Christine McVie RIP

Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac’s great keyboard player, and the singer and songwriter of a huge proportion of the bands hits, has died age 79 after a short illness.

It’s difficult to sum up exactly how pivotal and yet strangely overlooked McVie was in the band’s success, so I’m grateful to the excellent Chris O’Leary for something he said on Twitter that helped put McVie in her proper context. He asked if there was, in any other band, a parallel to her:

“Was thinking about whether Christine McVie had equivalents in other bands—lead singers, songwriters, essential players who weren’t quite the “star”–and the closest I got was Richard Manuel.”

Of the replies he received, he said, the best suggestions were Bob Weir and Benjamin Orr. But with all respect to Manuel, Orr and Weir (and the respondents who suggested them), they’re not in the same league as McVie. On FM’s 1988