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Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie have been Fleetwood Mac bandmates for decades, and they have both said that their friendship was instant and natural. Here’s how Nicks and McVie met and how they described their first impressions of each other.

Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks, who first met when Nicks was trying to join Fleetwood Mac.
(L-R) Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks | Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

Stevie Nicks said she ‘adored’ Christine McVie from ‘the minute’ they met

Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks first met while having dinner at a Mexican restaurant. Nicks and her then-boyfriend, Lindsey Buckingham, were considering joining Fleetwood Mac, so they shared a meal with the band to get to know everyone.

Nicks said she was immediately drawn to McVie. “Christine, I adored from the minute I met her at dinner at a Mexican food restaurant in Los Angeles,” the singer said on The Zane Lowe Interview Series podcast. “I thought, ‘She’s going to be… She doesn’t know it. She’s five years older than me. She’s going to be my best friend. And she doesn’t know this yet, but she is.’ And she was.”

Stevie Nicks said working with Christine McVie was ‘like having your best friend in a band with you’

At first, Nicks was surprised by how well she got along with McVie. “We had the best time. We really enjoyed all of those amazing adventures together,” Nicks described. “And it was like having your best friend in a band with you, which is unheard of. It’s usually, you just don’t get two girls and a guy, two girl writers and a guy. You just usually don’t get that. So we were really lucky.”

She said their first impression of each other launched their decades-long friendship. “That started us off on such a great foot that we just were able to just put on our high heel boots and go straight up the ladder.”

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The Fleetwood Mac keyboardist said it was ‘critical’ for her to get along with the singer

Nicks didn’t know at the time how important it was for her to impress McVie. The dinner at a Mexican restaurant was really more like a job interview, and the keyboardist got to cast the deciding vote on whether or not to allow the singer into the group.

“We went for Mexican food with them,” Nicks told The Guardian in 2013. “And we laughed and laughed, because you English people have a very strange sense of humor. Even Lindsey had fun – he didn’t want to, but he couldn’t help it.”

“It was critical that I got on with her,” McVie said in the same interview. “Because I’d never played with another girl. But I liked her instantly. She was funny and nice but also there was no competition. We were completely different on the stage to each other and we wrote differently too.”

McVie agreed that the singer could join Fleetwood Mac, and the next day, the band called Buckingham and Nicks to officially invite them into the group.

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