One night in the summer of 1967, a 20-year-old guitarist named Peter Green walked into Decca Studios in London after hours. He'd been given free recording time by his boss, John Mayall of the Bluesbreakers, and he brought two friends: a towering, loose-limbed drummer called Mick Fleetwood and a reluctant bassist called John McVie. They cut a handful of tracks. One was an instrumental shuffle. Green wrote a title on the tape box: "Fleetwood Mac."
It was a gift. Green named the band after the rhythm section, not himself, because he didn't want to be a frontman. He wanted to be part of something. "Peter could have been the stereotypical superstar guitar player and control freak," Fleetwood said decades later. "But that wasn't his style. He named the band after the bass player and drummer, for Christ's sake."
That generosity would cost him. Within three years, Green would be gone, shattered by LSD and guilt over the money he was making. The band he named after his friends would carry on without him for another five decades, through cult disappearances, fake tours, spectacular divorces and the biggest-selling album of the 1970s. It is, without much competition, the strangest story in rock music.
The Cockney kid who replaced God
Peter Green was born Peter Greenbaum in Bethnal Green, East London, in 1946. His family shortened their surname to avoid the antisemitic bullying Green had endured throughout his childhood. He started as a bass player, switched to guitar in his mid-teens, and by 1966 found himself in the unenviable position of replacing Eric Clapton in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. The Bluesbreakers were a finishing school for British blues musicians: Clapton, Jack Bruce and Mick Taylor all passed through. Replacing Clapton was, by any measure, a ridiculous ask. Green pulled it off. Mayall later said he was the best guitarist he'd heard since Clapton left. B.B. King went further, calling Green the only guitarist who gave him "a cold sweat."
Green met Fleetwood in a band called Peter B's Looners, led by keyboard player Peter Bardens (who would later form Camel). Fleetwood was six foot five and chaotic. Green got him a job in the Bluesbreakers when drummer Aynsley Dunbar left to join Jeff Beck's group. When Green decided to leave Mayall and start his own band, he brought Fleetwood with him and tried to lure McVie on bass. McVie, sensibly, preferred his steady Bluesbreakers salary. So Green hired Bob Brunning as a temporary replacement, on the understanding that Brunning would leave the moment McVie changed his mind. McVie lasted about a month before jumping ship.
The early lineup also included slide guitarist Jeremy Spencer, an Elmore James obsessive from Hartlepool who specialised in 1950s pastiches and once performed onstage wearing a giant phallus, getting the band banned from the Marquee Club. Green enlisted Spencer because he didn't want to be the sole guitarist. He didn't want to be Cream. He wanted a band.
Their debut album, released in February 1968, was raw British blues that stayed in the UK charts for 37 weeks. Green's label, Blue Horizon, insisted on releasing it as Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac. Green was furious and demanded a reissue under the shorter name. His songs were extraordinary: "Black Magic Woman" (later covered by Santana and made into an international hit), "Albatross" (a wistful instrumental that went to number 1 in the UK), "Oh Well" and "Man of the World." Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers used to break into the guitar-whiplash half of "Oh Well" during their own shows, and the crowd would erupt as if it were a Petty song.
Then Green started to unravel.
The Munich party
By 1969, the melancholy had crept in. "Man of the World" contained the lyric "I just wish that I had never been born," and Green's bandmates started to notice that he meant it. He began taking large doses of LSD. He grew a beard and started wearing robes and a crucifix. He told Fleetwood the band should give all its money away. Fleetwood's response was polite but firm: "You can do it. I don't wanna do that, and that doesn't make me a bad person."
The breaking point came in Munich in early 1970, during a European tour. Green was collected at the airport by two mysterious German hippies and taken to a commune called the Highfisch-Kommune, run by political radicals including Rainer Langhans and his partner Uschi Obermaier. What happened there has become one of rock's most retold cautionary tales. Green was reportedly fed enormous doses of LSD and confined while forced to jam for hours. People who heard the recordings later described the music as beyond dark.
Green himself, in a rare 2009 interview, remembered it differently. "I had a good play there, it was great. Someone recorded it. It was the most spiritual music I've ever recorded in my life." But whatever actually happened in that commune, Green came back a different person. On 11 April 1970, he told the band he was leaving. He played his final show on 20 May.
What followed was grim. Green was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He underwent electroconvulsive therapy. He reportedly turned up at his accountant's office with a shotgun, demanding that royalty payments be stopped. By the late 1980s, he was wandering around Richmond with a straggly beard and long fingernails, and local teenagers had nicknamed him the Wolf Man. A television interviewer discovered he no longer owned a guitar. Peter Green, the man B.B. King said gave him chills, didn't have an instrument.
