michelej1
04-30-2008, 03:20 PM
The Times (London) December 12, 1998
BYLINE: Chris Campling
BODY:
The house Fleetwood Mac once called home is for sale, writes Chris Campling
About 30 years ago, any serious rock musician worth his tie-dyed loon pants would consider himself a failure if he did not have some little place in the country to which he could retreat in the interests of getting his head together, man. Some, such as Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant and Steve Winwood of Traffic, roughed it in cold-water farmhouses. It is appropriate that the members of Fleetwood Mac took a different tack.
This, after all, is the band that took rock'n'roll hedonism to its most lurid heights. The success of albums such as Rumours (25 million sold and still counting) supported a lifestyle that embraced everything from partner-swapping among the members of the band to, it was said, goldfish bowls full of cocaine circulating at parties that seemed to go on for years.
At the beginning of the 1970s though, Fleetwood Mac were a band of rather more modest transgressions. They were also a band in transition. Their leader, Peter Green, a man for whom the description "troubled genius" might have been coined, had left. Where did the band go next?
Where they went was a house called Benifold in Headley, a small Hampshire village near Hindhead. For Pounds 23,000 the band and their then manager, Clifford Davis, acquired the late-Victorian mansion that had most recently been used by the members of a religious order as a retreat. It was here that the tune to a hymn by Charles Wesley called Glory, Love and Praise and Honour had been written. A lot more songs were to be written there over the next few years.
What did the band see as they drove up the narrow, untarred road to Benifold's front gates and then wound through the grounds to the main entrance? A lot of trees for a start, marching down the side of the hill on which the house was built, straddling the huge manmade gash in the ground where the locals had dug for fuller's earth, once quite a cash generator in the area. Then down further into woodland until Benifold's land met a farmer's fields, out of sight of the house itself.
Benifold was built by a man who was suffering from tuberculosis, and at the time it was believed that pine trees could help to cure TB," says Keith Nicklin, who bought the house in 1987 and now has it on the market through Knight Frank International for Pounds 1.25 million.
A healthy crop of conifers still surrounds the house, despite the ravages of the October 1987 hurricane, which struck just before the Nicklins moved in. Not an auspicious start to a stay that is ending now because both the junior Nicklins will soon be at boarding school and an already large house will become massive to the two adults left to rattle around in it.
No such problems assailed Fleetwood Mac. Benifold's nine bedrooms, not to mention the one-bedroom self-contained flat, were soon filled. What had once been the servants' quarters in the eastern side of the house were occupied by drummer Mick Fleetwood and his then wife, Jenny. Bass player John McVie and his new wife Christine, the band's keyboards player, had their own little wing complete with kitchen and living room. Guitarist Danny Kirwin and his girlfriend were up in the attic. Jeremy Spencer, the band's other guitarist, shipped his wife and children in, too. Spencer was not to stay long. In 1971, while on tour in America, he left the hotel and disappeared, turning up as a member of the controversial Children of God religious cult.
Some significant traces of the band's stay at Benifold remain. The Nicklins have considerably refurbished the ground and first floors during their 11-year tenure, but the second floor remains as it must have been during those hippy days. On one wall of the corridor someone has painted a row of trees; on another, a rising sun; on a third a trio of women, possibly copied from a 1930s issue of Vogue. None is signed, but the style of the painting of the row of trees in particular is reminiscent of the cover art of Kiln House, one of the albums Fleetwood Mac made during their time at Benifold (there were four of them). The Kiln House cover, showing children playing near the kiln house of the title, was painted by Christine McVie and, out in the grounds, an old wooden water tower and accompanying shed are similar enough to the buildings in the painting to have at least inspired the keyboard player.
"We get people coming along and taking pictures of the house," Nicklin says, "and someone who was writing a book about the band came."
What he saw was far more Nicklin than Mac. Unlike the band, who "had enough money to buy the house, but not to refurbish it", according to another member of the band, Bob Welch, the Nicklins have put money and time into making Benifold their home, rather than a rock'n'roll museum.
