little more freedom... I may not play very well, but I play it the way it suits the band.
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The chemistry was still there. To me, that was the biggest thing: Would the chemistry be there? Can we really go ahead and do this? And it was obvious within the first moment of plugging in the instruments that the magic was still there. It was a fantastic feeling.
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The last thing I ever thought was that this band could seriously work together again.
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The old Fleetwood Mac was much better; they did some beautiful and, to my mind, very authentic blues. Chicken Shack did pretty well in Europe, but after I left, it was over.
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The torpid Chicken Shack records were unfortunately much more typical of British blues than early Fleetwood Mac had been.
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There were a lot of bad feelings when Lindsey first left the band. But there's been a lot of healing going on, growing up, maturing. The bond is a great deal stronger than what we first thought.
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There's a whole bunch of unfinished stuff. Then I've got books of lyrics. I find it frustrating to finish a song and not be able to record it... so I don't write a million songs.
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This configuration of Fleetwood Mac's been together 10 years, and it's taken us entire years to make a single record.
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We all enjoyed the success of Rumours obviously.
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We had a wonderful studio in Montreaux Jazz Festival... we got a wonderful live sound, so we didn't use that much additional outboard gear.
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We had some rehearsals where I was playing on four songs... but we dropped them from the set because it was interfering with my stage work, and I guess it wasn't that necessary.
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We have recorded with some synthesizers-we've used a Minimoog and an Oberheim. And I remember using a Multi-moog... It wasn't even mine, though. There was some mad little professor guy running around twiddling all the knobs for me while I played it. I think he slept with the damn thing.
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We picked up the instruments and hammered through about 10 songs without batting an eye, just brushing off the cobwebs. The added pleasure of playing with those other four musicians is that it's now elevated to a joyful celebration.
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We were like a big family even then. Mick's like my brother.
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We're going to try and do something different this time, and away from even what we expect to do. We haven't really formed any concrete plan at the moment, but whatever it is, it's going to have a twist.
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We're more like brother and sister now. I'm not trying to paint too rosy a picture. I think it took quite a few years to be able to sit down and talk to each other. It's all very nostalgic for us as well. There hasn't been an angry word between us, fingers crossed.
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We've gone in with one song and come out with a completely different song.
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What's past is past, it's too bloody late to do anything else. I've been very blessed and lucky in my life. To want to change the path of destiny is kind of a mistake, it leads to discontent. I don't feel complacent, but I feel content.
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When I married John, I felt that it was so great to be around them anyway, just as one of their wives. I used to listen to all their music.
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You can only mend the vase so many times before you have to chuck it away.
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You spend days getting the right drum sound. And vocals take a long time-you can't just do one take and it's perfect.

Biography

Christine McVie (born Christine Perfect, July 12, 1943) was a keyboardist, singer, and songwriter for the band Fleetwood Mac. Born Christine Perfect (she has kept her married name in spite of her longtime divorce from John McVie because she couldn't stand having a last name like Perfect), McVie was addicted to rock and roll from the first time she looked through a Fats Domino songbook.

Career


In 1969, McVie joined the group Chicken Shack, a very cut-rate group which seemed to have little chance of success. A year later she announced her plans to retire and become a housewife, oddly enough, just when the group managed to score a hit in "I'd Rather Go Blind". She also nabbed a Melody Makers award for female vocalist of the year, and lauded for having one of the "top 10 pairs of legs in all of Britain".

Encouraged to continue her career, she recorded a solo album, Christine Perfect, which she does not feel is among her best work. McVie joined Fleetwood Mac in 1970 just after marrying Fleetwood Mac bassist John McVie. She had already contributed backup vocals, played keyboards and painted the cover for Kiln House—the group had just lost founding member Peter Green and were nervous about touring without him. Ironically, McVie had been a huge fan of the Peter Green-era Mac, and as McVie knew all the lyrics to their songs, she went along. Christine quickly became the heart of the group, and the author of some of their finest songs, a position she would continue to hold for nearly 25 years.

The early '70s was a rocky time for the band, with a revolving door of guitarists and singers and only the albums Mystery to Me and Bare Trees scoring any successes, not to mention a group impersonating Fleetwood Mac touring the United States without their permission. John McVie's drinking was unbearable; McVie had an affair with a music producer and nearly left John and the group to make a solo album with her lover, but he went back to his spouse, so she did the same.

In 1974, McVie reluctantly agreed to move to the US and make a fresh start. Within a year, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined and breathed new life into the material. Their first album together, 1975's Fleetwood Mac, had a number of hits, with Christine's "Over My Head" and "Say You Love Me" both cracking Billboard's top 20 singles chart.

In 1976 she began an on-the-road affair with the lighting director, which inspired her to write "You Make Loving Fun", a top 10 hit on the landmark smash Rumours, one of the best-selling albums of all-time. Her biggest hit was "Don't Stop", which climbed all the way to #3 and has become identified forever as the song Bill Clinton played on the Presidential campaign trail and at his 1993 Inaugural Gala (Christine and the others performed there as well as the Super Bowl a few days later).

By the end of the Rumours tour, the McVies had divorced. The 1979 double album Tusk produced 2 more top 20 hits ("Tusk" and "Think About Me"), but was considered a disappointment as nothing could top the huge success of the Rumours album. The group reunited 3 years later to record Mirage, which contained the top 5 hit "Hold Me". "Hold Me" was also the group's first music video; McVie's inspiration for the song was her tortured relationship with Beach Boys member Dennis Wilson. Wilson drowned a few years later, breaking McVie's heart.

In 1984 McVie decided to take a risk and finally record a solo album, as most of the other band members had done. She snagged hits with the songs "Got a Hold on Me" and "Love Will Show Us How". The synthesizer-heavy tracks were somewhat jarring in contrast to the crisp and clear tones of the singer. She also met keyboardist Eddy Quintela (12 years her junior), whom she married in October 1986 (they divorced a decade later).

After covering the Elvis Presley standard "Can't Help Falling In Love With You" for the Howie Mandel film A Fine Mess, she rejoined the Mac to record Tango in the Night. Her voice had never been better and she had one of her biggest hits, and one of the more widely played songs of the era, "Little Lies".

In 1990 the group, minus Lindsey Buckingham, recorded Behind the Mask, but the sales were sluggish and the singles were only marginally successful. McVie had always been reluctant to tour, preferring to stay close to home with friends and family, and she refused to do any touring at all for the group's 1995 effort Time. The album, minus Buckingham (who had left in 1987) or Nicks (who had left several years later) was a flop.

The group seemed to have went their separate ways until John McVie, Mick Fleetwood, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham got together for one of Fleetwood's solo projects. They convinced McVie to record and tour with them one last time. The album, 1997's The Dance, went to #1 on the charts. McVie complied with their touring schedule, and performed for the group's 1998 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but has since retired from any Fleetwood Mac activities. She was delighted to receive the award of Honorary Doctor of Music from The University of Greenwich, UK, in 2000. In December 2003 she went to see Fleetwood Mac's last show in London, but didn't get up on stage. She lives in the south of England and rarely leaves her countryside home.

In mid-2004 she released a new solo album, In the Meantime, her third in a career spanning five decades.

...(more on Wikipedia)

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Christine McVie".
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