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Old 11-24-2017, 03:22 PM
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Going his own way
Mick Fleetwood has spent most of his life keeping the world’s most successful band together.


Mick Fleetwood has been walking around Carnaby Street, feeling a little — not nostalgic, exactly; he bats the suggestion away — but re-energised, vindicated. It was here in central London that, aged 17, he got his first job, working the phones at British department store Liberty, gleaning fashion ideas, dreaming of a rock ’n’ roll future, earning a princely £4 a week.

Squint, and the rangy old roue sitting opposite me in this boutique hotel, a former courthouse a few loping strides from where Liberty still stands, doesn’t look to have changed very much in the intervening five decades. He’s still a straight-backed 1.98m. His clothes still scream Swinging Sixties: paisley shirt, black jeans and red desert boots, gold medallion, gold earring and big gold rings on the knuckles of both hands. The teenage Mick might not have had the bling — or the neat grey beard and ponytail — but he had the drive to go out and get it.

“I couldn’t wait to bounce out of school, being an academic no-good,” says Fleetwood, 70, in silky tones befitting his long-ago posh boarding facility in Gloucester, southwest England. “I was a schemer, and London was where it was at. It was this pocket of naive thinking, this creative roll, this attitude, where nothing was questioned. I mean, why do these things happen?” He lets the question hang in the air.

A founding member of one of the most enduring and successful bands of the past 50 years, Fleetwood loves to talk, which is good news for ticket holders to his coming appearances in Sydney and Melbourne to launch Love That Burns — A Chronicle of Fleetwood Mac Volume One: 1967-1974, a limited edition tome produced by bespoke publisher Genesis. Pictorially driven, the book features contributions from early band members and colleagues, and an account of Fleetwood’s childhood and teenage years, which happened to coincide with the so-called British blues boom.

“It was a time of experimentation in music, in fashion, in art.” Fleetwood shrugs, his brown eyes wide. “Blues appealed to a chunk of kids coming out of the war. As young players we were identifying with something that let us express ourselves, our wears and tears and pain.

“We’d go out to Eel Pie Island” (a major jazz and blues venue in the Thames at Twickenham, southwest London) “and listen to bands banging out early Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, stuff right out of the blues bin. It was a bijou movement that became a tidal wave.”

This Mick, a Maui, Hawaii-based grandfather, has seen it, done it, got the T-shirt. But he’s still as animated about music as he was when a juvenile drummer in a series of London-based bands called the Cheynes (which supported early gigs by the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds), the Bo Street Runners and Shotgun Express, which featured singer-guitarist Peter Green (or as Love That Burns insists, the “legendary” Peter Green), and a spry rising star named Rod Stewart.

Not to mention John Mayall’s Blues Breakers, a notorious outfit whose fluctuating line-up variously featured Fleetwood, Green and bassist John McVie.

When Mayall kicked McVie and Fleetwood out of the band for persistent onstage insobriety, a creatively frustrated Green left too. By the summer of 1967 all three men (along with guitarist Jeremy Spencer) were members of a band named Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac. Their live debut that same year — at the celebrated Windsor Blues and Jazz Festival — marked them out as a group to watch.

“There would be no Fleetwood Mac without Peter Green,” says Fleetwood of a man who is to the Mac as Syd Barrett was to Pink Floyd. That is, a troubled, sensitive, allegedly drug-dabbling genius for whom fame and its accoutrements became too much.

“Peter was our internal combustion engine, our focus. He was completely unselfish.

“Later on, when he was asked why he named the band Fleetwood Mac, he said: ‘I didn’t want to be Eric Clapton, I wanted to be in a band with Mick, John and Jeremy.’ He always knew he was going to move on, and he didn’t want us to be left with nothing.”

Spencer left. McVie left for several years and came back. But Fleetwood has been there throughout, all bug eyes and gangly limbs behind the cymbals and snares, gurning and thrashing through a litany of hits, none of which he wrote. No matter that he has always been at the bottom of the pecking order when it comes to credibility, creativity, (mega) earnings.

Keeping the Mac together has been his lifework — no mean feat given the band’s unofficial status as a sort of dysfunctional family, rife with fallings out, personnel changes, bankrupt*cies (Fleetwood’s, mainly), relationship swaps, alcohol and substance abuses, and various other intense lows and giddy, giddy highs. “My father used to say, try and have a humour about what you do, and if you know you have to get something done then don’t feel it’s necessary to take the credit.” He grins. “That,” he says, “would be the crafty side of Mick Fleetwood.”

