FLEETWOOD MAC’S EXTRAORDINARY JOURNEY THROUGH GENIUS, BREAKDOWN AND BETRAYAL
From Peter Green’s haunting British blues to the romantic warfare of Rumours, Fleetwood Mac repeatedly transformed personal catastrophe into music. Its members departed, returned, divorced and betrayed one another, yet the chain held for more than half a century — and one unforgettable bass line became the sound of Formula One.
THE BAND THAT REFUSED TO DIE
Few groups in popular music have lived as many different lives as Fleetwood Mac. It began in Britain as a formidable blues band under the leadership of Peter Green, survived the loss of its founder, crossed the Atlantic, acquired two relatively unknown American musicians and emerged as one of the most commercially successful acts in recording history.
Along the way, its members endured mental illness, drug dependency, broken marriages, financial disputes, sudden departures and romantic relationships of almost operatic complexity. Musicians came and went with such frequency that Fleetwood Mac sometimes appeared less like a band than a grand country house whose occupants were continually changing while its foundations somehow remained intact.
Those foundations were Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, the drummer and bass player whose surnames Peter Green combined when naming the group. Green may have given Fleetwood Mac its original musical identity, but Fleetwood and McVie supplied the rhythm and continuity which allowed it to survive every subsequent upheaval.
The group that eventually produced Rumours was markedly different from the one Green created in 1967. Yet the melancholy at the heart of Green’s music never entirely disappeared. It merely changed clothes, crossed an ocean and learned how to fill stadiums.
PETER GREEN AND THE BIRTH OF FLEETWOOD MAC
Peter Green was born Peter Allen Greenbaum in Bethnal Green, east London, in 1946. A guitarist of extraordinary restraint and emotional intelligence, he emerged from the British blues movement of the 1960s and faced the unenviable task of replacing Eric Clapton in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers.
Green did not attempt to imitate Clapton. His playing was spacious, lyrical and unmistakably his own. He understood that a single trembling note, correctly placed, could convey more than a torrent of technical display. BB King later expressed profound admiration for the emotional power of Green’s playing.
In 1967, Green left the Bluesbreakers and formed a new group with drummer Mick Fleetwood and guitarist Jeremy Spencer. Bassist John McVie, initially reluctant to abandon the security of Mayall’s band, soon joined them. The group’s early name, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac featuring Jeremy Spencer, advertised both its leader and the rhythm section Green valued so highly.
Fleetwood Mac quickly became one of the leading bands of the British blues boom. Its early repertoire mixed interpretations of American blues with Green’s increasingly distinctive compositions. The group’s first album reached the upper reaches of the British chart and remained there for months.
Green possessed a rare ability to write songs that were commercially successful without sacrificing their mystery. Albatross, an exquisitely calm instrumental, reached number one in Britain. Black Magic Woman would later become internationally famous through Santana’s recording, while Oh Well combined a violent guitar attack with an almost medieval atmosphere. The Green Manalishi reflected a darker and more troubled imagination.
Perhaps the most revealing of Green’s compositions was Man of the World. On its surface it described a successful man who possessed everything he could reasonably desire. Beneath that success, however, was crushing loneliness and despair. It now sounds less like a conventional song than a message from a man becoming estranged from his own life.
THE VANISHING MAN
By the end of the 1960s, Green’s mental health was deteriorating. He had become uncomfortable with wealth and the machinery of the music business, speaking about giving away his money and questioning whether musicians should profit from their work. His use of LSD formed part of this troubled period, and an intense experience at a commune near Munich in 1970 has frequently been presented as a decisive moment.
It would be too simple, however, to reduce Green’s illness to a single night or a single drug. Mental breakdown rarely offers history such a convenient explanation. Green was already showing signs of profound emotional and psychological distress, and those around him did not possess the knowledge necessary to understand what was happening.
He left Fleetwood Mac in 1970, at the height of the group’s early success. During the following years, he withdrew from the public world and was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia. He spent periods in psychiatric hospitals and received treatments that included electroconvulsive therapy. At times he lived in obscurity and financial difficulty, a startling reversal for the founder of a successful band whose songs continued to be performed and recorded.
