<img style="float: left;" src="http://images.mid-day.com/images/images/2022/dec/Rahul-op_e.jpg" alt="Rahul Da Cunha" width="200" height="69" />I first heard Christine McVie in 1978, on a set of headphones at the erstwhile Rhythm House. And she&rsquo;s stayed my top female voice over the years.
Fleetwood Mac&rsquo;s Rumours had hit the charts, and each song was an earworm. It was a boppy track, on the album called Don&rsquo;t Stop, that first caught my fancy&mdash;&nbsp;
Don&rsquo;t stop thinking about tomorrow, Don&rsquo;t stop, it&rsquo;ll soon be here, It&rsquo;ll be better than before, Yesterday&rsquo;s gone,&nbsp; yesterday&rsquo;s gone.
Out of context it was a cheesy song, nothing straight out unconventional, but it had one unique concept, verse one was sung by a male vocalist, verse two by a female, verse three, combined both. I&rsquo;d never heard that before, it gave music a new mixed flavour.
The song became Bill Clinton&rsquo;s &rsquo;92 campaign theme song&mdash;&ldquo;it perfectly captured the mood of a nation eager for better days. I&rsquo;m grateful to Christine &amp; Fleetwood Mac for entrusting us with such a meaningful song. I will miss her,&rdquo; the ex-US President tweeted.
Fleetwood Mac was a band where male and female energies intermingled, with a certain Christine McVie on vocals. She had a silken quality I&rsquo;d never heard before&mdash;I&rsquo;d always had a complicated relationship with women singers, till that point. Being a true blue rocker with leanings &nbsp;towards heavy metal, pop and folk were never my thing&mdash;and women tended to populate the pop genre back in the 1970s and &rsquo;80s.
And then, Fleetwood Mac popped onto my horizon. A band with not just one, but two female vocalists&mdash;two distinct singers, of differing tones, and timbres, McVie and Stevie Nicks.
I&rsquo;d shunned love songs till then, ballads were restricted to the men, but these two with their edgy elegance turned love to lust and pain into sheer poetry, with no self-pity.
It was these two women, Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks, a sisterhood that supported each other, in the band, and influenced generations of women musicians that came after&hellip; Belinda Carlisle, the Bangles and Sheryl Crow being &nbsp;a few.
What made Christine McVie so special was that she combined sass with purity&mdash;she was no diva like &nbsp;Diana Ross, no dazzling superstar, no &ldquo;drug drenched&rdquo; Janis Joplin, no female vocalist in an otherwise male band like Debbie Harry&mdash;but she had chutzpah, she had cheek, she had a chuckle, she had velvet to go with the vibrato. She forged her path in a mostly male outfit, and then a solo career of great proportions.
She wrote a song, You Make Loving Fun, about her steamy affair with the lighting designer of Fleetwood Mac; her husband, also a band member, &nbsp;curiously asked her who she&rsquo;d dedicated it to. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s about my dog&rdquo;, she said, poker faced.
Rumours had everything&mdash; in-studio brilliance, off-stage drama, broken marriages, adultery.
Never before in the history of music, was there an album, a voyeuristic vinyl, people writing songs about each other, this was a he said-she said, romantic confessional, but the sound stayed untainted, largely because of Christine McVie&rsquo;s voice and musicality.
Great songs have this one commonality, they stand the test of time, the earworm quality makes you hum a song with the same passion as when you first heard it.&nbsp;
I suspect Cristine McVie lived life on her own terms, without any feminist stridency, no fame induced suicide attempts, no fuss, no fanfare, no fanciful social media-hood, just a focus on the songwriting,&nbsp;
Maynard John Keenan, the maverick mercurial front man of Prog Metal band Tool, tweeted this when she passed, &ldquo;I had the same bus driver from kindergarten to eighth grade, she had just one cassette, played again and again and that was Fleetwood Mac&rsquo;s Rumours. Christine McVie was a part of my DNA.&rdquo;
She was certainly a part of mine.&nbsp;
Rest well, oh Songbird.
Rahul daCunha is an adman, theatre director/playwright, photographer and traveller. Reach him at rahul.dacunha@mid-day.com
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The song became Bill Clinton’s ’92 campaign theme song—“it perfectly captured the mood of a nation eager for better days

Songbird RIP

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