Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie Reveals Stevie Nicks’ Clever Nickname For Her
Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie became close friends as the female members of rock supergroup Fleetwood Mac, and Nickes even had a special nickname for McVie. Here’s what the “Rhiannon” singer called McVie and why the moniker was so appropriate.
Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie made a pact in the early days of Fleetwood Mac
Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks are the best-known female members of the rock supergroup Fleetwood Mac. Singer Bekka Bramlett joined the band for a couple of years, but Nicks and McVie are the longest-standing female faces of the group.
Historically, men have dominated the rock and roll genre, so it was a big deal when singer Nicks became the figurehead of the band started by Mick Fleetwood, Peter Green, and Jeremy Spencer.
Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac, along with her then-boyfriend and guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, on New Year’s Eve in 1974. McVie was already well-established within the group, having joined in 1970.
As the only women in the band, Nicks and McVie once made a promise to each other early in their careers. “We made a pact at the very beginning,” Nicks told CBS in October 2020, “That if we were ever in a room of super famous guitar players that didn’t treat us with the respect that we thought that we deserved, that we would just stand up and say, ‘This party’s over,’ and we would walk out.”
Nicks added that she and McVie never had to act on their pact. “We never actually did have to do that, so that was a nice surprise,” she explained. “We never had to make a scene.”
Christine McVie revealed the sweet nickname Stevie Nicks gave her
Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie became so close that the “Songbird” singer revealed that her Fleetwood Mac bandmate gave her an affectionate nickname. Nicks chose the moniker because McVie mostly remained balanced and rational, despite the band’s hard-partying tendencies.
“We all drank a lot and did a lot of cocaine, we partied a lot, I don’t think I did anything terribly outrageous,” McVie told Harper’s Bazaar in March 2019. “Except I once threw a cake out the window which landed on top of [a] taxi. I was kind of the good girl in the group. That’s who I was. Stevie used to call me Mother Earth because I was always pretty grounded.”
The ‘Songbird’ singer once defended her Fleetwood Mac bandmate after Lindsey Buckingham allegedly threw a guitar at her
Although Christine McVie may have been the grounded “Mother Earth” of the group, there was a time when she slapped one of her Fleetwood Mac bandmates.
Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks have had a notoriously complicated and stormy relationship. In a Jan. 2015 interview with Rolling Stone, Nicks claimed that Buckingham openly mocked her on stage. She also described an incident during a New Zealand show of the band’s 1980 “Tusk” tour when Buckingham allegedly threw a Les Paul guitar at her head.
McVie shared in a separate interview that she was so enraged by Buckingham’s actions that night that she slapped him after the show, “I think he’s the only person I ever, ever slapped,” the “Songbird” singer admitted (via Washington Post). “I actually might have chucked a glass of wine, too.”
