Mother Earth, musical prodigy or steely powerhouse? The enigma of Christine McVie

Through Fleetwood Mac's most turbulent times, she held the line - and wrote some of their most beautiful, bittersweet songs. We pay tribute to Christine McVie

According to a handwritten note Stevie Nicks posted on social media on Wednesday, Christine McVie's bandmates in Fleetwood Mac hadn't even known she was ill until a few days before her death. I wanted to be in London; I wanted to get to London," Nicks lamented. But I was told to wait."

It's a sad story, but it somehow seems very Christine McVie. She gave every impression of being unfailingly modest and understated while playing a vital role in one of the most successful rock bands in history, maintaining a remarkably clear-eyed view of their strengths and failings: she bluntly dismissed the last two albums she made with the band, 1990's Behind the Mask and 1995's Time, as terrible". She appeared to sail through the soap opera that was Fleetwood Mac in the mid- to late 70s - a broiling mass of failed personal relationships, cocaine-fulled egotism and excess - with such a degree of equanimity that Nicks took to calling her Mother Earth. Somehow, she pulled off the not-inconsiderable feat of seeming to be at one remove from the band's madness while in reality being in the thick of it.