Christine McVie tried going her own way for a while, but now she's ready to rejoin her Fleetwood Mac bandmates on the road. Fifteen years after leaving the famed rock group to retire from touring, the British keyboardist and singer, 70, tells The Guardian she'd be "delighted" to permanently reunite with Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, and ex-husband John McVie.
"I like being with the band, the whole idea of playing music with them," McVie says. "I miss them all. If they were to ask me I would probably be very delighted…but it hasn't happened so we'll have to wait and see."
The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer first left Fleetwood Mac back in 1998, after 28 years as a member. (She wrote many of the group's hit songs, including "Over My Head," "Don't Stop," and "Songbird.")
"I think I was just music'd out," the "Little Lies" singer tells The Guardian of why she quit. "I suffered from some kind of delusion that I wanted to be an English country girl…and it took me 15 years to realize that it's not really what I wanted at all."
That realization was made even clearer when McVie joined Fleetwood Mac for their recent shows at the O2 Arena in London. "It was amazing, like I'd never left," the Brit says of performing alongside her former bandmates. "I climbed back on there again and there they were, the same old faces onstage."
That said, she doesn't expect an official reunion to take place anytime soon. "It's a long way down that path if it ever were to happen," she tells the paper of Fleetwood Mac, who are on a break while bassist John McVie is treated for cancer. "John's got to get well first, so it hasn't been talked about. We'll have to wait and see."
McVie's desire to once again become a permanent member of the group will likely come as a surprise to her bandmates — but for Nicks, at least, it may be a welcome one. In an interview with Rolling Stone in December 2012, the Fleetwood Mac frontwoman said she'd love to have McVie back but didn't think it would ever happen.
"She is done. You know when you look in somebody's face and you can just tell? She doesn't want to do it anymore," Nicks, AGE, told Rolling Stone. "She doesn't want to fly. She doesn't want to come back to America. When she left, she left."
"She sold her house, her piano, her car," the "Rhiannon" songwriter continued. "She went to England and she has never been back since 1998, so it's not really feasible, as much as we would all like to think that she'll just change her mind one day. I don't think it'll happen. We love her, so we had to let her go."
