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  #61  
Old 06-14-2018, 01:59 PM
GateandGarden GateandGarden is offline
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Thank you for the information, madformac.
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  #62  
Old 06-15-2018, 07:19 PM
michelej1 michelej1 is offline
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The Guardian

Adam Sweeting
Thu 14 Jun 2018 11.19 EDT

Although he was only 18 when he joined Fleetwood Mac in 1968, Danny Kirwan, who has died aged 68, rapidly became a significant creative force within the group in their early years. It was the guitarist Peter Green who achieved enduring “guitar hero” status with the band, but Kirwan was also a fluent and accomplished player with a delicate touch, his playing particularly recognisable for its use of vibrato.

He was also a prolific songwriter whose compositions would help to move Fleetwood Mac away from their strictly blues roots towards the more melodic soft-rock that turned them into one of the world’s most successful acts.

Kirwan had been in the group for two months when he made his first recording with them, playing on their Green-composed single Albatross, a lilting instrumental assembled from contrasting guitar parts. It was an auspicious beginning, since this would be the band’s only UK No 1 hit. His first album with them, Then Play On (1969), contained seven of his songs, including the string-accompanied ballad When You Say among more conventionally bluesy material.

He had more writing credits on Kiln House (1970) – the group’s first album after the departure of Green – including the bouncy rocker Tell Me All the Things You Do, and he wrote the single Dragonfly (1970), with lyrics from a poem by WH Davies. Green considered Dragonfly to be the best song Kirwan ever wrote.


Future Games (1971) included the Kirwan-penned opening track Woman of 1000 Years, a piece of dreamy California-style psychedelia, and his proto-country rock effort Sometimes. Bare Trees (1972), the last Mac album Kirwan appeared on, featured five more of his songs, including the almost Eagles-like Child of Mine and the poignant soft-rock of Dust (the latter taking its lyrics from Rupert Brooke’s poem of the same name).

Kirwan can thus be seen as the missing link between the original Fleetwood Mac, planted squarely in the British blues boom, and the band’s megastar LA-based incarnation featuring Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham , when it would sell 40m copies of its 1977 album Rumours.

But Kirwan was unable to cash in on the band’s subsequent commercial bonanza. He had always been emotionally fragile, and Green recounted that Kirwan would often be in tears while he was playing. The strain of touring and performing drove him to drink and drugs, and he often neglected food altogether. He finally quit during a US tour in 1972, when he flew into a rage in the dressing room before one of the shows, smashed his Les Paul guitar and refused to take the stage with the rest of the band. Afterwards Mick Fleetwood told Kirwan he was out of the band.

Kirwan was born in Brixton, south London, though obscurity surrounds his upbringing. At 17 he was playing in a three-piece band called Boilerhouse, and after he persuaded Fleetwood Mac’s producer Mike Vernon to come and see them, Vernon recommended them to Green, who invited Boilerhouse to be the support band at Fleetwood Mac shows. Green had not been happy with his co-guitarist Jeremy Spencer and was looking for another guitar player, so Kirwan was invited aboard, joining the lineup in August 1968.

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“I was lucky to have played for the band at all,” Kirwan told the Independent in a rare interview in 1993, after he had stepped out of the limelight. “I did it for about four years, to about 1972, but I couldn’t handle the lifestyle and the women and the travelling.” At this time he had been living in a St Mungo’s homeless hostel in central London, but had been tracked down by Fleetwood, who had last seen him in 1980.

After leaving Fleetwood Mac, Kirwan had put in a blink-and-you-missed-it stint with a band called Hungry Fighter, who played one solitary gig and made no recordings. He made three solo albums on the DJM label in the 1970s, Second Chapter (1975), Midnight in San Juan (1976) and Hello There Big Boy! (1979), but though the music was often melodic and attractive, Kirwan’s absence from live performance and lack of public visibility meant that the discs sold miserably and failed to chart.

He subsequently drifted away from music altogether, spending 10 years living rough and in a basement flat in Brixton, surviving on social security and royalty payments from his Fleetwood Mac work. In 1998, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Fleetwood Mac, but did not attend the ceremony.

He is survived by a son, Dominic, from his marriage to Clare Morris, which ended in divorce.

• Daniel David Kirwan, guitarist, singer and songwriter, born 13 May 1950; died 8 June 2018
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  #63  
Old 06-15-2018, 07:20 PM
michelej1 michelej1 is offline
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The Times

When Danny Kirwan joined Fleetwood Mac in 1968 his arrival created a three-pronged guitar attack that turned the group into one of the biggest-selling bands in Britain.

