Christine McVie Wrote This Popular Fleetwood Mac Song About Her Affair
Christine McVie wrote a hit song about her affair while married to her Fleetwood Mac bandmate, John McVie. Here’s which track from the popular Rumours album is about McVie’s entanglement, and what her husband thought of it.
Christine McVie wrote the Fleetwood Mac song ‘You Make Loving Fun’ about her affair
Rumours was Fleetwood Mac’s most successful album, but it was created during a period of intense personal turmoil for the band members.
Keyboardist Christine McVie was married to bass guitarist John McVie, but she was unhappy, and the couple was on the cusp of separation. Christine had an affair with Curry Grant, the band’s lighting director. Their entanglement inspired the song “You Make Loving Fun.”
The hit track contains the lyrics, “Don’t, don’t break the spell / It would be different and you know it will / You, you make loving fun / And I don’t have to tell you but you’re the only one.”
Christine McVie’s husband thought she wrote ‘You Make Loving Fun’ about her dogs
The keyboardist thought she would struggle to write anything for Rumours, but she made four songs on the album: “Don’t Stop,” “You Make Loving Fun,” “Oh Daddy,” and “Songbird.” She also, along with the rest of the group, contributed to “The Chain.”
“I thought I was drying up,” Christine McVie told Q Magazine (per I Love Classic Rock). “I was practically panicking because every time I sat down at a piano, nothing came out. Then, one day in Sausalito, I just sat down and wrote in the studio, and the four-and-a-half songs of mine on the album are a result of that.”
As for the lyrics in “You Make Loving Fun,” John McVie had no idea it was about his wife’s affair. “Knowing John, he probably thought it was about one of her dogs,” said drummer Mick Fleetwood (via Songfacts).
Fleetwood Mac had several affairs within the band
Christine McVie wasn’t the only member of Fleetwood Mac who had an affair. The band was rife with scandal and drama, and there were several relationships within the group.
Perhaps the group’s most famous couple was Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, who joined the band as a couple. Some of Fleetwood Mac’s best songs are about their romance and bitter breakup.
Before the Nicks and Buckingham joined the band, Mick Fleetwood’s wife, Jenny Boyd, had an affair with lead guitarist Bob Weston. The drummer was heartbroken over the infidelity, leading to Weston’s departure from the group.
After Nicks and Buckingham broke up, the singer had an affair with Fleetwood. Nicks was in a relationship with the Eagles’ Don Henley at the time, while the drummer was working things out with Boyd.
And John and Christine McVie, the only married couple within the band, continued working together amidst their divorce.
“To be in Fleetwood Mac is to live in a soap opera,” Nicks told Us Magazine in 1990. “And it has been pretty scandalous and pretty incestuous, and pretty wonderful in a lot of ways.”
