“A Loner And A One-Off”
Danny Kirwan 1950-2018
Fleetwood Mac guitarist Danny Kirwan, whose vibrato technique adorned classics from 1968 until 1972, died on June 8. Mac alumni Christine McVie and Jeremy Spencer pay tribute.
“DANNY KIRWAN was the white English blues guy,” Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie tells MOJO, days after the guitarist and songwriter’s death on June 8. “Nobody else could play like him. He was a one-off.” Indeed, Kirwan played a vital role during not one but two eras of Fleetwood Mac. As an 18-year-old, he debuted his signature vibrato sound on their 1968 hit, Albatross, while his imaginative reading of the 1933 jazz song Jigsaw Puzzle Blues made it onto the B-side. However, after co-founder Peter Green’s departure, Kirwan moved centre-stage, and left his musical fingerprint on such underrated Mac albums as 1971’s Future Games. He formed a crucial link between the ‘old’ Fleetwood Mac blues band and the ‘new’ chart-dominating version featuring Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. Despite his talent, though, Kirwan fell victim to what one of his successors, Buckingham, half-jokingly calls “the curse of the Fleetwood Mac guitarist”. Like Green, Jeremy Spencer and Bob Welch, Kirwan did not share in the group’s later multiplatinum success. Instead, his haphazard solo career and personal life were marred by alcoholism and mental health issues. By the early 1990s, Kirwan’s legacy had been reduced to a footnote, with newspaper stories revealing how the Mac’s “cheerful, dishevelled” former guitarist was now destitute. Born in Brixton, south London, Kirwan learned to play guitar as a teenager, and gravitated towards jazz, big band music and the blues of Otis Rush and Albert King. In 1967, Fleetwood Mac’s co-founder Peter Green chanced upon the 17-year-old Kirwan performing with his first band, Boilerhouse. Drummer Mick Fleetwood suggested he join their group instead. Kirwan joining Fleetwood Mac in 1968 came as “a surprise and no surprise, really,” says Jeremy Spencer, Green’s co-guitarist at the time. “The ‘surprise’ for me was to suddenly see Danny sitting in the van, ready for the next gig. The ‘no surprise’ was that I was timid about stepping out with new ideas, whereas Danny was brimming with them. It gave Pete a new lease of life.”
“Danny gave Peter Green a new lease of life.” JEREMY SPENCER
Green later claimed Albatross, the band’s UK Number 1, wouldn’t have “been possible without Danny”. Soon after, Kirwan joined Green and Mac bassist John McVie in the studio with Chicago blues pianist Otis Spann. Critics were stunned to hear the young English kid playing several solos on the subsequent album, The Biggest Thing Since Colossus. On Fleetwood Mac’s next UK album, Then Play On, Kirwan and Green’s sabre-rattling twin leads defined the likes of Coming Your Way and the later hits Oh Well (Part 1) and The Green Manalishi (With The Two Prong Crown). “I was a huge fan of that particular incarnation of Fleetwood Mac,” says Christine McVie. “I would go and see them whenever I could. Danny and Peter gelled so well together. Danny had that very precise, piercing vibrato – a unique sound.” She so adored Kirwan’s song When You Say she re-recorded it for her 1970 solo LP, with Danny handling the string arrangement. “He was a perfectionist,” she remembers. But his abilities were offset by a difficult personality. “Danny brought inventiveness and melody to the band, but he was like bull in a china shop,” says Spencer. “He took over – with generally good results, but it sometimes left some less than positive feelings.” In the studio, others remember Kirwan seeking Green’s approval while simultaneously jumping at any chance to challenge him. Kirwan would soon have his chance to take over, when an increasingly unpredictable Green left in August 1970, after taking LSD in what Spencer calls “a jet-set hippy commune” during a German tour. Some have also blamed Kirwan’s behaviour on being spiked at the same commune. Others, though, insist his problems came from increasingly heavy drinking. Green’s replacement was keyboard player Christine McVie. Fleetwood Mac’s next album, Kiln House, was named after the band’s new communal retreat, a converted oast house in Hampshire. When Kirwan and his wife-to-be, Clare Morris, joined the group there, it wasn’t comfortable. “Danny was a troubled man and a difficult person to get to know,” admits Christine. “He was a loner and – I say this with the greatest respect – he didn’t know how to treat a woman. I respected him as a musician, but we didn’t always see eye to eye.” Both Kirwan and Spencer were struggling to front the group in Green’s absence. The latter left in 1971, and Kirwan was soon clashing with Spencer’s replacement, Bob Welch. There was a pattern emerging: Welch (who died in 2012) praised Kirwan’s “musical maturity and soulfulness” while calling him “one of the strangest people I’ve ever met”. Kirwan’s writing and spectral-sounding guitar dominated ’71’s Future Games, while the following year’s Bare Trees included his musical take on Rupert Brooke’s poem Dust. But the subsequent US tour broke him. Backstage, after an argument with Welch, Kirwan smashed up his Les Paul and then started banging his head against a bathroom wall. The band played without him, and he was fired soon after. Kirwan re-surfaced in 1974 with Hungry Fighter, comprising ex-members of Chicken Shack and Savoy Brown. They lasted one gig before splitting. “Danny had a touch of genius,” says their former piano player Paul Raymond. “But the poor fellow was a bag of nerves. I found it hard to have a conversation with him.” Raymond stayed on for Kirwan’s debut solo album, ’75’s Second Chapter: “But it was a bit bizarre. The demos Danny did were so much better.” Two more solo records followed, but Kirwan seemed to vanish after 1979’s Hello There Big Boy!. Nothing was heard of him again until 1993, when The Independent newspaper responded to a plea for information from Mick Fleetwood, who was shocked to hear his former bandmate had been sleeping on a park bench. The Independent found Kirwan staying in St Mungo’s hostel for the homeless in London’s West End. In truth, Kirwan’s whereabouts were known to many on the capital’s music scene. The late Melody Maker journalist Carol Clerk had befriended Danny in one of his regular haunts, The Oporto pub in Holborn, but respected his desire for privacy. “He has been living on social security and ‘dribs and drabs’ of royalties,” revealed The Independent. Asked why he’d quit the business, Kirwan replied: “I couldn’t handle the lifestyle and the women and the travelling.” Jeremy Spencer last saw Kirwan in London in 2002. Danny was accompanied by his ex-wife Clare and their son, Dominic: “It was pleasant enough, even though he was a bit in his own world.” By then, he was living in a care home in south London, where he was well looked after and visited by family and friends until the end. Mick Fleetwood was the first of Kirwan’s ex-bandmates to learn of his death, aged 68, from pneumonia. “Mick told me he passed peacefully in his sleep – which is probably the way we’d all like to go,” says Christine. Fleetwood released a statement: “Danny’s true legacy, in my mind, will forever live on in the music he wrote and played so beautifully in Fleetwood Mac.” Christine McVie concurs. “Listen to Woman Of A 1000 Years, Sands Of Time, Tell Me All The Things You Do… they’re killer songs,” she says. “He was a fantastic musician, and a fantastic writer.” Mark Blake
“I couldn’t handle the lifestyle and the women and the travelling.” DANNY KIRWAN