'When Christine played Songbird, grown men would weep. I did every night,' said John McVie of Christine McVie, his ex-wife and Fleetwood Mac bandmate, of one of the best-loved hits written by Christine while she was part of one of the greatest bands of the 1970s and 1980s.
McVie didn't even 'write' it in a conventional sense: 'I woke up in the middle of the night and the song was there in my brain, chords lyrics melody, everything,' she once explained. Turning what was in her head into the song took her half an hour — and the hardest bit was staying up all night waiting for the studio to open, as she had nothing at home to record it on to.
'I've never been able to figure out how I did that,' she said. 'I don't know where that came from. I wished it would happen more often, but it hasn't.'
Songbird lives on today, thought not just as the original, and Eva Cassidy's classic cover version — it's also the name of one of the cottages at The Quaives, the 17th century home in Kent that was McVie's home for 25 years, and which is now up for sale at £3 million through Harding Green.
McVie, like so many of the best rock stars, left LA and bought this English country house in 1990, located in the village of Wickhambreaux, not far from Canterbury. She lived and worked here happily for 25 years, refurbishing the place completely, and to this day her care of the house shines through.
Fleetwood Mac are one of the most successful bands of all time (and Rumours is the eight-best-selling album ever recorded), and McVie clearly had the luxury of saving the house without worrying about costs. We won't go in to how much she made, but here's a picture stepping out of Fleetwood Mac's private jet in 1975.
The present owners — who came here when McVie relocated to Belgravia in 2015 — have also done a fine job, keeping the place up and upgrading. Not the least of the additions is a yoga studio in one of the barns, currently run as a business (the house is also used to host events).
Set in 18 acres, this seven-bedroom, Grade II-listed home is full of character, with exposed timbers, panelled walls, casement windows and handsome fireplaces throughout. The reception rooms are cosy and relaxed — in the words of Harding Green's Mellony Morgan, 'a succession of spaces for both entertaining and relaxed family life.'
It's huge, too, with more than 6,000sq ft over three floors. The ground floor, arranged in a U-shape, has a drawing room, sitting room, family room, dining room and a huge kitchen-breakfast room.
The master suite, with its dressing room and en suite bathroom, is on the first floor, as are three further bedrooms and two family bathrooms. Three more bedrooms and two more bathrooms are on the vaulted second floor above.
The cottages and other outbuildings amount to 5,000sq ft of extra space, bringing The Quaives' total to more than 11,000sq ft. But the grounds are perhaps just as much of a draw for buyers: there are formal gardens and terraces, woodland and a lake.
In short, it's a picture of bucolic bliss that's about as far as is possible to imagine from the hard-living peak of Fleetwood Mac's heyday. Mick Fleetwood started the band in the 1960s with John McVie — the Fleetwood and the Mac — but there was a revolving door for band members until the line-up settled down with the McVies and Fleetwood plus Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks from the mid-1970s until well into the 1990s.
Those peak years saw them based in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s where they wrote, recorded and toured — as well as negotiating endless parties, the machinations of the music business (they were one of the few big bands of the era to manage themselves) as well as blizzards of cocaine and rivers of champagne.
The timing of McVie's purchase of The Quaives isn't accidental: by the time the band recorded the 1987 album Tango in the Night (for which McVie wrote the biggest hit, Everywhere) several of her bandmates were in various forms of recovery. Indeed, Nicks missed many of the album's recording sessions as she had checked in to the Betty Ford Clinic.
McVie came out relatively unscathed (throwing a cake off a balcony was about as wild as it got), though she had just as much of a share in the band's complicated on-again-off-again relationships as any of them. One of the songs McVie wrote for Rumours, called You Make Loving Fun, was written about an affair she was having with one of the band's technicians. She was still with John McVie at the time, and apparently told him she'd written it about the dog.
As well as the music and the house she left behind, the greatest tribute to McVie is that she kept on such good terms with the bandmates throughout the years that followed. The outpouring of love and grief from her bandmates after McVie died from a stroke is incredibly touching to read.
The Quaives is for sale through Harding Green — contact the agent for more details.