Songwriters are lucky, we go back and relive painful experiences...
| Published date | 02 December 2022 |
| Publication title | Express, The/The Express on Sunday |
"Life humbles you bit by bit," the Fleetwood Mac singer, songwriter and keyboardist - who died this week aged 79 after a short illness - mused to this rookie upstart, who probably shouldn't have been there in the first place.
To be English in California, as I had found, went a long way in the 1980s. An unlikely friendship with movie star Raquel Welch opened doors for me. Certainly Chris, as everyone knew her, was unfazed by my presence, which was enough.
"There comes the realisation of how much stupid nonsense you've wasted your time on," said the then 41-year-old. "You want those years back, but of course you can't get them.
"The songwriters are the lucky ones. We get to go back, to relive experiences that were maybe too painful to live at the time, or we were way too off our heads on booze and drugs to know what was going on. We get to make sense of things in words and tunes. As compensation goes, it's not the worst kind."
It was January 1984. A week or so earlier, on December 28, Chris's former lover, Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, had gone overboard from a yacht called Emerald moored at Marina del Rey. Drugs, booze and freezing seawater did for him. He was just 39.
Chris heard about the tragedy in a call from her PA, who phoned at the ungodly rock star hour of 8am to inform her boss Dennis had drowned.
"Is he all right?" Chris asked. Convinced the hell-raising love of her life was indestructible, she could not compute "drowned" meant "dead".
.
I persuaded my new friend to invite me to her home to talk further.
Days later, I drove through the entrance of a gated estate in the Crest Streets enclave of Beverly Hills for the first of many encounters over the next few years.
I was confronted by what looked like a lavish English country mansion which, I later learnt, had once belonged to Joan Collins and, separately, Elton John.
--. d - th
A baronial marble fireplace dominated the ballroom-sized sitting room. French windows opened on to a verandaed patio with majestic views.We sat in a vast pine kitchen with a beamed ceiling and a den. Not a maid in sight. Chris made coffee.We talked about the night, only a week before he died, when I had supper with Dennis and his old pal from England, the DJ Roger Scott. By then, Chris and Dennis had been history for nearly two years.
But Dennis spent the evening lamenting their demise, swigging from a bottle, sobbing...
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