He eventually recovered enough to perform again, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Fleetwood Mac in 1998. He died in July 2020, aged 73, in his sleep.
The man who went to buy a magazine
Green's departure should have killed the band. It didn't, but what happened next almost did.
In February 1971, Fleetwood Mac were on a US tour. They'd added a third guitarist, Danny Kirwan, and Christine Perfect (now Christine McVie, having married the bassist) on keyboards. On 15 February, the day of a gig at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles, Jeremy Spencer told Fleetwood he was going to a bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard to buy a magazine. He didn't come back.
The gig was cancelled. The band, their crew, and eventually the police went looking. Five days later, Spencer was found at a four-storey warehouse on Towne Street in downtown LA. He'd joined a religious group called the Children of God. His long hair had been cut. He'd given his $200 to the commune. He had a new name: Jonathan. He told the band's manager he wouldn't be coming back. "Jesus will take care of them," he reportedly said of his wife and two children back in London.
Peter Green was flown in from England as emergency cover, performing under the pseudonym Peter Blue, but only to finish the tour. Bob Welch, an American guitarist, became the permanent replacement.
Kirwan, the remaining original-era guitarist, didn't last much longer. Struggling with alcoholism at 22, he smashed his guitar before a gig, punched his own reflection in a mirror, then sat in the hallway refusing to go onstage. He was sacked. His own story ended badly: decades of mental illness, homelessness, and near-total obscurity. He died in 2018.
The fake Fleetwood Mac
By 1974, the band was held together by Fleetwood's stubbornness and the McVies' marriage (which was itself falling apart). When Mick Fleetwood discovered his wife was having an affair with guitarist Bob Weston, the latest recruit, he cancelled a US tour. Their manager, Clifford Davis, was not pleased. His solution was to assemble an entirely different group of musicians and send them on tour as Fleetwood Mac.
The promoter at the first show in Pittsburgh watched the new arrivals walk through the stage door and assumed they were roadies. "He said, 'They're here,'" the promoter recalled. "Well, no, they weren't." Davis told Rolling Stone: "This band is my band. This band has always been my band."
The replacement musicians had been told Fleetwood would join them imminently. He never showed. The fake Mac played a handful of shows to confused audiences before the whole thing collapsed. It remains one of the most surreal episodes in the history of live music.
The waitress and the frozen love song
In late 1974, Fleetwood Mac was broke, traumatised and missing a guitarist. Bob Welch had left. Mick Fleetwood, scouting for a studio to record their next album, visited Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California. An engineer called Keith Olsen played him a track to demonstrate the studio's sound. The song was called "Frozen Love." It was from a failed album by a Californian duo called Buckingham Nicks.
Fleetwood was transfixed by the guitar playing. He later said it reminded him of Peter Green. He filed the name away. A few weeks later, when Welch quit, Fleetwood called Olsen and asked to hire the guitarist, Lindsey Buckingham. Olsen told him Buckingham came as a package deal with his girlfriend, a singer called Stevie Nicks.
Nicks, at that point, was working as a waitress and hostess at a restaurant called Clementine's. Their album had flopped. Polydor had dropped them. She'd been on the verge of going back to college. Buckingham was ambivalent about joining someone else's band, but Nicks talked him into it. "We were in total chaos," she later told Uncut. "I said, 'We can always quit.'"
The meeting took place at El Carmen, a Mexican restaurant. Fleetwood and John McVie had agreed beforehand that Christine McVie, initially wary of another woman in the band, would have the final say on Nicks. Nicks arrived first, straight from her waitressing shift, still wearing her flapper dress from work.
Christine said yes. On New Year's Eve 1974, Buckingham and Nicks officially joined Fleetwood Mac. They rehearsed for two weeks and went straight into the studio.
The resulting self-titled album, released in July 1975, took 58 weeks to reach number 1 on the Billboard 200. It produced three top-twenty singles: "Over My Head," "Rhiannon" and "Say You Love Me." Nicks wrote "Rhiannon" after reading a Welsh legend, and "Landslide" during the period when she was deciding whether to carry on with music at all. The song was, in her words, "the decision."
The band that had started as a British blues outfit in 1967 was now the biggest rock act in America. And every couple in it was about to fall apart.
Rumours
By the time Fleetwood Mac arrived at the Record Plant in Sausalito, California in February 1976, three relationships were simultaneously disintegrating. Christine and John McVie were divorcing after eight years. Buckingham and Nicks had split. And Mick Fleetwood had just discovered his wife's affair. The five of them were about to spend twelve months in a windowless studio together, writing songs about each other.
