Stevie Nicks has declared that Fleetwood Mac is over after the death of her longtime friend and bandmate Christine McVie. McVie, who was the keyboardist and vocalist of the group, passed away last November at the age of 78.
Nicks told Vulture.com that she felt like McVie was irreplaceable and that without her, the band had no reason to continue. "When Christine died, I felt like you can’t replace her. You just can’t. Without her, what is it?... She was like my soulmate, my musical soulmate, and my best friend that I spent more time with than any of my other best friends outside of Fleetwood Mac...
"When I think about Taylor Swift’s song 'You’re on Your Own, Kid,' and the line 'you always have been,'...that was Christine and I. We were on our own in that band. We always were. We protected each other. Who am I going to look over to on the right and have them not be there behind that Hammond organ? When she died, I figured we really can’t go any further with this. There’s no reason to."
Nicks also said that she didn't want the band to go back to how they were when McVie retired in 1998. She said that McVie was the pop star of the group and that none of the other members could write songs like her. "Christine was the pop star. She wrote all those really super pop hits. None of the rest of us could write those songs. What would happen is we’d have to take the songs out, like we did when she actually retired for 18 years. We couldn’t re-create those songs. So we became a much more hard-rock band."
McVie returned to the band in 2014, and Lindsey Buckingham, who Mick Fleetwood would like to have back for a proper farewell tour, was booted in 2018 after Nicks gave an ultimatum of either he goes or she does.
Fleetwood Mac was one of the most successful and influential rock bands of all time, selling over 120 million records worldwide and producing classic albums such as Rumours, Tusk, and Tango in the Night. The band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998.
[Source: Classic Hits Today]