The story of Fleetwood Mac

London blues beginnings

The story begins with a guitarist from Bethnal Green in east London. Peter Green was born Peter Greenbaum in October 1946, the youngest of four children in a Jewish family, and his brother Michael taught him his first chords. By 1966 he had landed one of the most daunting jobs in British music, replacing Eric Clapton in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. When producer Mike Vernon asked where Clapton was, Mayall told him not to worry, because he had found someone better. Green's playing on the album A Hard Road was so admired that friends started calling him the Green God, a playful nod to Clapton's own nickname of God. He was a player who cared about feeling far more than speed.[1] [2]

In the Bluesbreakers Green found his favourite rhythm section. Mick Fleetwood was a very tall drummer from Redruth in Cornwall, the son of an air force pilot, who had grown up partly in Egypt and Norway and left school at fifteen to drum in London. John McVie was a quiet bass player from Ealing who had trained for nine months as a tax inspector while playing with Mayall. Fleetwood was soon sacked from the Bluesbreakers for turning up drunk. Around then Mayall gave Green some free studio time as a gift, and Green used it to record with Fleetwood and McVie. One of the tracks was an instrumental he named after the two of them. He called it Fleetwood Mac.[1] [2] [3]

In 1967 Green left Mayall to start his own blues band, and he named it Fleetwood Mac to lure McVie along. McVie was not ready to give up a steady wage, so a bass player called Bob Brunning filled in on the understanding he would step aside. Slide guitarist Jeremy Spencer, an Elmore James devotee from Hartlepool, completed the group. They made their debut on the thirteenth of August 1967 at the National Jazz and Blues Festival in Windsor, billed as Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac featuring Jeremy Spencer. Within weeks McVie changed his mind, unhappy that Mayall was drifting towards jazz and adding horns. Brunning stood down, and the first settled line up was in place.[1] [2] [3]

The band signed to Mike Vernon's new Blue Horizon label, and their self titled debut album came out in February 1968. It had no single on it, yet it reached number four in Britain and stayed on the chart for thirty seven weeks. Early in 1968, at Green's own insistence, his name was dropped from the band's title. That year brought the single Black Magic Woman, a Latin tinged minor blues that Green wrote about a former girlfriend, Sandra Elsdon. Two years later Santana turned it into a much bigger American hit. The second album, Mr. Wonderful, was cut live in the studio, and a pianist friend from the band Chicken Shack called Christine Perfect sat in on keyboards.[1] [2] [3]

Albatross and the fall of Peter Green

In the summer of 1968 the band added a third guitarist. Danny Kirwan was just eighteen, a shy player from Brixton who had been following the band around London clubs, carrying gear and jamming with Green after soundchecks. Green had spotted him fronting a trio called Boilerhouse and tried to find him a better rhythm section through an advert that drew more than three hundred applicants. Nobody was good enough, so Fleetwood suggested simply asking Kirwan to join. Green and Kirwan clicked at once. Only two months later they recorded a dreamy instrumental that Green had been carrying around for a long time. Green said afterwards that without Danny he would never have had a number one record.[1] [2]

That instrumental was Albatross. Green said the title came from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Fleetwood played it with soft timpani mallets. At first the BBC saw little commercial point in a guitar instrumental, but Top of the Pops had forty five seconds to fill over its closing credits and used Albatross. Orders poured in the next day. In January 1969 it reached number one in Britain, and it remains the band's only British chart topper. The same month, on an American tour, the band recorded at Chess studios in Chicago with blues heroes including Willie Dixon, Otis Spann and Buddy Guy. Then came Man of the World, a sad song Green later described as him at his saddest.[1] [2] [3]

By 1969 the band were among the biggest acts in Britain. The Beatles wanted them on Apple Records, but manager Clifford Davis took them to Warner Brothers through its Reprise label, where they stayed for the rest of their career. The album Then Play On, named after a line in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, came out that September, with songwriting split between Green and Kirwan. Spencer barely appeared on it. Its companion single Oh Well was a hit in Britain and the band's first entry on the American Hot 100. On stage Spencer remained a wild comic presence, doing impressions of Elvis and Buddy Holly, while offstage he was quiet and often read the Bible in his hotel room.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Green was changing. He had started taking LSD, grew a beard, wore robes and a crucifix, and pushed the band to give its money away. During a European tour in the spring of 1970 he went to a party at a commune near Munich and took acid there. Clifford Davis later named that night as the turning point in Green's decline. His last recording with the band was The Green Manalishi, a dark song he said was about money, pictured as the devil, and inspired by a dream about a dead dog barking at him. It reached number ten in Britain. Green played his final show with Fleetwood Mac on the twentieth of May 1970 and walked away.[1] [2] [3]

