“A bloody nightmare”: Mick Fleetwood on the era of Fleetwood Mac that nearly killed him
When it comes to Fleetwood Mac, the fact that the talk of drugs doesn’t quite overshadow the music is a testament to how galactically brilliant they were as pop stars. The likes of ‘Rhiannon’, ‘Go Your Own Way’, ‘The Chain’ and ‘Dreams’ are so utterly incredible that they still (just about) take precedence over the sheer magnitude of drinking and snorting that the Mac got up to in their heyday. It’s a genuine achievement that they aren’t a band that gets lost in their own mythology, like Mötley Crüe or The Libertines, but only just.
For Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, and the dearly missed Christine McVie, the stories of excess aren’t just rock hack muckraking. Instead, they’re a symptom. At their core, Mac were a truly baffling mix of hardened rock survivors and experts at self-sabotage. They were blues lifers well beyond the point where it was cool until they hired two California singer-songwriters and tried to go pop. Any other band would be kneecapped by this; instead, it made them one of the biggest, most beloved bands of their era.
They responded to this by seemingly trying their damndest to destroy the band outright. Whether that’s with the drugs, inter-band divorces, inter-band affairs or by following up Rumours, one of the best albums out there, with an experimental, avante-pop double album inspired by the Talking Heads. The fact that we got at their original form for almost 30 years is a miracle in and of itself, especially because once the sheen from Rumours faded—and the band made the difficult transition into the 1980s—the interpersonal friction deepened dramatically.
It wasn’t even that the band weren’t successful in the 1980s. Mirage in 1982 was a pretty sizable commercial comeback for the group. However, it didn’t stop the personal decay the band were going through, as Mick Fleetwood explained to Uncut: “I wasn’t quite Keith Moon but I was working hard on getting there, It was a wild trip that didn’t stop for nine years. I tried very hard to leave the planet, and I nearly did. I don’t want to romanticise something that’s extremely dangerous. It was fun, but it was a bloody nightmare, and I would never do it again. It became boring and sordid.”
With Fleetwood and Nicks in the throes of addiction and the McVie-s wanting nothing to do with them, it was up to Buckingham to press-gang the band into making something releasable. Thus, five years after Mirage came 1987’s Tango In The Night. Somehow, by sheer force of personality and will, Buckingham almost single-handedly made one of their best albums and, arguably, their second most commercially successful record after Rumours.
Unfortunately, making the album was such profound psychological torture that he quit the band after its release. This was a decision the band received with maturity and understanding. By which I mean Nicks physically attacked him and chucked him out of the house in which they were having the band meeting. After all that bad blood, one would assume they’d go full Morrissey and Johnny Marr and never work with each other again, right?
Well, you’d assume wrong. After a few high-profile reunion shows in the early 1990s, the band’s classic lineup decided that they were in the right place to get back together and went on the road to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Rumours in 1997. Mac were never far from drama, with members quitting and rejoining every other year. However, it’s telling that the band wasn’t truly over until the tragic passing of Christine McVie in 2022.
Fleetwood Mac could get through anything. Changing times, changing tastes, personal issues, romantic problems and, yes, the drugs. What they couldn’t do without was their ‘Songbird’. In a way, it is a fitting tribute to the soul of such a chaotic band.
