The one regret Mick Fleetwood will always have about Fleetwood Mac: “The truth is the truth”
As the de facto father of the group, and the man who gave them half their name, Mick Fleetwood has more than his fair share of Fleetwood Mac stories to tell. His name has not only been one-half of the group’s title, but it has also pushed him from behind the kit to the spotlight of the group. But he has also often acted as the act’s ‘daddy’.
A co-founder of the British-American group, Fleetwood has been there through it all with rock music’s most expansive dynasty, experiencing their soaring highs and crushing lows. Ostensibly a survivor of the classic rock period and one of music’s most fractious groups, Fleetwood’s accounts of his band’s history remain undoubtedly compelling, with the musician offering wisdom amid the fallouts, love triangles and drug abuse.
Whether it be original frontman Peter Green’s stark fall from grace, guitarist Jeremy Spencer abruptly leaving to join a cult, or the storied Rumours era that saw Fleetwood hold the band together when it was falling apart at the seams – despite enduring a failing marriage of his own – the number of storied moments Fleetwood Mac’s drummer has weathered is remarkable. It is for this that he has established himself as the best historian when it comes to the group.
Fleetwood was also there when guitarist/vocalist Lindsey Buckingham acrimoniously departed the band in 2018. When speaking to The Sun the following year, he reflected on the band’s history in light of what had happened with Buckingham. He expressed his “regret” at them being “probably very naive” in the media during their most hedonistic days when making 1977’s Rumours.
In today’s social media age, artists are more carefully guarded about the information they share with the public. They are both more accessible than ever but perhaps more secure than ever in the secrets they allow into the public domain. For Fleetwood and the contemporaries of the band, these precedents didn’t yet exist. Instead, they were left to fend for themselves and figure out the protocols for dealing with the pressures of marketing their albums and tours while still holding back potentially dangerous stories. He said: “The truth is the truth. But in many ways, we shared too much information. Looking back, I can see an element of responsibility which I now regret not seeing before”.
“But now I just accept things how they are and try to be civil and open. All of these lovely people have put their hearts and souls into Fleetwood Mac, and the franchise should absolutely honour those people in every way, and it does,” the drummer commented during another interview. “The music comes back to haunt everyone afterwards anyway — and usually that wins out in the end”.
Fleetwood reflected: “There’s no doubt those were hard-lived days. For a while, within Fleetwood Mac, there were romances, and that lifestyle and the other stuff got forgotten, and we asked for that trouble. We were too open about who we were and what we were doing, probably very naive”.
He expressed: “All anyone ever asked was, ‘Who is sleeping with who?’ or ‘Who is angry with who?’ You start to feel it’s a shame. Now they intelligently talk about what we did musically. That’s important to us. We never wanted to make fools of ourselves too many times”.
Thankfully, while the stories of the band’s interpersonal relation ships are still of pointed interest, they are mainly used as counterpoints to the work they produced, often acting as remarks laid bare next to adulation love the albums they released and tours they sold out.