The lost years

Without their leader the band retreated to the English countryside. They leased a converted oast house in Hampshire called Kiln House, lived there with their families, and gave the name to their next album in 1970. Mick Fleetwood married model Jenny Boyd there in June, and she was the sister of George Harrison's wife Pattie. Christine Perfect had married John McVie in 1968 after a romance of only a couple of weeks, with Peter Green as best man. She had left Chicken Shack to spend time with her husband, but she sang, played keyboards and drew the cover for Kiln House without credit. By August 1970 she was a full member of Fleetwood Mac.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In February 1971 the band arrived in Los Angeles on an American tour, days after a major earthquake had rattled the city. Jeremy Spencer, already fragile and full of dark premonitions, said he was popping out to a bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard. He never came back. After days of frantic searching, the band found he had joined a religious group called the Children of God, now known as the Family International. He refused to return. To save the tour, Peter Green flew out and played the final week, on condition that he performed only new material and none of his own old songs. Spencer has stayed with the group ever since, and says he left the band by his own free will.[1] [2]

The band now lived communally in a big house in Hampshire called Benifold. A friend recommended an American guitarist living in Paris named Bob Welch, and they hired him after hearing a tape of his songs, without ever playing together. Welch and Christine McVie steered the band towards melodic rock on Future Games in 1971 and Bare Trees in 1972. But Danny Kirwan was drinking heavily and growing isolated. In August 1972, before a gig on an American tour, he argued with Welch over tuning, banged his head and fists against a wall, smashed his Les Paul guitar and refused to go on. He watched from the mixing desk and criticised the show afterwards. Fleetwood fired him.[1] [2] [3]

More change followed. Singer Dave Walker and guitarist Bob Weston came in for the album Penguin in 1973, named for John McVie's fondness for the penguins at London Zoo. Walker was soon let go. Then, during the American tour for Mystery to Me, Fleetwood discovered that Weston was having an affair with his wife Jenny. Weston was fired and the remaining twenty six dates were cancelled after a show in Lincoln, Nebraska, on the twentieth of October 1973. Meanwhile the McVies' marriage was strained by constant work together and by John's heavy drinking. That night the band told their sound engineer that Fleetwood Mac was finished. It was not, but what came next was even stranger.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Manager Clifford Davis still had tour dates to fill and claimed he owned the name Fleetwood Mac. He assembled a group of musicians from a band called Legs and sent them across America in January 1974 as the New Fleetwood Mac. None of them had ever been in the band. The first shows went well, until word spread that this was not the real thing. Crowds turned hostile, promoters pulled dates, and after bottles were thrown at the stage in Edmonton the tour collapsed. The legal fight over the name kept the real band off the road for almost a year. Fleetwood later said he was grateful in the end, because the lawsuit pushed the band to move to California.[1] [2] [3]

Two Californians join the band

Bob Welch persuaded the others that Warner Brothers was neglecting them and that the future lay in America. The band moved to Los Angeles in 1974 and decided to manage themselves. That September they released Heroes Are Hard to Find, their highest charting American album to that point, reaching number thirty four. But Welch was exhausted. His marriage was failing, he felt he had run out of ideas, and the endless struggle to keep the band alive had worn him down. In December 1974 he resigned. Of that era he later said that Mick Fleetwood credited him with saving the band. It was a fair point, because it was his push to move west that set up everything that followed.[1] [2] [3]

Across town, two young Californians were struggling. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks had met at Menlo Atherton High School near San Francisco, singing California Dreamin' together at a youth club gathering. They played in a band called Fritz, which opened for Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, then became a couple and a duo. They recorded demos on a tape machine at Buckingham's father's coffee roasting plant, moved to Los Angeles and made an album called Buckingham Nicks in 1973. It flopped and Polydor dropped them. Nicks supported them both, waiting tables and cleaning the house of their producer Keith Olsen, while Buckingham toured as a guitarist in Don Everly's band.[1] [2] [3]

