Stevie Nicks wanted to sing to Christine McVie before she died. She didn't make it in time.

When Stevie Nicks learned on Saturday that her friend and Fleetwood Mac bandmate, Christine McVie, was seriously ill, a song started swirling around in her head.

"Hallelujah" by HAIM.

I had a best friend but she has come to pass
One I wish I could see now
You always remind me that memories will last
These arms reach out
You were there to protect me like a shield
Long hair running with me through the field
Everywhere you've been with me all along

Why me? How'd I get this hallelujah?

Nicks hoped to travel to London to sing it to her. But on Thursday came the news. McVie, 79, had died of a short, undisclosed illness.

In a statement released via social media, Nicks shared her heartache and her unfulfilled wish.

"A few hours ago I learned that my best friend in the whole world, since the first day in 1975, had passed away," Nicks wrote.

"I wanted to get to London, but we were told to wait... I thought I might possibly get to sing [Hallelujah] to her, and so I'm singing it to her now. I always knew I would need these words one day.

"It's all I can do now... See you on the other side, my love. Don't forget me."

pic.twitter.com/shclwCGpuu

— Stevie Nicks (@StevieNicks) November 30, 2022

Stevie and Christine: Fleetwood Mac's most enduring relationship.

It was the volatile relationships that became part of Fleetwood Mac's folklore. The marriages within and beyond the band, the affairs, the divorces, the various partnerships that threatened to bring them unstuck.

But the relationship between Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie endured through it all. They spoke of each other as more than bandmates; as collaborators, a mentor (McVie) and her mentee (Nicks), and dear friends.

It began in 1974 when founding member Mick Fleetwood sought to recruit American guitarist Lindsey Buckingham to the band. Buckingham had a stipulation: his then-girlfriend, Stevie Nicks, had to be part of the lineup, too. 

The band gave Christine the deciding vote.

"It was critical that I got on with her," she told The Guardian, "because I'd never played with another girl. But I liked her instantly. She was funny and nice but also there was no competition. We were completely different on the stage to each other and we wrote differently too."

Fleetwood Mac in 1977 (Lindsey Buckingham, Christine McVie, Mick Fleetwood, Stevie Nicks and John McVie). Image: Getty.

Nicks described their pairing as "like a force of nature".

"We made a pact, probably in our first rehearsal, that we would never accept being treated as second-class citizens in the music business," she said. "That when we walked into a room, we would be so fantastic and so strong and so smart that none of the uber-rockstar group of men would look through us. And they never did."

"I never want her to ever go out of my life again."

A classically trained pianist who discovered the blues, Christine was the stable core of Fleetwood Mac. As Rolling Stone phrased it in a 1984 profile, "Christine Perfect McVie has been the epitome of rock & roll sanity".

"We all drank a lot and did a lot of cocaine, we partied a lot. I don’t think I did anything terribly outrageous," she once told Harpers Bazaar. "Except I once threw a cake out the window which landed on top of a taxi. I was kind of the good girl in the group. That’s who I was. Stevie used to call me Mother Earth because I was always pretty grounded."

Nicks, meanwhile, was the potent rock goddess (or as Rolling Stone described her, "a maker of myths, a wearer of shawls, a genre unto herself, a woman taken by the sky").  

Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks in 1977. Image: Getty

There were times when the women's relationship strained. 

Notably in the mid '80s when Nicks married the husband of her late friend, Robin Anderson, shortly after she died of leukaemia (Nicks later described the three-month union as "a terrible, terrible mistake" by two grieving people). Nicks was also in the depths of her decade-long, life-threatening addiction to cocaine.

Lamenting the transformation of her friend's personality, McVie told Rolling Stone at the time, "Ten years ago, she really had her feet on the ground, along with a tremendous sense of humour, which she still has. But she seems to have developed her own fantasy world, somehow, which I’m not part of. We don’t socialise much."

Another chasm opened in their friendship in 1998, when McVie left the band. 

Fed up with the industry and crippled by a fear of flying that made touring torturous, she tucked herself away in her 17th Century mansion in the British county of Kent, satisfying herself cooking and tending to her garden. Or attempting to satisfy herself, at least.

After nearly 15 years, McVie realised her quiet existence was a "delusion", that she craved the creativity and camaraderie of her former life.

In 2014, after therapy for her flying phobia and an extended hand from Mick Fleetwood, McVie re-joined Fleetwood Mac. It was then that Stevie Nicks came to appreciate just what she'd been missing.

"I realised what an amazing friend she’d been of mine that I had lost and didn’t realise the whole consequences of it till now," she told The Star Tribune.

"She brings the funny back into Fleetwood Mac. Before, it was just a boys’ club. With her back, there’s more of a feminine touch to the whole thing. I never want her to ever go out of my life again, and that has nothing to do with music and everything to do with her and I as friends."

Feature image: Getty