WORSE THAN RUMOURS
Their entangled love lives, debauchery, drugs and ever changing line-ups would fill the plot lines of any drama... there has never been a band more like a soap opera than Fleetwood Mac.
So when guitarist and singer Lindsey Buckingham was dramatically fired and told to go his own way this week, it was just another chapter to their scandalous story.
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John McVie, Christine McVie, Stevie Nicks, Lindsay Buckingham and Mick Fleetwood in 2014Lindsey and former girlfriend Stevie Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac in 1975 and saw the band evolve from the blues group that drummer Mick Fleetwood had formed with guitar hero Peter Green in London in 1967 to the US West Coast pop band who became one of the most famous bands in the world.
Lindsey leaving the band is nothing new
It’s not the first time Lindsey, now 68, has left the band - he quit in 1987, but returned to the fold a decade later.
When Lindsey quit in the 80s, after producing their second-biggest selling album, 1987’s Tango In The Night, it was because of his refusal to go out on tour and following a physical altercation – according to Mick Fleetwood’s 2014 memoir, Play On.
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When the band announced last spring that a tour this year was planned, Lindsey was reluctant and wanted to focus on his solo work.
And so now, as in 1987 when was replaced by Billy Burnette and Rick Vito, Lindsey finds himself replaced by two new members with Crowded House’s Neil Finn and former Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell joining Fleetwood Mac for their upcoming tour.
Interviewing the band separately before their gig at New York’s Madison Square Garden in 2013 it was clear that Lindsey was the outsider who wanted to do things his way.
First he stopped journalists watching the band sound-check after Mick had invited them into the arena.
Later, he dismissed the rumour that Stevie’s good friend Sheryl Crow might take the place of Christine McVie who had “retired” in 1998.
Lindsey said snarkily: “There aren’t too many people who would be able to fill that bill. With Sheryl I thought it was pretty funny.”
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Guitarist curse
It was when Lindsey and Stevie joined the band, establishing a "new Fleetwood Mac" line-up and sound after the "Peter Green years", that the group’s popularity skyrocketed and the most outrageous period of their history began involving excessive drink and drugs, broken marriages and tempestuous affairs.
But the earlier and original Fleetwood Mac members were no strangers to controversy and Lindsey even said there was a “Fleetwood Mac guitarist curse”.
Founder and guitar genius Peter Green, whose drug of choice was acid, tried to persuade the rest of the band to give away all their money to charity.
He was later diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent time in hospital undergoing electro-shock therapy.
On tour in 1971, in LA lead guitarist Jeremy Spencer told Mick Fleetwood he was popping to the shop but ran off and joined sex cult Children of God later renamed The Family after meeting a cult disciple on Hollywood Boulevard.
Music video for Seven Wonders by Fleetwood Mac from 1987
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The excesses of rock'n'roll were too much for guitarist Danny Kirwan who suffered with alcoholism and mental health instability was sacked in 1972 and ended up living homeless on the streets of London.
Then in 2012 former guitarist Bob Welch shot himself in the chest leaving a suicide note for his wife after he was told he would not walk again after an unsuccessful operation on his spine three months earlier. Earlier that same year (2012) Bob Weston was found dead age 64 in his London flat after suffering a brain haemorrhage.
He’d been sacked by Mick Fleetwood in 1973 after he discovered Bob had been having an affair with his wife Jenny. The band also cancelled their US tour.
'Living out a soap opera'
But it was the end of Lindsey and Stevie’s five-year relationship and the breakdown of band mates John and Christine McVie’s marriage during the making of their best-selling album Rumours became the cornerstone of the Fleetwood Mac story.
The 1977 album sold more than 33million and today it remains the ninth best-selling album of all time.
As John McVie declared, making it was like “living out a soap opera”.
After eight years together he and Christine had ended their marriage and Christine had started a relationship with the band’s lighting director Curry Grant and wrote Don’t Stop, a personal message to John about moving on.
At the same time Mick Fleetwood was in the middle of divorce proceedings from his wife Jenny Boyd who he had married in 1970 but divorced after a few years.
They married again in 1976 but split up for good in 1978, with the 6ft 5in drummer then beginning a two-year affair with Stevie Nicks.
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And spilling the beans in songs such as Go Your Own Way, Never Going Back Again, You Make Loving Fun and Second Hand News.
“We communicated through music - which hurt,” said Mick Fleetwood when I spoke to him for the re-release of Rumours in 2013.
“Imagine hearing what was going on with your partner? As writers they were saying they were angry and hurt through music, which, yes, were pop songs, but had a certain darkness.”
Stevie said the album showed the strength of the band rising above the mayhem going on in their personal lives.
She said: “When Lindsey and I split and Christine and John were about to break-up, there were the five of us in the room, each saying ‘Well I’m not going to quit so you quit.’
“Mick was in the middle saying; Well, is anybody quitting? If not can we just carry on? And that’s exactly what happened.”
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£20m on cocaine
The band’s excessive intake of drugs in the seventies and eighties was renowned.
“It just became a nonstop party and when in Rome, you all join in,” said Lindsey in 2013.
"There was an illusion that you had to be experimental to max your creativity but by the late eighties when we were making Tango In the Night it caused tension."
Mick said: "There’s no doubt that Stevie and I were the worst offenders of the band by far.”
Mick blew £20million on coke and in his memoir he reckoned that if you stretched all the cocaine he’d ever done into one single snortable line, it would be “seven miles long.”
Calculations were based on taking an eighth of an ounce every day for 20 years so it was no wonder he was nicknamed “The King of Toot”.
In 1984 Mick filed for bankruptcy – astonishing for someone whose band had sold over 40 million albums but he said: “Drugs were not the reason I went bankrupt. If it all went up my nose I’d be f**king dead.”
Fleetwood Mac perform iconic track The Chain on the 1997 The Dance tour
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Stevie had hit rock bottom. Having developed a taste for cocaine, she’d also developed a hole in her nose and one of rock ‘n’ roll’s greatest myths is that when Stevie’s nose collapsed, she had cocaine blown up her bum.
The singer has dismissed this as “rubbish” many times and in our interview said. “I don’t know why people believe that. I would never do that.”
Stevie had tried to wean herself off the drug she then became addicted to the tranquilliser Klonopin, prescribed by her psychiatrist to stay off the coke.
She said: “I lost eight years of my life. I lost my forties because of that man. I just lay on the couch, called the deli and drank wine.”
"The band breaking up has never been an issue, it’s bigger than any of us individually,” said Stevie.
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The soap's next episode
And could the door remain open for Lindsey to return as it did for Christine McVie, who returned to the band in October 2014 for their On With The Show tour after 15 years away.
The pair even made an album together, 2017’s Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie – which had originally started as the band’s 18th studio album but was delayed by Stevie Nick’s solo work demands and she’s has made it clear that she’s not interested in another Fleetwood Mac album.
But fans love Lindsey’s guitar stage interplay with Stevie Nicks which they have played up at every show.
Lindsey is an intense character known for his mood swings and Stevie said: “Some things never change. Like, Lindsey and I will never agree on anything and can never be pals.
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"You’d have to go to a psychiatrist to figure out what we are not. But what I know is that we have that musical attraction.”
Fans with tickets to their 2018 tour will be disappointed and worried that they may never see Lindsey playing in the band again.
Or will he return? With the numerous comings and goings this is unlikely to be the final episode in the Fleetwood Mac story.
Fleetwood Mac's Christine McVie confirms on the One Show the band will go on a global tour in 2018