Mention Fleetwood Mac to the person-of-a-certain-age on the street, and the line-up that will probably spring to mind is the one responsible for 1977’s US west coast dream-pop gem, Rumours, which remains one of the biggest selling albums of all time: husband-and-wife Christine and John McVie; Lindsey Buckingham and his on/off partner, Stevie Nicks; Fleetwood, there with Nicks on the album’s iconic black-and-white cover photo, his foot on a chair, a pair of wooden balls dangling from the crotch of his very tight black knickerbockers.

The balls, a “juju” good luck charm and a trademark of his wry stage get-up, date back to an early incarnation of Fleetwood Mac. The blues-playing Mac, in fact, that we’re here to talk about today.

The Mac that was based in Britain until 1975 (when they relocated to the US to build on their success), recording albums such as their self-titled 1967 debut Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, an overnight triumph, and 1968’s Mr Wonderful, which contains the Green-penned song Love That Burns, and whose guest singer, erstwhile folkie Christine Perfect, would go on to marry John McVie. Oh, and four of whose songs began with the exact same riff by Mississippi-born blues legend Elmore James.

“We were a bunch of kids playing blues and loving it. The fact that people hadn’t heard what we were producing made us something new, though in truth we were just copyists.” Fleetwood puts up his hands, you-got-me-guv style.

“If you listen to early Fleetwood Mac it’s our best efforts at doing something traditional. We weren’t like the Yardbirds, doing weird versions of classic songs. We played classic songs for better or for worse. And got better.”

He’d nicked the balls from a pub toilet after a few too many ales on tour: “The whole ethic of blues is slightly suggestive. Suitably, I walked out on stage with these two lavatory chains with wooden balls hanging down, and it just stuck.”

The son of a homemaker and an RAF pilot who moved his family from base to base — there was six years in Egypt and a long stint in Norway, where the young Mick grew fluent in Norwegian — Fleetwood was always a bit of a stirrer. This had a lot to do with what he now recognises as dyslexia; at school, unable to commit facts to memory, and with words swimming around on the page, he used to muck around for laughs instead.

“I mean, look, we’re sitting in an old courthouse,” he says now. “So many jails today are full of dyslexics and unconventional, misunderstood people. I’m so lucky that my parents encouraged creativity in all of us”

His sister Susan, who died of cancer in 1995, was an established Shakespearean actress; his other sister Sally became a sculptor and fashion designer. “They gave me a drum kit when I was 13, recognising that my future would probably be in something artistic.

“My dad liked to goof around on a drum kit or just do this sort of stuff.” He slaps out a brisk rhythm on one jeans-clad thigh. “His party piece in the officer’s mess was playing wine bottles with sticks. I’ve no idea if that is why I ended up doing what I’m doing but you know …” Another smile. “Here we are.”

Fleetwood is the first to admit he’s not the greatest percussionist ever to have whacked a high-hat.

Early on, when his nerves and a sort of rhythmic dyslexia tried to get the better of him, the ever sensitive Green would sing to fill in during drum breaks, and encourage Fleetwood to follow the beat by anticipating the lead guitarist. It was a masterclass that would prove invaluable later, when the group was auditioning Mac axemen Danny Kirwan and Bob Welch, since Fleetwood came to know what made a guitarist great.

“Peter had asked me to join John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, and when I wondered why he’d want me over the other incredibly adept drummer he said, ‘Mick, you play the **** from the heart and it’s totally suited to blues playing.’ The other guy had got too clever for what they were doing. Peter gave me confidence. He was a mentor as well as a friend.”

Still, forget drum solos. “I hate them. Inherently drummers are forced into **** like that, like when the power goes off in a club. You ever seen Charlie Watts do a drum solo? Ringo? Any drum solo I do is buffoonery, theatre; I shout in the microphone, talk in tongues. Though Peter did give me a talking drum once,” he says of the West African tama, an instrument that is clamped under an elbow and played with a stick. “I had great fun running around the stage with that.”

