Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Christine McVie described writing “Songbird”, the crystalline piano ballad that closes side one of Rumours, Fleetwood Mac’s multimillion-selling 1977 album, as something like a spiritual visitation. “I woke up in the middle of the night and the song just came into my head,” she said. Paul McCartney described a similar phenomenon when he claimed “Yesterday” arrived fully formed in a dream; David Bowie said “Life on Mars?” landed when he was on a bus. Perhaps detaching from innate talent is a form of ambivalence about the success talent can bring. With Fleetwood Mac, the jobbing British blues band McVie joined in 1970, she co-wrote and recorded gold, platinum and multi-platinum albums, selling more than 120 million worldwide. The band’s success was in large part down to McVie’s cool, assured talent: she wrote songs that resonated for decades, from the epic “Don’t Stop” to the gossamer-light “Everywhere”, and co-wrote countless others. McVie may be less celebrated than her male counterparts, but her achievements were on a similar scale. McVie’s success and the years of addiction, hedonism and disastrous relationships it cost her are retold in detail in Lesley-Ann Jones’s biography of the English musician and songwriter born Christine Perfect, who died aged 79 in 2022. Fleetwood Mac’s early career was unpromising; its line-up and romantic complexities ever-shifting. But as one of the Anglo-American core “Rumours Five” — with Stevie Nicks, Mick Fleetwood, John McVie and Lindsey Buckingham — McVie was overwhelmed by success by her mid-thirties. With introspective tendencies, she was, says Jones, often also lonely and self-destructive. Jones is a biographer and longtime rock journalist, a former Daily Mail feature writer and girl-about-town columnist for The Sun. Her subjects are typically music stars she met through her work; McVie joins Bowie, Marc Bolan and Freddie Mercury among others (Jones’s publisher describes her as a friend of McVie). During Fleetwood Mac’s pomp, McVie opted to stand to the side, a counterpoint to Nicks’s sublime lead vocals and centre stage, chiffon-draped twirling. Consequently, McVie dodged some misery. In 1994 Nicks told Jones that Mick Fleetwood made her have four abortions because, as Jones puts it, “he couldn’t stand the thought of a billowy pregnant frontwoman”.But McVie’s reticence did not shield her completely. Jones highlights her professional triumphs but also delves into countless affairs, two failed marriages (including to bassist John McVie) and the pivotal relationship that almost cost her her sanity, with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, a man whose name usually appears in music history with the prefix “dangerously handsome”. Their story is worth telling because it illustrates McVie’s resilience and illuminates her songwriting. The romance is often presented as a story of true love doomed. Jones recasts it as a nightmare.McVie met Wilson in 1978, a decade after the Beach Boys’ heyday and his drug-fuelled entanglement with the Manson gang. Wilson had recorded a critically acclaimed solo album (1977’s Pacific Ocean Blue), been married four times, had four children and was living precariously. Jones suggests Wilson was paranoid about waning success and set out to ingratiate himself with the most successful band in the world. McVie, vulnerable and cocaine-addled after the end of her marriage to John McVie, described their meeting as “absolute love at first sight”. She hoped to marry Wilson. But he was unstable, careless with her money and incapable of monogamy. Describing him as “beyond fixing”, she insisted they split in 1982; he drowned in an accident the following year. McVie wrote endlessly about Wilson, most notably 1982’s “Only Over You”, as Jones puts it, “as if trying to eradicate him”.Jones can be lurid, and is given to inviting a psychotherapist, whom McVie probably never met, to comment on her subject’s behaviour. She quotes him at length in a way that feels tenuous. But like the best tabloid writers, Jones has a strong formula. Her forthright tone cuts through sentimentality. Mostly, she cares about documenting McVie’s life and achievements as a brilliant musical force, when her subject was a modest woman who claimed her innate talent was merely down to being “good at pathos”.Songbird: An Intimate Biography of Christine McVie by Lesley-Ann Jones John Blake £22, 352 pages Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