His unique vibrato style helped the instrumental Albatross to No 1, and further chart-topping hits featuring his distinctive guitar work followed with Man Of The World and Oh Well. Yet by 1972 Kirwan and both his fellow guitarists had gone, all three of them succumbing to psychotic breakdowns in what came to be known as “the curse of Fleetwood Mac”.

The first of them, Peter Green, quit in 1970, giving away his guitars and his money after a schizophrenic attack brought on by hallucinogenic drugs. Jeremy Spencer disappeared the next year, walking out of the band’s hotel, saying he was going to buy a magazine. He never returned and was later found to have joined a religious cult.

Yet Kirwan’s meltdown was in many ways the most dramatic of all. Sensitive and mentally fragile, he struggled to deal with fame and responsibility, went days on end without eating and developed a crippling stage fright, which in turn drove him to alcoholism.

His career as a rock star came to a shattering halt one night in 1972 on tour in America. Back stage while the band were tuning up before going on, something snapped and he hurled his Les Paul guitar at a dressing-room mirror, showering broken glass over his bandmates. Smashing his fists and head against the wall until they were bleeding, he refused to take the stage and instead spent the gig heckling from the audience as the band struggled on without him. He was sacked and never played with Fleetwood Mac again.

He made a doomed attempt to launch a solo career, but by 1980 Kirwan had disappeared, lost in an alcoholic haze. He briefly reappeared on the radar in 1993, when Mick Fleetwood employed the Missing Persons Bureau to trace him. He was found living in a London hostel for the homeless and had reportedly spent several years sleeping on park benches.

“I’ve been through a bit of a rough patch, but I’m not too bad,” he told a reporter who had got wind of his story and tracked him down to his favourite pub in the West End. “I couldn’t handle it all mentally — the lifestyle and the women and the travelling. I had to get out. I can’t settle.”

He then disappeared again for another quarter of a century, until his death was reported on Fleetwood Mac’s website. The “curse of Fleetwood Mac” claimed further victims when Bob Welch (obituary, June 9, 2012), the guitarist who had replaced Spencer, committed suicide.

Daniel David Kirwan was born in 1950 in Brixton, south London. Like so much of his life, his childhood is a mystery, although a line in one of his songs, Child of Mine, in which he sang, “I won’t leave you, no not like my father did,” was believed to be autobiographical. A self-taught guitarist, he was playing in an amateur blues trio called Boilerhouse by the age of 17.

After Fleetwood Mac’s producer Mike Vernon heard them rehearsing in a south London basement, he recommended them to Green, who offered to manage the group and arranged for them to support Fleetwood Mac at venues such as the Marquee Club in Soho, London.

When Kirwan’s bandmates expressed a reluctance to give up their day jobs and turn professional, Green placed an ad in Melody Maker to find a new drummer and bass player. More than 300 applied, but none of those auditioned was deemed to be up to the mark and so Kirwan was invited by Mick Fleetwood to join Fleetwood Mac by default.

“I was lucky to have played for the band at all,” Kirwan said when he briefly resurfaced in 1993. “I just started off following them around, but I could play the guitar a bit and Mick put me in.”

Angel-faced with his long blond hair and a sad, faraway look in his eyes, Kirwan made his first appearance with the band at the Nag’s Head in Battersea, south London, in 1968. According to Green, he was so moved by the music that he cried on stage as he was playing.

Despite his extreme youth, Kirwan’s contribution to the group was substantial, particularly after Green’s departure, when he reluctantly stepped up as the band’s main songwriter. On albums such as Future Games and Bare Trees, Kirwan’s songs took Fleetwood Mac away from the group’s blues roots and towards a more melodic, soft-rock style. Several of his compositions adapted lyrics by his favourite poets, including Rupert Brooke.

As the group’s albums stopped charting and they struggled to maintain a stable line-up, fans often refer to the period as the “wilderness years”, before the arrival of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks a few years later turned Fleetwood Mac into one of the biggest-selling bands. It would, perhaps, be fairer to see it as an era of transition, with Kirwan as the bridge.

Yet the pressure proved too much. “Danny wasn’t a very light-hearted person, to say the least,” his bandmate Welch recalled. “He was always very intense about his work, but didn’t seem to be able to distance himself from it. Danny was the definition of ‘deadly serious’.”

