Why Mick Fleetwood admitted Fleetwood Mac were “very naive”
It’s easy to forget how young some artists were when they created their masterpieces. Prince was only 19 when he burst onto the music scene. Tom Petty was 21 when he felt ready to release his first track with Mudcrutch. Fleetwood Mac’s best-known lineup—Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, and the McVies—were all still in their 20s when they crafted some of their biggest albums. While wisdom comes with age, Mick Fleetwood recalls that the band was simply “naive” back then.
By now, the stories of the emotional carnage that went on behind the scenes of Fleetwood Mac are musical myths, told time and time again like old fables. The band are a cautionary tale for merging the boundaries of love and work, pleasure and business. But yet, despite blurring the lines, they still managed to create some of the most defining songs of the 1970s and ‘80s.
However, it’s hard not to wonder what else they might have done if their personal relationships had been less volatile. Their first album as a lineup, Fleetwood Mac, ran so smoothly and seemed to scream the potential of this particular troupe, made up of the musical chemistry of two distinct couples. But by the time Rumours came around, they’d descended into in-fighting thanks to fallouts, breakups, affairs and heartbreak. While that motivated some of their best-loved anthems, like ‘Go Your Own Way’ and ‘Dreams’, it didn’t make for a productive atmosphere.
From then on, the band seemed to fall apart, get back together, and then fall apart again. They would move between moments of collaborative passion into hostile hiatuses when their personal relationships or various addictions got too hard to handle. All in all, they lost years of the band’s life, wasting them away in off-periods.
But for Mick Fleetwood, all of that can be chalked up to one thing: utter naivety. “For a while within Fleetwood Mac there were romances and that lifestyle … and the other stuff got forgotten – and we really asked for that trouble,” the drummer told The Sun. But it wasn’t just their mistaken priorities, putting hedonism first. There was also the fact that these were all still young people attempting to navigate new fame and notoriety. In the end, Fleetwood thinks they all gave too much away.
“We were too open about who we were and what we were doing – probably very naive,” he said. As they were always more than willing to air their dirty laundry in their music without much effort being put into veiling the truth behind the lyrics, the band were quickly swallowed up by a media storm of outlets wanting gossip more than artistic reflections. “All anyone ever asked about was, ‘Who is sleeping with who?’ or ‘Who is angry with who?’ And you start to feel it’s a shame,” he said.
However, the winds of time have been kind to the band in Fleetwood’s eyes. Now the storm of the personal drama has died down, the band are discussed more for their artistic merit and era-defining sound. To the group themselves, that’s a welcome rebalance. “Now they intelligently talk about what we did musically. That’s important to us,” Fleetwood said. “We never wanted to make fools of ourselves too many times.”