In late 1974 Mick Fleetwood went to Sound City studios in Los Angeles to check the place out. To show off the room, engineer Keith Olsen played him Frozen Love from the Buckingham Nicks album, and Fleetwood made a mental note of the guitarist. When Welch left, Fleetwood called and offered Buckingham the job. Buckingham said he and Nicks were a package deal. Christine McVie, a little wary of having another woman in the band, was given the final say, and the five met at a Mexican restaurant called El Carmen. Nicks arrived first, still in the flapper dress from her waitressing shift. It went well. Buckingham and Nicks joined on New Year's Eve 1974.[1] [2] [3]

Within weeks the new line up was recording at Sound City. The album Fleetwood Mac came out in July 1975, and several songs came straight from a planned second Buckingham Nicks record. Nicks had written Rhiannon after reading a novel that mentioned the name, and Landslide while looking at the Rocky Mountains in Aspen, wondering whether to give up music. On stage Rhiannon became so intense that Fleetwood compared it to an exorcism. There were clashes too. When Buckingham tried to shape the bass parts, John McVie reminded him that the band was Fleetwood Mac, and that he was the Mac. The album reached number one in America more than a year after release and sold millions.[1] [2] [3]

Success arrived just as the band's private lives fell apart. After six months of touring, John and Christine McVie divorced in 1976, ending about eight years of marriage, and they stopped speaking except about music. Buckingham and Nicks were breaking up too, fighting often and only calming down when they worked on songs together. Fleetwood's own marriage to Jenny Boyd, already scarred by her affair, ended in divorce that year. In this atmosphere, and with more money than they had ever seen, the band also discovered cocaine. Fleetwood later wrote that a toot now and then relieved the boredom of long hours in the studio. They were about to turn all of that heartbreak into one of the biggest records ever made.[1] [2] [3]

Making Rumours

In February 1976 the band gathered at the Record Plant in Sausalito, across the bay from San Francisco, with engineers Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut sharing production. It was a windowless wooden building, and most of the band wanted to record at home instead, but Fleetwood refused. The women lived in two condominiums by the harbour, the men in a lodge in the hills, and nobody socialised after work. One of the studio's owners remembered the band arriving at seven in the evening, feasting and partying until one or two in the morning, and only then starting to record. The working title was Yesterday's Gone. Buckingham took charge of the sessions, determined to make a polished pop album.[1] [2]

Nearly every song was a message to someone else in the room. Buckingham's Go Your Own Way was aimed at Nicks, and Nicks answered with Dreams, which she wrote in about ten minutes in a back room at the Record Plant, sitting on a black velvet bed. Christine McVie wrote Don't Stop as an optimistic note to her ex husband, who said years later he had not realised it was about him. Her song You Make Loving Fun was about the band's lighting director, Curry Grant, whom she was seeing. The band members had to sing harmonies on songs about their own breakups. Buckingham described it as keeping personal feelings in one corner of the room while trying to be professional in the other.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Some of the album's best moments were stitched together from scraps. The Chain began as a Christine McVie song called Keep Me There. The band added Nicks lyrics from another song, a Buckingham intro from the Buckingham Nicks days, and a closing section built around a bass line John McVie played during the first run through. It was assembled by cutting tape with a razor blade, and it is the only song credited to all five members. Christine's ballad Songbird needed the sound of a concert hall, so it was recorded overnight at Zellerbach Auditorium in Berkeley. And the Sausalito tapes were played so often that they wore out, so a specialist had to rescue them.[1] [2]

Rumours was released on the fourth of February 1977, with an advance order of eight hundred thousand copies, then the largest in Warner Brothers history. It spent thirty one weeks at number one in America and became the band's first number one album in Britain. All four American singles reached the top ten, and Dreams became their only American number one. The album won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1978, and as of 2023 it had sold more than forty million copies worldwide, making it one of the best selling albums ever made. John McVie had suggested the title, because he felt the band were writing journals and diaries about each other and setting them to music.[1] [2] [3]

The drama did not stop when the album came out. In November 1977, after a concert in New Zealand on the Rumours tour, Stevie Nicks and Mick Fleetwood began a secret affair. Fleetwood was still tied to Jenny Boyd, with whom he had two daughters, and Nicks later said everyone was angry and she was horrified at herself. She ended it before long and said that if it had gone on, it would have been the end of Fleetwood Mac. Then Fleetwood fell for Nicks's close friend Sara Recor and moved in with her in 1978. On the tenth of October 1979 the band received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.[1] [2] [3]