Somewhere along the way in the early 1970s he acquired a wife and a son, but soon lost them again and nobody in the Fleetwood Mac camp knows what became of them. Living on social security and “dribs and drabs” of royalties from his songs, he claimed to have spent years travelling with all of his possessions in a rucksack, perhaps inspired by The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp by WH Davies, one of his favourite writers and whose poetry he set to music in his song Dragonfly.

He was one of eight past and present members of Fleetwood Mac inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1998, but did not attend the ceremony. Ever a man of mystery, nobody knew how to contact him. Even the Missing Persons Bureau could not track him down for the event.

Danny Kirwan, musician, was born on May 13, 1950. He died of unknown causes on June 8, 2018, aged 68
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  #64  
Old 06-15-2018, 08:32 PM
Tango Tango is offline
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He had always been emotionally fragile, and Green recounted that Kirwan would often be in tears while he was playing.

He played his heart out. His story heartbreaking. I imagine his son would have heard about his death. Thank you for posting this Michele.
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  #65  
Old 06-15-2018, 09:08 PM
michelej1 michelej1 is offline
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The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/10/o...twood-mac.html


Danny Kirwan, Guitarist in Fleetwood Mac’s Early Years, Dies at 68

By Jacey Fortin
June 10, 2018

Danny Kirwan, a guitarist, singer and songwriter for Fleetwood Mac whose work fueled the band’s rise during its early years, died on Friday in London. He was 68.

His former wife, Clare Morris, said he died in his sleep after contracting pneumonia earlier this year and never fully recovering from it. Fleetwood Mac also announced his death in a Facebook post.

Mr. Kirwan was only a teenager when he joined Fleetwood Mac in 1968, but his talent was apparent to the band, which at the time consisted of the guitarists Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer, the bassist John McVie and the drummer Mick Fleetwood.

His work was featured on five albums, beginning in 1969 with the bluesy “Then Play On,” on which he shared writing and lead guitar duties with Mr. Green. He also sang all the songs he wrote with the band, which included half the tracks on the gold-certified 1972 album “Bare Trees.”

As a guitarist, he was known for his vibrato.

“Danny had pure, resonant note comprehension,” Mr. Fleetwood said in an interview last year. “Many guitarists make the vibrato sound like a dying cow or a mosquito in heat. Danny had an unbelievable touch.”

Mr. Kirwan was fired from the band in 1972. (This reportedly followed an emotional outburst on tour in which he smashed his Gibson Les Paul guitar.)

His departure came as Fleetwood Mac was transitioning from its foundation in bluesy rock to the more melodic California pop-rock the band came to epitomize in the 1970s. Mr. Kirwan played a role in that transition but had left the band before the American singer-songwriters Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined and before the release of hit albums like the chart-topping “Rumours” and the experimental “Tusk” and Top 20 singles like “Go Your Own Way,” “Rhiannon” and “Don’t Stop.”

While Fleetwood Mac — whose lineup in those years also included the singer, songwriter and keyboardist Christine McVie, who joined the band in 1970 — evolved without him, Mr. Kirwan set out alone. He released a few solo albums, but they failed to make waves and he faded almost entirely from public view.

When Mr. Kirwan was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1998, along with seven other past and present members of Fleetwood Mac, he did not attend the ceremony.

Daniel David Kirwan was born in South London on May 13, 1950. As a teenager he was the frontman for a band called Boilerhouse, which was playing in a Brixton pub when he was discovered by Mr. Green and Mr. Fleetwood, according to online biographies.

He and Ms. Clare had a son, Dominic, who survives him. Mr. Kirwan had led a quiet life in London since retiring from the music industry, Ms. Clare said.

He had surfaced briefly in 1993 when, in an interview with the British newspaper The Independent, he said he had been homeless.

“I’ve been through a bit of a rough patch, but I’m not too bad,” Mr. Kirwan told the newspaper. “I get by, and I suppose I am homeless, but then I’ve never really had a home since our early days on tour.”
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  #66  
Old 06-16-2018, 12:21 PM
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elle elle is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by madformac View Post
I haven't posted here for many years but thought this might be something to add here.

Danny died in his sleep from complications of pneumonia. He had been battling it from earlier this year but couldn't beat it unfortunately. He was cremated and his ashes returned to his family.

He was only 68 although many of those later years were quite hard and Danny did battle with alcohol as has been documented. He spent a number of those later years in and out of hostels in the Soho district of London, ironically very close to Denmark Street and the heart of London's music history where the band played many early gigs.

I have my views on Danny and the way he was treated by the band before he was thrown out but this isn't the time or place for that.