Yet Green’s story did not end with disappearance. He released solo recordings, gradually returned to public performance and, during the 1990s, formed the Peter Green Splinter Group. Although the fragile young man who had led the original Fleetwood Mac could never simply be restored, his re-emergence allowed audiences to encounter him again as a working musician rather than merely as a tragic legend.
Green died peacefully in his sleep in 2020, aged 73. His influence remained immense. He had led Fleetwood Mac for only a few years, but those years gave the band its name, its first great songs and its enduring sense of emotional shadow.
A BAND IN SEARCH OF ITSELF
After Green’s departure, Fleetwood Mac entered a long and frequently overlooked period of transition. Guitarists and singers moved through its ranks, including Jeremy Spencer, Danny Kirwan and Bob Welch. Spencer abruptly left during an American tour in 1971 after becoming involved with a religious group, forcing Green to return temporarily and help the band complete its engagements.
Danny Kirwan contributed significantly to Fleetwood Mac’s movement beyond traditional blues, but his own difficulties eventually led to his dismissal. Bob Welch helped carry the group through the early 1970s and towards the smoother, more melodic sound that would later flourish in California.
Christine Perfect, formerly of the British blues band Chicken Shack, married John McVie and became Christine McVie. She joined Fleetwood Mac in 1970, bringing with her a warm, natural singing voice and an exceptional gift for writing melodies that appeared effortless. Her music would eventually provide some of the band’s most comforting and enduring songs, including Songbird, You Make Loving Fun, Don’t Stop, Everywhere and Little Lies.
By the middle of the decade, Fleetwood Mac had relocated its centre of gravity to the United States. The group had survived, but it needed a new identity. That identity arrived in the form of a couple whose own relationship was already under considerable strain.
BUCKINGHAM AND NICKS ENTER THE STORY
Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks had performed together as Buckingham Nicks and released an album in 1973. It was not a commercial success, and the couple struggled financially. Nicks worked various jobs while Buckingham pursued his exacting musical ambitions.
When Mick Fleetwood heard Buckingham’s guitar work, he considered him as a replacement for the departing Bob Welch. Buckingham insisted that he and Nicks came as a pair. Fleetwood agreed, and in 1974 they were invited to join the band.
Their arrival transformed Fleetwood Mac. Buckingham brought an inventive, highly controlled approach to guitar playing, composition and studio production. Nicks brought a husky and immediately recognisable voice, an instinct for theatrical imagery and a collection of songs populated by dreams, witches, mountains, lovers and ghosts.
The first album by the new line-up, Fleetwood Mac, was released in 1975. It contained Nicks’s Rhiannon and Landslide, Buckingham’s Monday Morning and Christine McVie’s Over My Head and Say You Love Me. The record became an enormous success.
The band had found the line-up that would define it: Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Unfortunately, almost every intimate relationship within it was beginning to collapse.
RUMOURS: HEARTBREAK PRESERVED ON TAPE
The making of Rumours has become one of rock music’s foundational legends because the emotional disorder surrounding it can actually be heard in the songs.
Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham’s long relationship was disintegrating. Christine and John McVie were divorcing. Mick Fleetwood’s marriage to Jenny Boyd was also breaking down. The five musicians were expected to work together every day, sing harmonies on one another’s accusations and transform private anguish into a commercially viable record.
What might have destroyed another band became Fleetwood Mac’s creative engine. Buckingham’s Go Your Own Way was directed at Nicks, who was required to sing on it. Nicks answered the end of their relationship through Dreams and Silver Springs. Christine McVie wrote You Make Loving Fun about a new relationship while her former husband continued playing bass alongside her. Don’t Stop offered an optimistic appeal to look towards tomorrow, although it emerged from the wreckage of a marriage.
The sessions were prolonged by perfectionism, exhaustion and heavy cocaine use. The studio became both refuge and battlefield. Words that could barely be exchanged in conversation were sung into microphones and polished into immaculate harmonies.
Released in 1977, Rumours became one of the best-selling albums ever made. Its appeal rests partly upon that extraordinary contrast: music of exceptional beauty and accessibility created by people who were emotionally tearing one another apart. The songs are personal without becoming narrow. Listeners who knew nothing of the band’s relationships could recognise their own love affairs, betrayals and attempts at survival within them.