The studio owner, Chris Stone, later said the band brought "excess at its most excessive." They'd arrive at seven in the evening, have an elaborate dinner, party until one or two in the morning, and then start recording when they were too wrecked to do anything else. A black velvet bag of cocaine sat under the mixing desk. At one point, engineer Ken Caillat swapped it for a bag of talcum powder and tipped the contents onto the floor. McVie and Fleetwood were about to kill him before the laughter from the other engineers gave the game away. The band seriously considered thanking their drug dealer in the album credits.
They spoke to each other "in clipped, civil tones," as Fleetwood put it. John McVie, drunk, threw a bottle of vodka at Buckingham's head during one session. Buckingham, in the role of producer as much as guitarist, took Nicks' songs and "made them beautiful," even as their relationship crumbled. The vocal harmonies between the three singers were pristine, recorded using the best microphones available, every take saturated with feelings that were entirely real.
Nicks wrote "Dreams" in about ten minutes, on an electric piano in an unused studio down the hall that had been built for Sly Stone. The room had a black-and-red colour scheme, a sunken pit with a piano, and a big velvet bed with Victorian drapes. "I sat down on the bed with my keyboard in front of me," she recalled. "I found a drum pattern, switched my little cassette player on, and wrote 'Dreams' in about ten minutes."
Christine McVie's "Songbird," which Caillat felt needed a concert hall's ambience, was recorded at three in the morning at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Auditorium, across the bay. Just Christine, a piano, and an empty room.
Nicks has suggested that Fleetwood Mac created the best music when they were in the worst shape. Buckingham agreed: the tensions between band members formed the recording process, and the result was "the whole being more than the sum of the parts."
The recording tapes were physically damaged from overuse. A specialist was hired to repair them using a vari-speed oscillator, wearing headphones that played the damaged tapes in one ear and the safety masters in the other. A sell-out autumn tour of the US was cancelled to allow the album to be finished. Its working title had been Yesterday's Gone.
Rumours was released on 4 February 1977. It stayed at number 1 on the Billboard chart for 31 weeks. It has sold over 40 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling albums in history. It won the Grammy for Album of the Year, beating out the Eagles' Hotel California. Nearly fifty years later, it remains one of the most consistently purchased vinyl records in the UK, appearing in the top 10 almost every year.
Tusk, and the long unravelling
What came after Rumours is almost as interesting as the album itself, even if far fewer people talk about it.
Buckingham, emboldened and restless, pushed the band into avant-garde territory with Tusk, a sprawling double album that cost over $1 million to record and featured the USC Trojan Marching Band. It sold four million copies, which for any other band would have been a triumph, but against Rumours looked like a commercial disappointment. The label was nervous. Buckingham didn't care. He considered Tusk his masterpiece.
The band continued through the 1980s and 90s with diminishing returns and escalating personal drama. Nicks developed a serious cocaine addiction (her drug consumption was so heavy that she later said it burned a hole in her nasal septum). She and Fleetwood had a brief affair, adding another layer to the entanglements. Mirage (1982) and Tango in the Night (1987) produced hits, but the chemistry was curdling. Buckingham left in 1987, was persuaded to return, left again, returned again, and was finally fired in 2018. He sued the band. They settled.
Christine McVie, the classically trained keyboardist who had been the band's quiet centre, retired from touring in 1998, returned in 2014, and died on 30 November 2022 at the age of 79 after a short illness. Nicks said that without Christine, Fleetwood Mac was finished. "She was my best friend in the whole world," she wrote on social media. There have been no performances or recordings since.
What's left
Peter Green is dead. Christine McVie is dead. Danny Kirwan died in obscurity. Jeremy Spencer remains affiliated with the organisation he joined in 1971. Lindsey Buckingham was fired and sued. The only founding members still standing are Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, the rhythm section whose names were scrawled on a tape box in a London studio in 1967 by a generous young guitarist who didn't want the spotlight.
The band's catalogue, particularly the Peter Green era and the Rumours era, remains phenomenally popular on vinyl. Rumours has been reissued and remastered multiple times and is one of the most commonly found records in any UK record shop. The 1975 self-titled album, Tusk, and the Peter Green-era compilation The Best of Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac are all regularly in print and readily available.
Mick Fleetwood, now in his late seventies, still performs. He opened a restaurant in Maui. He wrote a book. He remains the only person who has been in every single version of Fleetwood Mac across nearly sixty years. In 2013, he reflected on what Peter Green had done by naming the band after the rhythm section: "I'm not so sure that Peter didn't have a vision that one day, when he left, he didn't want this thing to stop."
It didn't stop. It just kept changing shape. From a British blues band in a London studio to a Californian soap opera playing stadiums, through fake tours and real breakups, LSD communes and cocaine bags under mixing desks. The one constant, written on a tape reel in 1967, was the name.