Green is a spectre in our conversation, garnering more mentions than, say, any of Fleetwood’s ex-wives: Jenny, sister of Pattie Boyd (who was married to Eric Clapton), who he married and divorced twice (and is the mother of his two daughters, Amy and Lucy); Sara, the former bestie of Nicks; Lynn, with whom he has twin girls, Ruby and Tessa. His current partner, Chelsea, here today, is a language teacher who lives with him in Maui, on a spread with three dogs, a pig and her daughter’s 25 exotic chickens. “They’re like cockatoos.”

More mentions, too, than his band mates past and present — especially, and consciously, Buckingham and Nicks, the blonde fairy goddess whose quavering voice and wafting chiffon outfits became a vital part of the Fleetwood Mac brand. “Well, the book is not about them, and the whole point of this interview is about the book,” says Fleetwood, who took over management of the band in 1974, the year Love That Burns finishes, the same year he overheard a folk duo called Buckingham Nicks performing in a recording studio he happened to be visiting, and was stopped in his tracks.

“The book concludes with a picture of me outside the restaurant where I introduced John and Christine to these two lovely people that I heard by happenstance,” he says. “How did all this happen?”

The question hovers, rhetorically. “It’s unbelievable!” he says. “So I am looking up at the sign and over to what will be the next part of this historic journey.”

The story has long been out there: of how Fleetwood and Nicks had a brief intense fling after the recording of Rumours. How Fleetwood dumped Nicks for her pal, Sara Recor, which a wounded Nicks then wrote a hit song about. The post-1974 Fleetwood Mac wasn’t shy about airing dirty laundry (Sara, Over My Head, Go Your Own Way), all while fulfilling every rock ’n’ roll cliche going.

Fleetwood’s 2014 autobiography Play On tells of cocaine use that began modestly enough (“We discovered a toot now and then relieved the boredom of long hours in the studio,” he writes); he has previously estimated that if his lines of coke were laid end to end they would run to about 11km long.

The bankruptcies came later, too. Fleetwood admits he has never been great with money, although his current sideline, a restaurant and bar in Maui called Fleetwood’s, where he performs from time to time with a blues band, is healthy enough. His first bankruptcy came in 1984, not long after he’d shelled out on Wensleydale, a sprawling property in Mittagong in the southern highlands of NSW, having fallen for Australia on Fleetwood Mac’s regular visits (a world tour next year is in the works).

“It was a pipe dream of a utopian lifestyle,” says Fleetwood, forgetting that we’ve strayed off-book. “Typical me, Irish dreaming nut case. I intended to live there, emigrate, the whole thing. But it became apparent that Australia was too far away for me as a sort of gatekeeper of Fleetwood Mac’s survival.

“The politics of Fleetwood Mac are well known and I couldn’t see the band going on if I kept the house. It was hard, all of it,” he sighs, “including getting my green card back.”

Still, nothing seems to have affected Fleetwood as much as the departure of the legendary Green. According to rock ’n’ roll legend, Green’s drift away from the band was tied in with health problems caused by his increasing LSD use. Having quit the band in 1970 and released several albums under his own name, he still lives in Southend on Sea, 65km east of London, a virtual recluse, the subject of ongoing fascination.

Fleetwood will be visiting his great friend in a couple of days, as he likes to do when he is in Britain. Whether Green appreciates the gesture is hard to say. “Peter is not the same person he was back then. He’s quite detached. He is someone who should never have taken acid, but that was only part of the reason he left Fleetwood Mac.” Fleetwood shakes his head.

“Life became so heavy for him. I’ve had my whole life to look at what happened with Peter with sadness; we lost someone so dear who became so altered that you didn’t, you don’t, really know …” He pauses, recalibrates.

“There isn’t a reciprocal connection. You go, ‘Well, he might not even miss me.’ But I love him and in many ways owe him everything.”

So of all the iterations of Fleetwood Mac, was the blues-playing, Swinging London version — Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac — his favourite?

“It was the most important because it’s how we started. We were doing what we wanted to do in this hugely exciting place, London, which was full of creativity and possibility and like-minded people. I can picture it so well.”

Fleetwood nods towards the street. “I still get a buzz being back here, even now.”

Mick Fleetwood is at two evening events in Sydney on November 28 and 29 and Melbourne on December 1 and 2.
Love That Burns — A Chronicle of Fleetwood Mac, Volume One: 1967-1974 is published by Genesis in a limited edition run of 2000 copies.



http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts...052c2c5cb1c082
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