Let me just say he was a magical talent and in many ways he and Peter Green were two parts of the same jigsaw. Their playing was magical and Danny was a very gifted songwriter and singer as well as a guitarist. Tragic he went the way that he did. Hopefully he will be at peace now.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SUbloyGsgw


Thank you.
thank you so much for this.

here is a link to his obituary from The Times (UK) -


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  #67  
Old 06-16-2018, 12:58 PM
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Thanks for the link to the obituary, and to fmfanuk for posting it.

I hadn't realized they couldn't locate him to tell him about the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame Induction. I just thought he chose not to attend. So much for the Missing Persons Bureau... he wasn't kidnapped or actively hiding and they still couldn't find him!
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  #68  
Old 06-24-2018, 01:20 PM
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Thanks for share all the obituaries. Really sad to know that Danny spent his last years in the nowhere, out from all the social contact. Now he will rest in peace, for sure.
Oh! And it's really new for me to know that he had a family...
Regards!
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  #69  
Old 07-05-2018, 10:50 AM
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It's been a few weeks and I'm still really not over this loss. In the back of my mind, I was always hoping he would emerge again, modestly of course, for an interview and/or a meet up with Mick.

I was hoping we'd have at least one final statement from him for posterity.

But it wasn't to be, and as much as I longed for an interview, I was also impressed that he, more than any other member of the band, avoided all media scrutiny and preserved his privacy to the very end. That is its own accomplishment.
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  #70  
Old 07-06-2018, 12:56 AM
lazy poker lazy poker is offline
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Originally Posted by aleuzzi View Post
(...) I was also impressed that he, more than any other member of the band, avoided all media scrutiny and preserved his privacy to the very end. That is its own accomplishment.
yes, indeed!
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  #71  
Old 07-11-2018, 04:48 PM
lennonfan lennonfan is offline
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I had a dream last week and I wrote about it on the Steve Hoffman audiophile forum and I'll repeat it here

the dream was obscure but clear and it revealed:
Danny's 4 albums with Fleetwood Mac each represent a season.
It was also revealed the cycle was of 4 and it was complete.
look at the covers!
Fall-Then Play On
Spring-Kiln House
Summer-Future Games
Winter-Bare Trees
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  #72  
Old 07-11-2018, 06:37 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lennonfan View Post
I had a dream last week and I wrote about it on the Steve Hoffman audiophile forum and I'll repeat it here

the dream was obscure but clear and it revealed:
Danny's 4 albums with Fleetwood Mac each represent a season.
It was also revealed the cycle was of 4 and it was complete.
look at the covers!
Fall-Then Play On
Spring-Kiln House
Summer-Future Games
Winter-Bare Trees
Sometimes a great idea is the one that seems so obvious once someone points it out. That’s the case here. Thank you for this bit of clarity. I totally see it. Kinda’ like Jefferson Starship’s four elements concept in the 70s—air, water, fire, earth.
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  #73  
Old 07-12-2018, 04:51 AM
lennonfan lennonfan is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by aleuzzi View Post
Sometimes a great idea is the one that seems so obvious once someone points it out. That’s the case here. Thank you for this bit of clarity. I totally see it. Kinda’ like Jefferson Starship’s four elements concept in the 70s—air, water, fire, earth.
the weirdest thing about this dream was it made me see the incident that got him fired in a whole new way. I'm feeling he smashed his guitar and wouldn't go on stage because he couldn't handle it anymore and knew it was over intuitively.
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  #74  
Old 07-16-2018, 05:49 PM
Murrow Murrow is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lennonfan View Post
I had a dream last week and I wrote about it on the Steve Hoffman audiophile forum and I'll repeat it here

the dream was obscure but clear and it revealed:
Danny's 4 albums with Fleetwood Mac each represent a season.
It was also revealed the cycle was of 4 and it was complete.
look at the covers!
Fall-Then Play On
Spring-Kiln House
Summer-Future Games
Winter-Bare Trees
Bit out of sequence though. I would have thought of Future Games as more of an autumn album (sorry, I'm a Brit). And then there's Although the Sun is Shining...
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  #75  
Old 07-21-2018, 09:12 AM
lennonfan lennonfan is offline
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Quote:
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Bit out of sequence though. I would have thought of Future Games as more of an autumn album (sorry, I'm a Brit). And then there's Although the Sun is Shining...
not sure the sequence matters but Future Games is more Summer:
Sands Of Time:
'We will go right down to the sea, bathing in light we will be free to wander'
sounds summery to me
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