Yesterday’s Gone

Fleetwood Mac’s long-reigning queen of the blues explores life, love and male shor tcomings on a remastered solo career resumé. By Mark Blake.

Christine McVie ★★★★

Songbird: A Solo Collection

RHINO. CD/DL/LP

O H, WHAT stories Christine McVie could tell. The daughter of a psychic faith healer, the former Christine Perfect was a

Birmingham art-school graduate who ran away to London and joined the British blues boom. She spent the late ’60s as the lone female in guitarist Stan Webb’s boys’ club Chicken Shack, followed by the best part of 50 years, off and on, as Fleetwood Mac’s co-vocalist, songwriter and keyboard player.

Christine joined the group in 1970, just as their quixotic guitarist Peter Green was heading for the emergency exit. She rode out the lean years, blossoming as a songwriter in the mid-’70s, bigsunglasses-and-silver-coke-spoon version of Fleetwood Mac. McVie composed and sang Don’t Stop and You Make Loving Fun, while sharing a studio and stage with her spurned ex-husband, bass guitarist John, and refereeing new recruits and estranged lovers Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks.

McVie’s blues roots and English enunciation (although she claims she sometimes Americanised her voice to fit in) balanced out her Californian bandmates’ navel-gazing pop and witchy ballads. One of her most famous Mac compositions, Songbird, is revived here, and lends its title to this 10-song collection.

Of course, no two Fleetwood Mac members’ solo careers are the same. Stevie Nicks went to Number 1 in the US with her 1981 debut, Bella Donna, while Lindsey Buckingham continues to preach beautifully to what Shakespeare’s Henry V called “we happy few, we band of brothers”. Christine never joined in, though. She had what she called “a brief skirmish” with a solo career, releasing Christine Perfect, an album of half originals and half covers, in 1970.

That was it until 1984’s Christine McVie and 2004’s In The Meantime, the two sets from which Songbird is drawn. Neither album challenged Fleetwood Mac’s sales figures, but both illustrate McVie’s talent in its purest form. This is Christine McVie uncut.

Producer Glyn Johns’ deft re-mastering papers over the join between songs recorded two decades and several lifetimes of technology apart. More importantly, McVie’s songwriting rarely wavers off course. “I’m good with a hook,” she once understated, and pretty much everything here has a peerless melody. That, and what McVie called “the boogie-bass, left-hand thing”; meaning the seesawing Fats Domino swing which propelled Say You Love Me, Don’t Stop, Hold Me, etc.

McVie recorded her self-titled LP when Fleetwood Mac were on one of their breaks.

Surprisingly, only two songs from it make the cut here. The modest hits, Love Will Show Us How and Got A Hold On Me (Billboard Top 30 and Top 10 respectively), are strangely absent.

Instead, The Challenge’s loping FM-radio groove includes Lindsey Buckingham’s whispery backing vocals and Eric Clapton’s sleepy-sounding guitar, captured on a flying visit to Montreux’s Mountain Studios. Meanwhile, Ask Anybody, recorded after a convivial afternoon in a Salisbury pub, is date-stamped by bubbling fretless bass and her drinking partner and co-writer Steve Winwood’s parping keyboard. Musically, it would have slotted right onto Winwood’s Talking Back To The Night album.

“Pretty much everything here peerless has a melody.”

As often happens on the older material, McVie’s voice and lyrics transcend those very-’80s moments.

Ask Anybody isn’t the only song here in which she addresses the men in her life, but it’s the best.

“He’s a devil and an angel,” she sings, “and the combination’s driving me wild.” This is, after all, somebody who was once engaged to wayward Beach Boy Dennis Wilson.

Most of Songbird, though, comes from the period after McVie left Fleetwood Mac for a time in 1998.

Christine talked about re-training as a chef and opening a restaurant, but returned seven years later with In The Meantime, created with extended Mac family members, recently ex-husband and Portuguese musician Eddy Quintela, and her nephew Dan Perfect.

The weakest song here, despite the sweetest melody, is Northern Star, where Aunt Christine cheerfully serenades Dan’s wife for him. She’s better when exploring her own life and loves.

Friend contains the album’s biggest hook and packs the same melancholy punch (on the line “I even told the rising sun…”) as most of 2017’s quietly brilliant Buckingham McVie, the best album Fleetwood Mac never made.

McVie completely inhabits Sweet Revenge, smiling serenely as she dismisses another feckless lover. Less woman scorned, more woman indifferent; the message is compounded by some tinkling musical box-style keyboards and the song’s otherwise sunny disposition.

Eddy Quintela previously had a credit on Fleetwood Mac’s Little Lies and co-wrote this album’s Easy Come, Easy Go. McVie could probably sing this sort of burnished bluesy pop while halfasleep. So too, the semi-acoustic Givin’ It Back (composed with Fleetwood Mac’s sometime guitarist Billy Burnette). But both retain an effortless charm.

There are two not-quite new songs here. The chirpy but slight Slow Down was written but rejected for the soundtrack to 1985’s American Flyers, in which Kevin Costner played a cyclist battling an aneurysm. The movie f lopped. Far superior is All You Gotta Do, a vocal duet with her songwriting partner and bassist, the late George Hawkins. It’s a shuffling, soulful waltz, and was lost for over 15 years before being re-discovered for this project.

A reworked Songbird closes the album. The original was recorded for 1977’s Rumours in an empty auditorium in Berkeley, California, late at night. McVie sang and played piano while Buckingham strummed an acoustic guitar to help keep time.