Songbird: An Intimate Biography of Christine McVie Lesley-Ann Jones

I'll start right off with the conclusion of this review: don't bother.

Supposedly the author was a friend of Christine McVie. Clearly McVie was a very private person, and if Jones was her friend, she certainly was not an intimate one, regardless of the book's title. Just how revealing was a guarded rock star with a rock journalist "friend"? I would speculate that the answer is "not so much".

And so speculation is what Jones does repeatedly in an attempt to explain McVie's childhood, her relationships with her parents, where her talents came from, and her motivations for many decisions throughout her life. She talks in depth about McVie's phycological background and reasons for her life's pathway with a psychologist that never met Christine McVie. She uses a jealous bass player that wanted but never got John McVie's role in Fleetwood Mac like he is an expert on Christine. 

No family members contributed. No Fleetwood Mac members gave new insights (although they are often quoted from past interviews). No lifelong close friends (real ones) talked to Jones. No neighbors from  Wickhambreaux, the small country town where Christine lived for some fifteen years had anything to say.

There's scant detailed or new information on the Fleetwood Mac records to which Christine famously contributed. In fact, I thought Jones wasn't even going mention Heroes Are Hard To Find, when she went off on a multi-page tangent and discussion of Bob Welsh's departure from the band before she even mentioned Heroes, the last Fleetwood Mac album on which he was featured. She of course spends lots of pages on the famous version of the band, but skims over the 1970-1974 era, when Christine wrote many of the bands best songs during the transitional phase, and helped keep things together before Buckingham and Nicks signed on.

The book covers all the sex, drugs and rock and roll mess and excess that was the famous post 1974 band. There's nothing new here, that story has been told to death. Same with her disastrous love of Dennis Wilson, a brief period of true love for Christine that ended in heartbreak.

If Lesley-Ann Jones was actually a friend of Christine McVie, she would have never written this sham of a biography.