It was Fleetwood Mac’s ABBA moment, but with the emotional wiring pulled even further apart. Like ABBA, the band contained couples who continued performing together after love had failed. Unlike ABBA, the romantic complications did not remain confined to the original pairings.
STEVIE NICKS, MICK FLEETWOOD AND THE AFFAIR WITHIN THE AFFAIR
After her relationship with Buckingham had ended, Stevie Nicks began an affair with Mick Fleetwood. Both were involved with other people, and Fleetwood was close to reconciling with his wife. The relationship introduced yet another layer of tension into a group already constructed around unresolved feelings.
Nicks later acknowledged that the affair was destructive and should not have happened. Fleetwood ultimately resumed his relationship with Jenny Boyd, although that marriage would not endure. Nicks then entered a relationship with Fleetwood’s friend, the Eagles musician Don Henley, while Fleetwood became involved with Nicks’s close friend Sara Recor, whom he later married.
The remarkable fact is not simply that these events occurred, but that the musicians continued walking onto stages together. Buckingham played guitar beside the woman who had left him. John McVie supplied bass lines beneath songs inspired by Christine’s new lover. Mick Fleetwood maintained the beat while relationships formed and dissolved around him — and, at times, with his active participation.
It was less a love triangle than an emotional railway junction. Yet when the lights came up, five wounded people produced the sound of a single, astonishingly disciplined band.
THE CHAIN
No song represents Fleetwood Mac more completely than The Chain. It was assembled from musical fragments contributed by members of the group and is the only track on Rumours credited to all five.
Its lyrics concern betrayal, anger and the refusal to allow a bond to be entirely broken. That made it an appropriate statement from a band whose members could no longer live peacefully together but remained joined by music, ambition and financial reality.
Then comes its most famous passage. John McVie’s bass begins alone: dark, measured and expectant. Mick Fleetwood’s drums gather behind it, Buckingham’s guitar enters, and the song accelerates towards its release.
The BBC adopted this instrumental section for its Formula One coverage in 1978. It became inseparable from the sight of racing cars, mechanics, starting grids and grandstands. For generations of British viewers, McVie’s bass line signalled Sunday afternoon speed long before an engine had been heard.
The broadcaster revived it when Formula One returned to the BBC in 2009, while Channel 4 subsequently retained the musical association for its coverage. It is difficult to imagine another piece of rock music so completely fused with a sport. The first notes create a physical expectation: tyres warming, lights preparing to extinguish and a field of cars waiting to launch itself towards the opening corner.
A song created from the remains of broken relationships became the sound of precision engineering and controlled danger. Few accidents of popular culture have ever felt so perfectly ordained.
SUCCESS, EXCESS AND TUSK
After Rumours, Fleetwood Mac faced the impossible task of following one of the most successful albums in history. Buckingham resisted the demand to repeat its formula and pushed the band towards the stranger, more experimental double album Tusk.
Released in 1979, Tusk was enormously expensive to produce and initially appeared commercially disappointing beside its predecessor. Yet its reputation has grown. The album revealed Buckingham’s restless studio imagination, Nicks’s developing independence as a songwriter and Christine McVie’s continuing melodic assurance.
Fleetwood Mac continued recording and touring through the 1980s, producing albums including Mirage and Tango in the Night. The latter delivered major hits such as Big Love, Little Lies and Everywhere. However, the old tensions never disappeared. Buckingham left before the accompanying tour, exhausted by the band’s relationships and pressures.
Stevie Nicks had meanwhile established a highly successful solo career. Her identity had grown beyond Fleetwood Mac, but she remained one of the group’s defining figures. Christine McVie likewise possessed a distinctive musical character: less mystical than Nicks and less abrasive than Buckingham, she supplied emotional clarity and some of the band’s most graceful pop songs.
DEPARTURES AND RETURNS
The classic five reunited for The Dance in 1997, a live performance and album that introduced their music to another generation. Its version of The Chain demonstrated that the old chemistry remained powerful, even when the relationships behind it had fundamentally changed.
Christine McVie withdrew from touring after the reunion and left the group in 1998. For years she lived quietly in England, having developed a fear of flying and grown weary of the demands surrounding the band.