From Tusk to Tango in the Night

Buckingham refused to make Rumours part two. Inspired by new wave acts like Talking Heads, he recorded much of his material at home, sometimes using a tissue box as a snare drum, and pushed for something stranger. Fleetwood agreed and insisted it be a double album. Tusk came out in October 1979 with twenty tracks and cost about one point four million dollars, reportedly the most expensive rock album made to that point. Its title track featured the University of Southern California marching band, recorded at Dodger Stadium, and Nicks's song Sara became a top ten hit. Tusk sold about four million copies, a huge number that still looked like failure next to Rumours.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Fleetwood blamed the relatively modest sales partly on a radio chain that played the whole album before release, letting fans tape it at home. The band then spent about eleven months touring the world, sharing a bill in Germany with Bob Marley and recording a live album. Afterwards the members branched out. Nicks's first solo album, Bella Donna, went to number one in 1981 and made her a solo star. But the week it hit the top, she learned her close friend Robin Anderson had leukaemia. Anderson died in 1982, and in her grief Nicks married Robin's widower, Kim Anderson, to help care for the baby. The marriage lasted about three months.[1] [2] [3]

The band reconvened at the Chateau d'Herouville in France for Mirage in 1982, a deliberate return to polished pop. Christine McVie's Hold Me, inspired by her stormy relationship with Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson, sat at number four in America for seven weeks. They headlined the first US Festival and were paid half a million dollars. Then came years of excess. Fleetwood filed for bankruptcy. Nicks was warned by a surgeon that her next hit of cocaine could kill her, and in 1986 she checked into the Betty Ford Center for thirty days. Buckingham's 1984 solo album Go Insane closed with a tribute to the late Dennis Wilson, a close friend of the band.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Tango in the Night began life as a Buckingham solo album before becoming a group project, recorded largely at his home studio. Fleetwood admitted his cocaine use was even worse than during Rumours, and Buckingham parked a camper van in his driveway for the drummer and his friends. Nicks spent only about two weeks in the studio across eighteen months. Buckingham sampled and slowed his own voice for the grunts on Big Love. Released in April 1987, the album became their best seller since Rumours, with Big Love, Seven Wonders, Little Lies and Everywhere all becoming hits. In Britain it went to number one, and Everywhere is now certified seven times platinum there.[1] [2] [3] [4]

With a tour booked, Buckingham decided he could not go on. He later said he needed distance from Nicks, because he had never found closure after their breakup. At a band meeting at Christine McVie's house on the seventh of August 1987, tempers exploded. Fleetwood wrote that there was a physical altercation between Buckingham and Nicks, and John McVie described the confrontation as physically ugly. Buckingham quit the next day. The band did not audition anyone. They brought in two guitarists, Billy Burnette, son of rockabilly singer Dorsey Burnette, and Rick Vito, a Peter Green admirer who had played with Bonnie Raitt, and set out on the Shake the Cage tour.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The band without Lindsey

The new line up toured through 1987 and 1988, and a Greatest Hits album followed in late 1988, dedicated to Buckingham, with whom the band had made their peace. It has since sold more than eight million copies in America. Behind the Mask arrived in 1990 with a more adult contemporary sound. It entered the British chart at number one but only reached number eighteen in America, and its one American top forty hit was Christine McVie's Save Me. The tour played sold out shows at Wembley Stadium. At the final show in Los Angeles, Buckingham joined the band on stage. Christine's father died during the tour, and she and Nicks decided it would be their last tour.[1] [2] [3]

Nicks was also struggling with a dependency on the sedative Klonopin, which a psychiatrist had prescribed in ever larger doses to keep her away from cocaine. She later said she had no memory of her 1989 solo tour. In 1991 she left Fleetwood Mac after a row with Mick Fleetwood over Silver Springs, a Rumours era song she wanted for her solo best of album. Fleetwood refused, because he was saving it for a box set. Rick Vito left around the same time. The box set, 25 Years The Chain, came out in 1992 with Silver Springs on it, and Fleetwood published a companion book about his time in the band.[1] [2] [3]

Then a presidential campaign brought the Rumours line up back together for one night. Bill Clinton had used Don't Stop as his theme song in 1992, and he asked the band to play it at his inaugural celebrations in January 1993. Fleetwood, both McVies, Buckingham and Nicks all agreed, though they had no plans to reunite. Afterwards Fleetwood and John McVie carried on with a very different band, adding singer Bekka Bramlett, daughter of the duo Delaney and Bonnie, and Dave Mason, an original member of Traffic. With Christine McVie no longer touring, they played the oldies circuit, opening for Crosby, Stills and Nash in 1994.[1] [2] [3] [4]

