‘One Direction only wanted to talk to me’
Mick Fleetwood tells Craig Mclean how being dumped got him into Fleetwood Mac – and about the band’s unlikely young fans
The first thing you read in Mick Fleetwood’s new memoir is startling. Not cocaine-for-breakfast startling, or affair-withyour-bandmate startling. It’s a poem written by the Fleetwood Mac drummer’s late father, RAF Wing Commander John Joseph Fleetwood. In “Rock Star”, he cautions his youngest not to be carried away by the “sordid clubs, deadbeat roadies and randy fans… crooked managers exploiting talent, pusher, junkie, rocker and mod, dolly girls and the Children of God…”
Having experienced all of the above in 50 years of rock ’n’ roll picaresque, Fleetwood is candid in his response to his father’s verse.
“That would be his reminder to me, in typical Fleetwood manner, to retain a sense of humour,” he says. “No matter how wildly fantastical something becomes, be careful you don’t start believing your own bull----!”
It is something, he acknowledges, that happened to him “for sure”. But “although Fleetwood Mac did become blurred by substance abuse and a lifestyle turn here and there”, he says, “the real nitty-gritty of diva-ism and an inhuman approach to humanity, if you like, did not take place”. He qualifies: “To my recollection.” And this is a band whose most famous album,
Rumours (1977), chronicled a hydra of romantic entanglement and drugskewed breakdown.
The chipper 70-year-old – ponytailed, rake-thin and 6ft 6in in his ever-colourful socks – is holding gentlemanly court in a hotel suite in Knightsbridge, central London. The backbone of one of the all-time great bands has flown in from the Hawaiian island of Maui, where he lives, near bass player John Mcvie, the “Mac” to his “Fleetwood”.
The expat is here to discuss his new book, Love That Burns. Published to mark the 50th anniversary of Fleetwood Mac’s first gig at the Windsor Jazz and Blues Festival, it’s a lavish, photograph-heavy chronicle of the band’s early years – pre-stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. It’s an evocation of the heady days when the band went through guitarists – and a founder (the fabled Peter Green) – like a dose of salts.
This incarnation of the group hit Number One in 1968 with the instrumental Albatross. But mostly, as the £325 tome shows, these were dog days of pub gigs and boozing. And, for this well-spoken public schoolboy, they were fantastic and transformative.
“I just lucked out by being drawn into it and becoming somewhat educated,” Fleetwood says of the world he joined in 1963 as a 15-year-old fresh off the train from Gloucester. Soon, via his fashion designer sister, he was having his hair cut by Vidal Sassoon, and meeting David Hockney.
The book is dedicated to Peter Green, the mercurial guitarist who recruited Fleetwood and Mcvie and decided to name his new group after his rhythm section. Fleetwood clearly adores the genius musician who flew too close to the sun (that is, took too many drugs). Green has been reclusive for decades, but Fleetwood coaxed him to contribute to the book. He got hold of a chap in Southend-on-sea, Essex, where Green lives, “who’s a really sweet influence, a caretaker of Peter. He’s a guitar player and he sits with him in his living room two or three times a week, and they just jam.”
Even with that “in”, he admits he was none the less surprised when Green agreed to speak to him on the phone. Did he reveal, over the course of their two-and-half-hour conversation, why he had rated Fleetwood all those years ago? “Oh, I don’t think he rated me at all! But I did say to him: ‘why was it you asked me to be at your side when you formed Fleetwood Mac?’ He just went straight for it: ‘You were so sad’.” Fleetwood was initially flummoxed.
“‘Don’t you remember? [said Green] You and Jenny [Boyd, Fleetwood’s future wife, a model and sister of Pattie, also a model and the wife of George Harrison and Eric Clapton] had just broken up. You were miserable. Devastated. Like a beaten dog! And I couldn’t stand seeing you like that. You needed something to do’.
“I phoned Jenny up – saw her the other night – mother of my lovely grown-up daughters,” Fleetwood rattles, “and said: ‘Jenny, do you realise that had you not dumped me, there would never have been a Fleetwood Mac? I owe everything to you! We all do!’” Fleetwood chortles delightedly. “Which is true!”
In Love That Burns, Fleetwood matter-of-factly mentions Boyd’s subsequent affair with early Mac guitarist Bob Weston. “There’s so much water under the bridge,” he shrugs, aware that “water” in this case was more of a torrent.
“I didn’t want it to be that kind of book. This was all about the music, without all the…” He waves a big hand.
As John Mcvie never speaks to the press, Fleetwood is both keeper of the flame and last man standing. How did he survive? “Well, hey, I had a long chunk of time when I was not OK. I drink,” he says, “but not nearly as much as I used to. You’re always aware that you don’t want to open that box again. But I think it was luck. Even in the worst of the worst of the worst of the days,” he notes with a palpable wince as he remembers their narcotically crazed Seventies and Eighties, “I always seemed to rein myself in.”
The Mac daddy is great, garrulous company, high, these days, on little more than red wine and life. He’s thrilled at his new “pen pal” Harry Styles, who covers Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain on his current tour, much to the mortification of Fleetwood’s teenage daughters.
“I took my girls to see One Direction way back. Afterwards it was all, ‘Dad! Stay out of the way!’ And my daughters are watching as the whole One Direction crew only want to talk to me and go on about how they’re copying our harmonies!”
It’s a kinship that speaks to the millennial craze for Fleetwood Mac – the third generation to fall for this deathless, golden band.
“Seemingly so,” Fleetwood muses. “It’s gratifying. However long it goes on for, who’s really to know? But we have no complaints, really.”
The gritty, bluesy group and the blockbuster modern Mac are poles apart, but yoked together by this beanpole drummer with the twinkly eyes.
“It’s almost a miracle that we’ve managed to take an audience along this journey,” Fleetwood concedes with a still-can’tbelieve-my-luck chuckle, “without anyone saying: ‘It’s not even the same f------ band!’”