In praise of "Everywhere"

[Mr Scarrott]

The Times has removed its paywall for this weekend, so I've had a look for any Mac-related articles I had not seen before.

This is a lovely one, written in the wake of Christine's passing. Hopefully the copyright police don't nab us...

Did Christine McVie write the greatest pop song of the 1980s?
Everywhere by Fleetwood Mac is a three-minute masterpiece, argues Dan Cairns


Dan Cairns
Sunday December 04 2022, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
Always adept at masking the carnage in their private lives with songs of peerless pop perfection, Fleetwood Mac excelled themselves on their 1987 album, Tango in the Night. And nowhere more so than on the single Everywhere, a track that, even by its composer Christine McVie’s stratospherically high standards, turns musical economy and lyrical brevity into an art form.

You don’t have to subscribe to one critic’s bracingly biting assertion that the opening minute of the song is “better than the entire recorded output of Bob Dylan” to accept that Everywhere is a masterpiece — though it’s a great way to start an argument in a pub. But it just is: a copper-bottomed classic that most other songwriters would sell a body part for.

McVie, whose death at the age of 79 was announced last Wednesday, had form when it came to offsetting the intraband turmoil with songs like Don’t Stop, You Make Loving Fun, Little Lies and Say You Love Me, whose breezy charm belied the friction festering behind the recording studio doors. Given the circumstances it was recorded in, Everywhere is a minor miracle of displacement and on-with-the-show denial.


McVie was in the first throes of new love with the Portuguese musician Eddy Quintela at the time. Things were decidedly less rosy with her bandmates. Stevie Nicks and Mick Fleetwood, strung out on drugs and surrounded by hangers-on, had been banished to a Winnebago in the driveway of Lindsey Buckingham’s Los Angeles home, where Tango in the Night was being recorded. McVie’s former husband, John, was sinking ever deeper into binge-drinking alcoholism. And Buckingham, never the most serene of people, was seething as he watched his planned solo album being swallowed up by the voracious Fleetwood Mac machine.

McVie’s response? To step, sometimes literally, over the bodies and get on with the job at hand. But there was always a grittiness, a no-nonsense, roll-up-your-sleeves aspect to the Cumbria-born, Brum-raised musician. Perhaps a slight impatience too. You can sense that on Everywhere. It doesn’t hang around; the song has a point to make and sets about making it. Tellingly, there is neither a bridge — the ladder between verse and chorus — nor a middle eight. Nothing must get in the way of the message.



Buckingham, presumably relieved that one of his bandmates was getting their act together, used all his ingenuity and inventiveness in the service of the song. That extraordinary, tinkling keyboard part, like a celestial milk round, gives way to the barest of backings — fingerpicked guitar, washes of synth, the locked-in rhythm section of Mick and John. And over this, McVie delivers a vocal of incredible warmth and directness — a directness mirrored in the lyrics. Years of living in California had failed to smooth away her English edges; that mix of tongue-tied reticence and bubble-bursting self-knowledge comes together in lines such as “You know that I’m proud / And I can’t get the words out” and “Something’s happening, happening to me / My friends say I’m acting peculiarly.” (Who uses the word “peculiarly” in a pop song?) And then a chorus of glory, and glorious simplicity, the music ascending as McVie throws caution to the wind and sings, as if finally finding the right words and the courage to say them: “I want to be with you everywhere.”

That’s the beauty of songs, though. Unlike conversations, there’s no comeback, no risk of disagreement or misunderstanding — the writer swaps the jeopardy of dialogue for a safe space that offers the freedom of pure and uncontradicted expression. In Everywhere’s case, that means three minutes and 46 seconds of unfiltered emotion, to a musical backing that supports it every step of the way. No wonder the song endures. There is a sort of artful artlessness to it that means it lodges in your head and heart and refuses to leave.

McVie, on the occasions I met her, was impervious to praise for what she had achieved. A twinkly-eyed and even slightly scatty side could give way to a touch of frost at any hint of fawning, or the dredging up of the old Fleetwood Mac war stories. She always loathed folderol — her decision to step away from the Mac circus for 15 years speaks volumes.

Everywhere, although reaching No 4 in the charts, was released in the decade when pop succumbed to sonic bombast, trickery and plasticity. How characteristic that McVie would cut through that and get to the heart of the matter.

And how fitting that the woman born Christine Perfect should be responsible for the 1980s’ most perfect pop song.

https://www.thetimes.com/article/did...980s-bqxrb9525