BYLINE: Chris Campling
BODY:
The house Fleetwood Mac once called home is for sale, writes Chris Campling
About 30 years ago, any serious rock musician worth his tie-dyed loon pants would consider himself a failure if he did not have some little place in the country to which he could retreat in the interests of getting his head together, man. Some, such as Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant and Steve Winwood of Traffic, roughed it in cold-water farmhouses. It is appropriate that the members of Fleetwood Mac took a different tack.
This, after all, is the band that took rock'n'roll hedonism to its most lurid heights. The success of albums such as Rumours (25 million sold and still counting) supported a lifestyle that embraced everything from partner-swapping among the members of the band to, it was said, goldfish bowls full of cocaine circulating at parties that seemed to go on for years.
At the beginning of the 1970s though, Fleetwood Mac were a band of rather more modest transgressions. They were also a band in transition. Their leader, Peter Green, a man for whom the description "troubled genius" might have been coined, had left. Where did the band go next?
Where they went was a house called Benifold in Headley, a small Hampshire village near Hindhead. For Pounds 23,000 the band and their then manager, Clifford Davis, acquired the late-Victorian mansion that had most recently been used by the members of a religious order as a retreat. It was here that the tune to a hymn by Charles Wesley called Glory, Love and Praise and Honour had been written. A lot more songs were to be written there over the next few years.
What did the band see as they drove up the narrow, untarred road to Benifold's front gates and then wound through the grounds to the main entrance? A lot of trees for a start, marching down the side of the hill on which the house was built, straddling the huge manmade gash in the ground where the locals had dug for fuller's earth, once quite a cash generator in the area. Then down further into woodland until Benifold's land met a farmer's fields, out of sight of the house itself.
Benifold was built by a man who was suffering from tuberculosis, and at the time it was believed that pine trees could help to cure TB," says Keith Nicklin, who bought the house in 1987 and now has it on the market through Knight Frank International for Pounds 1.25 million.
A healthy crop of conifers still surrounds the house, despite the ravages of the October 1987 hurricane, which struck just before the Nicklins moved in. Not an auspicious start to a stay that is ending now because both the junior Nicklins will soon be at boarding school and an already large house will become massive to the two adults left to rattle around in it.
No such problems assailed Fleetwood Mac. Benifold's nine bedrooms, not to mention the one-bedroom self-contained flat, were soon filled. What had once been the servants' quarters in the eastern side of the house were occupied by drummer Mick Fleetwood and his then wife, Jenny. Bass player John McVie and his new wife Christine, the band's keyboards player, had their own little wing complete with kitchen and living room. Guitarist Danny Kirwin and his girlfriend were up in the attic. Jeremy Spencer, the band's other guitarist, shipped his wife and children in, too. Spencer was not to stay long. In 1971, while on tour in America, he left the hotel and disappeared, turning up as a member of the controversial Children of God religious cult.
Some significant traces of the band's stay at Benifold remain. The Nicklins have considerably refurbished the ground and first floors during their 11-year tenure, but the second floor remains as it must have been during those hippy days. On one wall of the corridor someone has painted a row of trees; on another, a rising sun; on a third a trio of women, possibly copied from a 1930s issue of Vogue. None is signed, but the style of the painting of the row of trees in particular is reminiscent of the cover art of Kiln House, one of the albums Fleetwood Mac made during their time at Benifold (there were four of them). The Kiln House cover, showing children playing near the kiln house of the title, was painted by Christine McVie and, out in the grounds, an old wooden water tower and accompanying shed are similar enough to the buildings in the painting to have at least inspired the keyboard player.
"We get people coming along and taking pictures of the house," Nicklin says, "and someone who was writing a book about the band came."
What he saw was far more Nicklin than Mac. Unlike the band, who "had enough money to buy the house, but not to refurbish it", according to another member of the band, Bob Welch, the Nicklins have put money and time into making Benifold their home, rather than a rock'n'roll museum.