Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Perfect’ return looms

It’s a good thing pop music fans can’t always take Christine Perfect or Christine McVie at her word — both names refer to the same person — and I mean that in the nicest way possible. Her performance here next Tuesday, Dec. 2, with Fleetwood Mac at SDSU’s Viejas Arena is part of her first tour with the band in 16 years. (Ticket information appears at the conclusion of this article.)

In 1969, the year after she left the English blues-rock band Chicken Shack and a year before her debut solo album, “Christine Perfect,” was released, Perfect announced she was quitting the music business. Happily, the gifted singer, songwriter and keyboardist soon changed her mind.

In 1970, after a short, ill-fated solo tour in England, Perfect briefly quit music again. She then joined Fleetwood Mac, whose bassist, John McVie, she had married in 1968. She soon took his name and, as Christine McVie, helped Fleetwood Mac recover from the departure of its key member and musical mastermind, singer-guitarist Peter Green, and evolve into one of the world’s biggest pop-rock acts.

The McVies divorced by 1978, a year after Fleetwood Mac’s classic album, “Rumours,” chronicled in song the dissolution of their marriage and the romantic break-up of fellow Mac members Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham.

Buckingham quit Fleetwood Mac in 1987 to pursue a solo career. Christine McVie stopped touring with the band in 1990. After several more lineup changes, the once mighty Mac ground to a halt in 1995 — two years after the classic lineup of Buckingham, Nicks, both McVies and never-say-die drummer Mick Fleetwood reunited for one night in early 1993 to play at Bill Clinton’s presidential inauguration. (Clinton’s campaIgn had used the band’s 1977 hit “Don’t Stop,” one of Christine McVie’s best, as its theme song.)

The five musicians reunited in 1997 for a tour and album that she vowed would be her last with the group. True to McVie’s word, when the tour ended in 1999, she left and returned to live quietly in her English country home (which, apparently, is a castle).

Now, 16 years later, she is back in the fold, touring with Fleetwood Mac once again, a year after the group performed without her at SDSU’s Viejas Arena. Her return means the band can now reclaim “Say You Love Me,” “Songbird,” “Little Lies” and other McVie-penned gems that had been retired from the group’s concert repertoire after she left in 1999. It also means that the three-part vocal harmonies that were once such a vital and distinctive ingredient of the band’s sound have been reborn.

At 71, Christine McVie is the band’s senior member — and one of its most valuable assets. Her return coincides with bassist John McVie’s apparent recovery from the cancer that last year prompted the group to cancel its tours of Australia and New Zealand so that he could receive medical treatment.

So expect an air of double-celebration when Fleetwood Mac performs Tuesday at SDSU’s Viejas Arena. Don’t stop, indeed.

Fleetwood Mac: On with the Show

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday

Where: Viejas Arena, 5500 Canyon Crest Drive, SDSU

Tickets: Nearly sold-out (a few tickets are still available; most have been sold)

Phone: (800) 745-3000

Online: ticketmaster.com