There was a surprise in Tokyo in 1995, when Jeremy Spencer came to see the band and got up to play a few songs with them. The album Time followed in October 1995. It was the first Fleetwood Mac album in two decades with no Stevie Nicks, and it failed to chart at all in America, selling only about thirty two thousand copies there by 1996. Christine McVie told the others it would be her last album. Soon afterwards Fleetwood Mac quietly disbanded. Bramlett and Burnette went off to form a country duo. For a band that had been a fixture of the album charts for twenty years, it looked like the end.[1] [2]

The Dance and the long goodbye

The reunion came almost by accident. Weeks after the band dissolved, Buckingham asked Fleetwood to help on a solo track. John McVie joined the sessions, then Christine McVie, and Nicks recruited Buckingham to produce a duet called Twisted for the film Twister. By March 1997 the Rumours line up had officially reformed. On the twenty second of May 1997 they played a concert on a soundstage at Warner Brothers in Burbank, filmed for MTV. The live album The Dance topped the American chart, their first number one in ten years, and became one of the best selling live albums in American history. The marching band from Tusk came back too, performing on Tusk and Don't Stop.[1] [2] [3]

In 1998 Fleetwood Mac were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The honour went to the early blues line up of Fleetwood, John McVie, Green, Spencer and Kirwan, plus Christine McVie, Nicks and Buckingham. Bob Welch was left out, and he felt he was being written out of the band's history, though he later softened. Peter Green came but chose to play Black Magic Woman with Santana, inducted the same night. Spencer and Kirwan stayed away. The band also received the Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music. Then Christine McVie retired to a Tudor manor house in Kent. She said she had developed a phobia of flying.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Without Christine, Buckingham and Nicks were the two songwriters on Say You Will in 2003, the band's final studio album. Several songs came from a Buckingham solo record that Warner Brothers had persuaded him to shelve. It debuted at number three in America, and the tour ran through 2004. Nicks later said she was unhappy with the album and tour, citing production disputes with Buckingham and missing Christine. The Unleashed greatest hits tour followed in 2009. In a BBC documentary that year, Nicks said that maybe when they were seventy five, and Fleetwood Mac was a distant memory, she and Buckingham might be friends. In 2011 a Glee episode sent Rumours flying back up the charts.[1] [2] [3]

Those years also brought loss. Bob Brunning, the first bass player, who had gone on to become a primary school headmaster and write books about the band, died of a heart attack in October 2011, aged sixty eight. Guitarist Bob Weston was found dead in January 2012, aged sixty four. Then on the seventh of June 2012, Bob Welch died from a self inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Nashville, aged sixty six. His wife found him. He had been struggling with health problems and depression, and he left a note. The man who had held the band together in its leanest years, and led it to America, was gone.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2013 the band toured again and released Extended Play, their first new studio material in ten years. At London's O2 Arena that September, Christine McVie walked on stage to play Don't Stop, her first appearance with the band in fifteen years. The crowd went wild. A month later the band cancelled their Australian and New Zealand dates because John McVie had been diagnosed with cancer. He began treatment, kept playing on the next tour as his health improved, and by 2017 his colon cancer was reported to be completely cleared. McVie had already beaten one demon. An alcohol induced seizure in 1987 had made him stop drinking, and he stayed sober.[1] [2] [3]

Last act and legacy

On the eleventh of January 2014, at a concert in Maui, Mick Fleetwood announced that Christine McVie was coming back. The On with the Show tour opened in Minneapolis that September, with the full Rumours line up together for the first time since 1997, and British arena dates sold out in minutes. Plans for a new band album stalled because Nicks was reluctant to commit, so Buckingham and McVie made one as a duo. Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVie came out in June 2017, with Fleetwood and John McVie on it, and they toured it that year. The full band also headlined big shows at Dodger Stadium and Citi Field in the summer of 2017.[1] [2] [3]

In January 2018 the band were honoured as MusiCares Person of the Year and performed at the gala. It was Buckingham's last show with them. That April he was out. The band said he would not sign off on a planned tour, and Fleetwood told CBS they had hit a brick wall, avoiding the word fired because he found it ugly. Buckingham sued in October 2018 and the case was settled that December. His replacements were Mike Campbell, longtime guitarist in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and Neil Finn of Crowded House. They launched An Evening with Fleetwood Mac in the autumn of 2018. Months later, Buckingham needed emergency open heart surgery.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The founders of the band were passing. Danny Kirwan, who had spent years homeless in London in the eighties and nineties before settling in a care home, died on the eighth of June 2018, aged sixty eight, after contracting pneumonia. Peter Green died in his sleep on the twenty fifth of July 2020 at the age of seventy three. He had been diagnosed with schizophrenia in the seventies, underwent electroconvulsive therapy, and slowly rebuilt a career, forming the Peter Green Splinter Group in the late nineties. Months before his death, Fleetwood staged an all star tribute concert to him at the London Palladium. Green knew about it but did not attend.[1] [2] [3]

