and Sandy Denny," she muses, "but not playing instruments I suppose." Mick Fleetwood encouraged her to write songs ("I loved the stuff we did with Bob Welch [in the early 70s]: Mystery To Me, Bare Trees, Future Games") but it wasn't really until Buckingham and Nicks joined that her true talent as a hitmaker was set free.

"I think I'm just good with hooks," she says, looking to win some kind of award for understatement, although this does speak of the songwriting balance in the band that gives Fleetwood Mac their depth: Buckingham provided the darkness, Nicks the poetry and McVie the optimism. Buckingham added another dimension with his studio expertise, shaping the band's sound and daring them to venture into brave new territory. It was his idea tofollow Rumours with Tusk, a double album influenced by the emerging punk and new wave bands whose very existence had made Fleetwood Mac seem somewhat unfashionable.

"We didn't really like [Tusk]," McVie admits. "We just kind of went" – she rolls her eyes – "okaaay. Because it was so different from Rumours. Deliberately so. In hindsight, I do like that record, but at the time me and Stevie would be like: 'What the hell is he doing in the toilet playing an empty Kleenex box for a drum?'"

Of course, recording percussion while sitting on the loo makes a certain kind of sense when you consider the escalation of the band's drug use by this point.

"My habit didn't really start until 1977," Nicks says. "During 1975 and 76 we were