Fleetwood Mac guitarist was found in homeless hostel after band fired him

Danny Kirwan, who has died aged 68, was a member of Fleetwood Mac in the band’s early days before falling victim to what its former frontman Lindsey Buckingham called ‘‘the Curse of the Fleetwood Mac Guitarist’’.

Kirwan, an 18-year-old guitar prodigy, was recruited to the band in August 1968, exactly a year after the original line-up – Peter Green, Mick Fleetwood, Jeremy Spencer and Bob Brunning (soon replaced by John Mcvie) – made their debut at the Windsor Jazz and Blues Festival.

In an interview with Guitar Player in 1994, Green described Kirwan as a kind of a ‘‘Ragtime Cowboy Joe’’ – somewhat unfairly perhaps, since Kirwan was credited with helping to lead the band away from its blues roots, introducing a dreamier, jazzy aspect to its three-guitar lineup.

He duetted with Green on the band’s first hit single Albatross – and went on to lead on many Peter Green-era recordings, including Green’s Oh Well, his playing notable for its pronounced vibrato. He also played and composed half the songs on the band’s third studio album, Then Play On (1969), including the opener, Coming Your Way.

But things soon started to go awry. Green departed in 1970 having developed schizophrenia after taking LSD. Kirwan and Spencer then began to lead the band to a more rock and roll sound, handling the guitars and vocals together on the Kiln House (1970) album, until February 1971 when, on a United States tour, Spencer walked out of his hotel one morning to buy a magazine and joined a religious cult instead.

After Spencer’s departure, Christine Mcvie joined the band, along with the guitarist Bob Welch, but Kirwan was landed with the lion’s share of the songwriting duties. He contributed half of the tracks on the next two albums, Future Games (1971) and Bare Trees (1972), which continued the move away from blues towards the pop-rock for which Fleetwood Mac would become better known.

But it was all too much for the mentally fragile and ultra-serious Kirwan, who hated performing live and was so emotional he would often cry as he played. There were stories of his not eating for days at a time, and subsisting entirely on beer.

The crunch came one autumn night in 1972, before a gig on that year’s tour of the US, when he suddenly lost his temper while tuning his guitar and hurled it at a mirror, showering broken glass over his bandmates, before stomping off into the auditorium. Refusing to come up on stage, he spent the evening heckling from the audience as the rest of the band struggled on without him.

Fired from the band, Kirwan eventually ended up living in a homeless hostel, where he was tracked down in the early 1990s by the band’s founder, Mick Fleetwood, who had sought the help of the Missing Persons Bureau.

Daniel David Kirwan was born in Brixton, south London. Little is known about his childhood, though a reference in his Child of Mine, from the Bare Trees album – ‘‘I won’t leave you, no not like my father did’’ – is thought to be autobiographical.

He was only 17 when he came to the attention of Green and Fleetwood, playing with his first band Boilerhouse. He played his first gig as part of the Fleetwood Mac lineup on August 14, 1968, at the Nag’s Head Blue Horizon Club in Battersea, south London.

While still with the band, Kirwan also contributed to Otis Spann’s blues album The Biggest Thing Since Colossus, worked on Christine Mcvie’s first solo album, and on Jeremy Spencer’s 1970 solo album, on which he played rhythm guitar and sang backing vocals.

He also played as a session guitarist with the blues band Tramp on their eponymously titled album in 1969, later working with them on their second album Put a Record On (1974) after his departure from Fleetwood Mac.

He went on to record three solo albums for DJM Records – Second Chapter (1975), Midnight in San Juan (1976) and Hello There Big Boy! (1979) – but none did well commercially. Kirwan then faded almost completely from view, surfacing briefly in 1993 when, having been tracked down by Fleetwood to St Mungo’s hostel for the homeless in central London, he gave a brief interview to The Independent at his favourite pub, the Coach and Horses in Greek St.

‘‘Looking cheerful but dishevelled,’’ the newspaper reported, ‘‘he told of constant travels with a rucksack and of five years living as a hermit in a dark basement flat in Brixton.’’

‘‘I’ve been through a bit of a rough patch but I’m not too bad,’’ Kirwan said. ‘‘I get by and I suppose I am homeless, but then I’ve never really had a home since our early days on tour. I couldn’t handle it mentally and I had to get out. I can’t settle.’’

In 1998 Kirwan and seven other past and present members of Fleetwood Mac were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but he did not attend the ceremony.

Kirwan was married in 1971, but was divorced a few years later. He is reported on the website Fleetwoodmac.net to have had a son. – Telegraph Group