Peter Green
Musician
PETER GREEN, who has died at 73, was a founding member of Fleetwood Mac, the influential British rock group, and widely considered to be one of the greatest guitarists of all time.
Described by the musician BB King as the only guitarist “to give me the cold sweats”, it was perhaps the blues singer John Mayall who first recognised the extent of his talent, recruiting him to replace Eric Clapton in his band, The Bluesbreakers.
Green went on to form what was originally named
Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac featuring Jeremy Spencer in 1967, but walked away after just three years in the grip of what would later be diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia.
In that period the group had released six UK top 40 singles, including Need Your Love So Bad and the instrumental Albatross, which went to number one.
Green’s anxiety and distaste for money was one of the defining features of his illness, and the reason cited by many friends for his departure.
“He was obsessive about us not making money, wanting us to give it all away,” said his fellow band member Mick Fleetwood. Legend had it that he wanted to stop receiving his royalty cheques for Fleetwood Mac’s early work, which was worth around £30,000 a year.
Peter Allen Greenbaum was born in Bethnal Green, London, on October 29 1946, into a Jewish family. The youngest of four children, his brother Michael taught him his first guitar chords, and by the age of 11 Green was teaching himself.
The 1970s were punctuated by spells in psychiatric hospitals and courses of electroconvulsive therapy, which would leave him in a trancelike state. He blamed his health problems on his experimentation with LSD.
But in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he returned to music at the instigation of his brother, who wrote the majority of his records and helped him find a label. He also made a couple of appearances on Fleetwood Mac recordings, including the 1979 album Tusk and the single Brown Eyes, as well as contributing to Mick Fleetwood’s 1981 solo album The Visitor.