“God’s gift to a musician”: The lowest ebb of Fleetwood Mac
While the life and times of a classic rock musician may seem glamorous, it harbours a very dark reality that can be best traced through Mick Fleetwood.
The wild Fleetwood Mac drummer has largely flown through life by the seat of his pants, traversing the peaks and troughs of both a failing and successful music career. In the 1960s he watched as Led Zeppelin overshadowed his own attempts to become a blues rock icon and painfully accepted the spiralling downfall of his enigmatic frontman Peter Green.
Of course, the halls of rock fame awaited him in the 1970s, when he teamed up with his new songwriting duo, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. This new transatlantic group would spearhead a dream rock renaissance with their seminal album Rumours, but ultimately, it came at a cost. Relationships were painfully fractured in order to inspire an album that was so visceral in its storytelling, and so that the band could enjoy the levels of recognition they had long awaited, they had to fight with one another relentlessly.
While Fleetwood was never really at the centre of the conflict, he wasn’t immune to struggles. The success brought with it relative difficulty for him be it a crippling drug addiction or a descent into financial despair, forcing him into a squalor like lifestyle despite being one of the most decorated musicians in the world.
He had, simply put, lived his life like a rollercoaster and brought some question marks to the glamour of rock and roll hedonism. Ultimately, it meant that he had plenty of material for the moment he decided to dip into songwriting of his own, which came on the band’s 1995 record Time.
While it was a relatively unloved album and marked a period of confusion for the band, it did provide some clarity for Fleetwood on the track ‘These Strange Times’. It was a spoken-word mood piece that saw Fleetwood expose his own existential crisis, as his narrative voice explored the percussive terrain he has laid down.
While Fleetwood admits “it was probably not even heard by anybody,” he understood the wider importance of the song to his own state, providing him with some crucial answers to the questions that had been lingering since the band’s rise to fame.
He continued, “I thought, what if we all consider there’s something you can come out of this period and address? That’s what this track became.” Fleetwood added, “I just wanted to re-express some things, and you know what? Getting a second chance to redo something — that’s God’s gift to a musician.”
Fleetwood admitted that he had to persuade the band to let it on the record, but maybe that was because they didn’t understand the importance of it. It wasn’t necessarily for them, but for Fleetwood himself, a man who had anchored the band through thick and thin, long before any of the new 1990s members could remember. And so ‘These Strange Times’ served as a closing of a chapter, for someone who had been a part of every page of the story.
