Christine McVie Revealed if She Regretted Rejoining Fleetwood Mac After a 16-Year Hiatus
In 1998, Christine McVie exited Fleetwood Mac after nearly 30 years with the band. She’d been a working musician for most of her life, and a worsening fear of flying made touring nearly impossible. She traded in her raucous years on the road for a quiet life in the English countryside. By 2014, however. McVie was ready to rejoin the band. She once shared if she ever regretted her decision to go back to the group.
Christine McVie left Fleetwood Mac after decades with the band
Toward the end of the 1990s, McVie dealt with increased anxiety around flying. This made Fleetwood Mac’s international tours excruciating for her. She’d also tired of her decades on the road and wanted to settle down. She purchased an old manor home and planned to fix it up in her retirement.
“I left the band because I developed a terrible fear of flying,” she told the New Yorker. “I wanted to restore an ancient house in Kent, and that’s what I did. It was a heap — this Tudor building with the beams painted lime green, so hideous. And I had this idea that I’d love the small village life, with the Range Rover and the dogs and baking cookies for the Y.W.C.A.”
McVie lived her new quiet lifestyle for well over a decade, but she eventually began to tire of it.
“It got so boring,” she explained. “You couldn’t walk down the road without meeting two people related to each other. I missed the songs. And I missed the audience.”
Christine McVie shared if she regretted returning to Fleetwood Mac
After working with a therapist and bandmate, Mick Fleetwood, to overcome her fear of flying, McVie rejoined the group in 2014. Dynamics in Fleetwood Mac had always been chaotic, and McVie’s new era with the group was no different: the band fired guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, and he sued them for it. McVie had traded in the quiet life for the same drama she had been living in the 1970s. Still, she said she never regretted her choice.
“I just enjoyed having my dogs, living in the country, going for long walks,” she told Rolling Stone in 2022. “I just wasn’t interested in playing music at that point. Then the feeling came back. Mick and I have always been in touch, and he said, ‘Do you ever think you’ll come back?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ Suffice to say that I did decide to return and never regretted it.”
McVie said that though she decided to leave in 1998, she was always happy with the group.
“I think I was happy pretty much all the time,” she said. “I was happy with Bob Welch. I was happy with that era. I was always happy with Stevie and Lindsey and loved what they brought to the table musically. Also, I loved being with Neil Finn and Mike Campbell. They were a couple of great guys. I loved working with them. But Mick and John and Stevie and I all got on well, contrary to public opinion.”
She completed her last tour with the band in 2019
McVie completed her final tour with Fleetwood Mac in 2019, after their 88-show An Evening with Fleetwood Mac concert tour. In 2021, she expressed doubt that the band would tour together again.
“I gave a cheeky answer indicating that the band might be ‘done with that’ or ‘you just never know,’” she told Rolling Stone. “I always intended to convey that, particularly after the last year, we just don’t know what the future holds.”
The band has not announced plans for an upcoming tour, and McVie died in Nov. 2022.
