Very sad to hear of the passing of Christine McVie this week. An amazing musical pedigree in anyone's book. We usually think of her in terms of peak period platinum selling Fleetwood Mac, but it's interesting to dig a bit deeper. After a series of bands in her native West Midlands, she came to prominence with the band Chicken Shack. Looking in our archives it appears that Chicken Shack played the Poly, now the University of Westminster, at least twice in the late 1960s. Posters for the 2 events are below;
I've written before about the musical history of University of Westminster, and we have run a number of 'ghost gigs' celebrating artists that have played at one of our venues. Here we source recordings of the gigs that took place, and play them again, on the anniversary of the date they originally took place, as far as possible in the space in which they took place. We play these at lunchtime as a homage to the lunchtime theatre model of the Soho Poly and in order to 'disrupt your day with culture'. More about this project here. One of these was based around the Fleetwood Mac performance in 1968, the fanzine we produced for this is here, in case you are wondering why the second page is upside down, its designed for double sided printing and to be folded into an A5 'booklet'. This of course was Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac before Christine McVie's time. We don't have any recordings of these Chicken Shack shows, but here is a link to. a John Peel session from that year so it hopefully captures what it might have sounded like. Quite an artist. RIP
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