Her return in 2014 was greeted with enormous affection. The classic line-up toured again, and Fleetwood Mac appeared to have achieved something approaching a late-life reconciliation. Time had not erased every disagreement, but it had softened some of their sharpest edges.
That stability did not last. Buckingham was dismissed from the touring line-up in 2018 following renewed conflict. He was replaced by Mike Campbell, formerly of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and Neil Finn of Crowded House. The altered group completed a world tour and played what remains Fleetwood Mac’s final concert in 2019.
THE LOSS OF CHRISTINE McVIE
Christine McVie died in November 2022 at the age of 79. Her death removed more than a singer and keyboard player. It took from Fleetwood Mac the musician who had often provided balance between Buckingham and Nicks, between experimentation and accessibility, and between emotional turbulence and domestic warmth.
Stevie Nicks subsequently said that the band could not continue without Christine. Mick Fleetwood likewise spoke of the group as having reached its end. Although reunion rumours have periodically appeared, Fleetwood Mac has not returned to performance, and reports of an imminent revival should be treated cautiously.
The surviving members remain musically active in different ways, and their personal connections have not disappeared. But Fleetwood Mac as a functioning band appears to have completed its journey. It has not performed since 2019, and any reunion without Christine McVie would inevitably be something different from the group remembered by its audience.
The chain exists now principally through the music.
MORE THAN ONE FLEETWOOD MAC
It is tempting to divide Fleetwood Mac into two bands: Peter Green’s British blues group and the Anglo-American supergroup of Rumours. In reality, there were many Fleetwood Macs, each emerging from the remains of the previous one.
There was Green’s intense and haunted original band; the wandering transitional group of the early 1970s; the California line-up that conquered the world; the fractured stadium attraction of the 1980s; and the older, reflective ensemble whose reunions carried the accumulated weight of everything its members had survived.
Peter Green’s story remains essential because Fleetwood Mac’s later success can otherwise obscure where it began. He was not merely an early member whose place was taken by more famous faces. He was its founder, first leader and original creative soul. His departure created the crisis that forced the band to evolve.
Buckingham and Nicks did not replace Green’s music. They transformed the possibilities of the institution he had created. Christine McVie helped connect those worlds, joining during the British period and becoming indispensable to the American one. Fleetwood and John McVie remained the pulse throughout, anchoring the band as personalities and musical fashions changed around them.
THE MUSIC THAT OUTLIVED THE MARRIAGES
Fleetwood Mac’s achievement cannot be explained solely by scandal. The affairs, divorces and arguments matter because they became raw material for exceptional songwriting, not because the private lives of musicians are inherently important.
The band possessed several distinctive writers, three recognisable lead voices and a rhythm section capable of making complicated emotional music feel natural. Buckingham’s meticulous production gave the records their detail. Nicks gave them myth and mystery. Christine McVie gave them tenderness and melodic ease. John McVie gave them movement, while Mick Fleetwood’s unorthodox drumming gave them space and character.
Peter Green had established the principle decades earlier: technical excellence mattered, but feeling mattered more.
That is why Fleetwood Mac continues to endure after the working band has apparently ended. Its catalogue does not sound like the relic of one period. Albatross floats outside time. Man of the World remains painfully intimate. Landslide grows older with its listener. Dreams moves with effortless confidence. Songbird offers consolation without ornament. Go Your Own Way turns rejection into forward motion.
And The Chain still begins with the promise that, whatever has been broken, something remains.
When John McVie’s bass rises beneath Formula One coverage, the sound carries far more than sporting excitement. Within those notes are Peter Green’s vanished blues band, Christine McVie’s quiet assurance, Buckingham and Nicks facing one another across a stage, and Mick Fleetwood maintaining the rhythm while the entire structure threatens to collapse.
Fleetwood Mac may no longer be touring, but it has not disappeared. The marriages ended. Members departed. Peter Green retreated from the world and eventually returned. Christine McVie left the stage, came home to the band and was then lost to it forever.
The people could not always remain together.
The music did.
And somewhere, as racing cars gather on a starting grid and that unmistakable bass line begins, the chain holds once more.
