Fred: The pivotal role of Mick Fleetwood’s imaginary friend
Drummers are always odd-balls, aren’t they? You only have to rattle off a few of the heavy hitters to determine that they truly lived in their own world, undeterred by the vanity of music performance. They didn’t mind getting sweaty, pulling silly faces and being largely invisible to the eye of screaming fans. If you don’t believe me, go back and watch some old Fleetwood Mac performances and notice how entirely unhinged Mick Fleetwood looks.
But who can blame him? He steered the ship of a rock and roll merry-go-round for several years before finally landing on a line-up that would bring him his much-needed musical glory. After flirting with greatness with Peter Green on the axe, the latter realised how closely linked stardom was to destruction as he left the band under the strain of LSD usage.
When Fleetwood finally landed the five-piece that would go on to cement their place in musical history, he unknowingly became the middleman in a soap opera-like dynamic. His two lead singers, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, were in the middle of a hideous break-up that felt as though it would implode into chaos during any given live show. While his founding partner, John McVie, was divorcing vocalist Christine McVie while she was penning chart-topping love songs about the band’s lighting director.
Naturally, every conversation Fleetwood may have tried to have with his bandmates off-stage was riddled with tension, leaving him to walk a tight-rope of eggshells in the hopes of keeping his world-conquering band in one piece. So, no wonder he smashed the hell out of the drums onstage every night, for it must have been a physical release of his silent frustration.
Like all of his counterparts in the industry at that time, Fleetwood leant into heavy drug use offstage. While it would have surely been a means of welcome escapism from the turbulence of the band, his partying was merely a sign of the times. A decade where hedonistic opulence was waiting with open arms, ready to distract brilliant musicians.
And so, with no real friends at any of these parties who could stop Fleetwood from letting rip, he had to conjure an imaginary friend of his own to help guide him truly out of harm’s way. “I call him Fred,” Fleetwood said, explaining, “When I was a fucking nutcase, Fred would go, ‘Mick, you’d better goto sleep now,’ and I’d go, What the fuck do I want to go and sleep for? l’m 20 grams in and I’m up for 10 days, I could give a shit. Fred would say, ‘Because you’ve got eight more shows to do and you’re going to make a fool of yourself’.”
Thank god for Fred because there was very little evidence of anyone talking any real sense at the music industry parties of the 1970s. It’s just a shame for Fleetwood that in the troubling decades that followed for the band, when they would finally dissolve as a unit, Fred couldn’t actually spring to life and help him write his next Rumours.