Then something unexpected happened. In October 2020 an Idaho man named Nathan Apodaca posted a video of himself skateboarding to work, sipping Ocean Spray cran raspberry juice and miming to Dreams. It went viral, Dreams returned to the Billboard Hot 100, and Rumours climbed back into the top ten for the first time in more than forty years. Ocean Spray gave Apodaca a brand new pickup truck. Then on the thirtieth of November 2022, Christine McVie died in hospital at the age of seventy nine, after a stroke, while also suffering from cancer. The band called her the best musician anyone could have in their band. Nicks called her her best friend in the whole world.[1] [2] [3]

Christine's death effectively ended Fleetwood Mac. In 2023 Fleetwood said he thought the band was finished, and Nicks said she saw no reason to carry on without her, repeating that view in 2024. That August 2023, Fleetwood's restaurant in Lahaina, Fleetwoods on Front Street, was destroyed in the Maui wildfires. He flew in with supplies for his staff and neighbours. As of 2026, the band has not played again, though Fleetwood said in 2024 he remained open to it. What remains is a catalogue that has sold more than one hundred and twenty million records, a British blues legend and a Californian pop dynasty under one name, and a set of breakup songs the whole world still sings along to.[1] [2] [3]

The people around Fleetwood Mac

Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. They met as teenagers singing California Dreamin' at a high school gathering, became a duo and a couple, and joined Fleetwood Mac as a package deal. Their breakup fed Rumours, with Go Your Own Way and Dreams telling two sides of one story. The tension never fully faded. Buckingham said they were never married but might as well have been, and in 2018 he blamed her for his firing.[1] [2] [3] [4]

John McVie and Christine McVie. They married in 1968 after about two weeks of romance, with Peter Green as best man, and celebrated with Joe Cocker at a Birmingham hotel instead of a honeymoon. His drinking and constant touring wore the marriage down, and they divorced in 1976. Remarkably, they kept working side by side for decades, and she wrote Don't Stop and You Make Loving Fun in the wreckage.[1] [2]

Mick Fleetwood and Stevie Nicks. In November 1977, on the Rumours tour, the drummer and the singer began a secret affair while Fleetwood was still tied to Jenny Boyd. Nicks ended it, saying it could have ended the band. Fleetwood then fell for her friend Sara Recor. Decades later they remained close allies, and it was Fleetwood's refusal to release Silver Springs that prompted her exit in 1991.[1] [2] [3]

Mick Fleetwood and Jenny Boyd. Fleetwood fell for the model, sister of Pattie Boyd, in the sixties and married her at Kiln House in June 1970. In 1973 her affair with guitarist Bob Weston led to his firing and the collapse of a tour. They divorced in 1976, remarried briefly to help their daughters move to America, and divorced again. They had two daughters together.[1] [2] [3]

Peter Green and Danny Kirwan. Kirwan was an eighteen year old fan who carried Green's gear and jammed with him after soundchecks. Green brought him in as a creative partner, split the album Then Play On with him, and credited him for Albatross. Both men later suffered severe mental health struggles. Kirwan was homeless for years, and both died within two years of each other, in 2018 and 2020.[1] [2] [3]

Mick Fleetwood and Clifford Davis. Davis managed the band through its blues years and steered it to Warner Brothers. After the 1973 tour collapsed, he claimed to own the name and sent out a fake Fleetwood Mac. The resulting legal battle froze the real band for almost a year and led it to manage itself. Fleetwood later said he was grateful, because the fight pushed them to California.[1] [2]

Bob Welch and Mick Fleetwood. Welch joined without an audition in 1971, co managed the band with Fleetwood and pushed the move to Los Angeles. They stayed friendly after he left, and Fleetwood managed his solo career. In 1994 Welch sued over royalties, and he was hurt to be left out of the Hall of Fame in 1998. He reconnected with Fleetwood backstage years later.[1] [2]

Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks. Christine was given the final say on whether another woman could join, and the two bonded at once, their voices blending perfectly. They became the band's inseparable pair. Nicks said she would not carry on without Christine, dedicated Landslide to her from the stage in 2009, and called her the best friend she had in the whole world when she died.[1] [2] [3]

Christine McVie and Dennis Wilson. The Beach Boys drummer dated Christine from 1979 to 1982, during the Tusk era. He offered the band his studio, and one journalist wrote that Wilson never really came out of the cocaine blizzard of those sessions. Christine's hit Hold Me was inspired by their tortured relationship, and Buckingham paid tribute to him on his 1984 solo album.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Stevie Nicks and Don Henley. The Eagles singer dated Nicks in the late seventies. In 1991 he told GQ that she had become pregnant by him and had an abortion, and linked her song Sara to it. Nicks later confirmed part of the story to Billboard. He and Nicks later toured together, and Henley was among the first to hear the sixteen minute demo of Sara.[1] [2] [3]

Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie. Buckingham said that from the start Christine was open to him reshaping her songs, and they became close musical partners, trading lead vocals on Don't Stop and Hold Me. Nicks said Christine was the only one in the band he ever really listened to. In 2017 they released a duet album together, shortly before his dismissal.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Fleetwood Mac

• The Tusk album cover is a photo of the producer's dog biting a man's leg. Photographer Peter Beard snapped Ken Caillat's dog Scooter nipping his leg, and it became the cover. Nicks had been promised a cover of herself dancing, and she told Caillat she had put a curse on the dog for stealing it.[1]
• Peter Green's famous 1959 Les Paul ended up with Gary Moore and later with Metallica's Kirk Hammett. Green bought the guitar for one hundred and fourteen pounds in London, then sold it to Gary Moore for whatever Moore could raise by selling his own guitar. Kirk Hammett bought it in 2014.[1]
• The Beatles used Albatross as the starting point for a song on Abbey Road. George Harrison said the band decided to pretend to be Fleetwood Mac doing Albatross just to get going, and it grew into Sun King. He admitted it never really sounded like Fleetwood Mac.[1]
• John McVie trained for nine months as a tax inspector before becoming a full time musician. He joined John Mayall's Bluesbreakers while still in that day job, and kept it for another nine months. He learned the blues mainly from B.B. King and Willie Dixon records that Mayall gave him.[1]
• Fleetwood Mac's penguin mascot comes from John McVie's hours at London Zoo. Early in his marriage he lived near the zoo, joined the Zoological Society and spent hours watching the penguins. The bird gave its name to the 1973 album Penguin.[1]
• The first bass player, Bob Brunning, became a primary school headmaster. After a few gigs in 1967, Brunning left music for a thirty year teaching career, heading two London primary schools. He also wrote several books about Fleetwood Mac.[1]
• Mick Fleetwood once played an alien on Star Trek: The Next Generation. He had small acting parts, including a resistance leader in The Running Man in 1987 and a guest alien in a 1989 Star Trek episode called Manhunt.[1]
• Mick Fleetwood's chaotic co hosting of the 1989 Brit Awards led the show to be pre recorded for years. The live broadcast he presented was full of fluffed lines and gaffes. Afterwards the Brits were pre recorded for the next eighteen years before going live again.[1]
• The cowbell on Oh Well was an accident that Peter Green insisted on keeping. Fleetwood hit it by mistake during recording, but Green liked it. Fleetwood later admitted he struggled to nail the part live and worried he never would.[1]
• The eerie guitar intro of The Green Manalishi was recorded in an underground car park. Producer Martin Birch put speakers in a concrete car park and captured the sound with microphones at the far end, getting natural echo. The band cut twenty seven takes of the song.[1]
• Christine McVie drew the cover of Kiln House before she was officially in the band. She also sang and played keyboards on the album without credit. Her first gig as a full member came in New Orleans on the first of August 1970.[1] [2]
• Instead of a honeymoon, the McVies celebrated with Joe Cocker at a hotel in Birmingham. Cocker happened to be staying there. Then both went back on the road with their own bands, Fleetwood Mac and Chicken Shack.[1]
• Bob Welch was hired without the band ever playing a note with him. A friend and part time secretary, Judy Wong, recommended her old school friend. The band met him a few times, listened to a tape of his songs and gave him the job.[1] [2]
