also looks out over the capital's river. Nicks settles down on the huge sofa – she's less than 5ft 2in, and her legs barely reach the edge, let alone the floor – and tells me about her friendship with McVie.

"We felt like, together, we were a force of nature," she says. "And we made a pact, probably in our first rehearsal, that we would never accept being treated as second-class citizens in the music business. 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."

What Nicks didn't know until years later was that she would never have even joined the band were it notfor McVie. In the mid-70s, Fleetwood Mac were struggling for an identity: their 60s incarnation as a blues band had been derailed by Peter Green's LSD use andrepeated lineup changes, and founder Mick Fleetwood was desperate to recruit the American Lindsey Buckingham as a guitarist. Buckingham, however, said he would only join if Nicks – his girlfriend at the time, as well as his musical partner in the up-and-coming Buckingham Nicks – was allowed to join too. The band arranged a meet-up, with Fleetwood, letting Christine have the decisive vote.

"We went for Mexican food with them," Nicks recalls, "and we laughed and laughed, because you English people have a very strange sense of humour. Even Lindsey had fun – he didn't want to, but he couldn't help it."

"It