Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks were best friends for decades. The two women were gifted songwriters responsible for crafting many of the band’s best-known tunes. The pair grew apart in the 1980s amid Nicks’ worsening drug addiction. But they came back together when McVIE returned to Fleetwood Mac in 2014. Nicks dedicated the song “Landslide” to her “mentor. Big sister. Best friend” in a tribute to her friend. The band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1998. McVies died on Wednesday after a brief illness at age 79; Nicks died Wednesday at age 80.. For years, the two were each other’s center in the band, protecting each other in a male-dominated industry, Nicks told the New Yorker earlier this year. “Christine was a whole other ballgame. She liked hanging out with the guys. She was just more comfortable with men than I had ever been,” Nicks said. “I would say to her, ‘Together, we are a serious force of nature, and it will give us the strength to maneuver the waters that are ahead of us,'” Nicks added in 2013. “We made a pact, in the very beginning, that we would never be treated with disrespect by all the male musicians in the community. We don’t part of the socialize world, which I’m not part of,” she told Rolling Stone in 1998, adding that she’d grown apart from Nicks. “She seems to have developed her own fantasy world, somehow,” she said of her former bandmate. “It was critical that I got on with her because I’d never played with another girl,” Mcvie told the Guardian in 2013, “but I liked her instantly. We were completely different on the stage to each other and we wrote differently too.” “Rumours” was the band’s greatest success to date when it was released in 1977. But the pair’s relationships with each other were deteriorating, save for the one between McVier and Nicks, who spent their time offstage together. As multiple members’ drug use intensified, the group’s dynamic grew tense. In 1984, McVia distanced herself from the group in 1984 amid her bandmates’ addictions, telling the Guardian she was sick of it. In 1986, she said she likely had been dependent on the drug Klonopin, which she later became addicted to, though she claimed to have quit in the 1990s. “Don’t Stop” and “You Make Lovin’ Fun” were among the songs she sang with Nicks and Fleetwood in 2014 when she rejoined the band. The group’s greatest success was “Rumoured,” including the lighthearted “You make Lovin’ Fun” and optimistic “Don’t Stop” She said she probably had been “just sick of the addictions”
The two women have been friends for decades. But now, they’re in a legal battle over the rights to their music.