• The 1975 British hit Why Did You Do It, by the band Stretch, was written about the fake Fleetwood Mac tour. Two members of the bogus 1974 line up, Elmer Gantry and Kirby Gregory, later joined Stretch, whose 1975 British hit was about the debacle.[1]
• Fans of the fake Fleetwood Mac complained to Idaho's attorney general. After a show in Boise in 1974, fans filed complaints because none of the musicians on the posters had actually played that night.[1]
• Stevie Nicks turned up to meet Fleetwood Mac still wearing her waitressing uniform. At the Mexican restaurant El Carmen, she arrived first, dressed in the flapper dress from her shift. Christine McVie had been given the final say on whether she joined.[1]
• Nicks wrote Dreams in about ten minutes in a room said to belong to Sly Stone. It was a black and red room at the Record Plant with a sunken pit and a black velvet bed. She sat on the bed with a keyboard and a cassette player.[1]
• The famous groove on Dreams is partly a tape loop. Ken Caillat built an eight bar loop from Fleetwood's drumming. He said he was amused when people praised the rhythm section on that song, because they were praising a drum loop.[1]
• Go Your Own Way was written in a rented Florida house Fleetwood said felt haunted. It was the first song Buckingham brought for Rumours. Its drum feel was inspired by the Rolling Stones' Street Fighting Man.[1]
• Don't Stop owes its bouncy sound to a piano with nails in its hammers. Christine McVie switched to a tack piano, where metal tacks on the hammers give a percussive jangle. Ken Caillat called it the breakthrough that made the song bounce.[1] [2]
• Cyndi Lauper's first released recording was a soundalike cover of You Make Loving Fun. Hired as a session singer in 1977, she was paid twelve dollars for it and did not own a copy until a fan gave her one in 2002.[1]
• Sara began as a demo about sixteen minutes long. Nicks recorded it through a long night in a converted church studio in Dallas. Don Henley and J.D. Souther told her it was almost good at its full length.[1] [2]
• During Tusk, Buckingham cut off his own hair with nail scissors in the shower. Ken Caillat recalled that Buckingham was so stressed he did it one day, and that he would tape microphones to the floor and sing from a push up position.[1]
• Nicks checked into the Betty Ford Center under the name Sara Anderson. Her thirty day stay in October 1986 inspired the Tango in the Night song Welcome to the Room Sara.[1]
• Those grunts on Big Love are Buckingham, not Nicks. He recorded his own voice and changed its speed. He said it was odd how many people assumed it was Stevie singing with him.[1]
• The title Edge of Seventeen came from mishearing Tom Petty's wife's accent. Jane Petty said she and Tom met at the age of seventeen, and her Southern accent made it sound like edge of seventeen to Nicks.[1]
• A Mirage single called Wish You Were Here was released only in Jamaica, and went to number one there. It was one of several singles from the 1982 album, alongside Hold Me, Gypsy and Love in Store.[1]
• Lindsey Buckingham's brother Greg won an Olympic silver medal in swimming in 1968. All the Buckingham brothers were encouraged to swim competitively, but Lindsey dropped out of sport to focus on music.[1]
• Buckingham wrote the instrumental Stephanie for Nicks while lying flat on his back with mononucleosis. Stephanie is Nicks's real first name. The piece appeared on the 1973 Buckingham Nicks album.[1]
• The instrumental break of The Chain became the theme for British Formula One coverage. The BBC and Channel Four have both used it, and it is the band's second most streamed track on Spotify.[1]
• Christine McVie's mother was a medium, psychic and faith healer. Her father was a concert violinist and music lecturer, and her grandfather had played the organ at Westminster Abbey.[1]
• Mick Fleetwood grew up partly in Norway and speaks Norwegian. His father was an air force pilot posted to Egypt and then Norway by NATO, and young Mick went to school there.[1]
• Jeremy Spencer's stage antics got Fleetwood Mac banned from London's Marquee Club. The slide guitarist was a gifted mimic whose suggestive routines sometimes landed the band in trouble with promoters, yet offstage he was quiet and often read the Bible.[1]
• In 1993 Mick Fleetwood used the Missing Persons Bureau to find Danny Kirwan. Kirwan, then forty two, was traced to a homeless hostel in London where he had lived for four years, carrying everything he owned in a rucksack.[1]
• Hold Me was stuck at number four in America for seven straight weeks in 1982. It was held back by songs including Eye of the Tiger and Abracadabra. It was then a record run at that position.[1]
• The first song ever recorded on Sound City's famous Neve console was a Buckingham Nicks song. Keith Olsen bought the console for the studio, and Crying in the Night, the opening track of Buckingham Nicks, was the first song recorded on it.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.