'Our lifestyle? Lunacy' Sex, drugs and Fleetwood Mac

Mick Fleetwood: 'We were cloaked in this crazy world’
Cocaine, affairs, reckless spending – Mick Fleetwood was the epitome of the rock ’n’ roll egomaniac. How did he, and his band, survive?

October 26, 2014 issue of Seven in The Telegraph (UK)

By Chrissy Iley
The Telegraph
October 26, 2014

I am waiting for Mick Fleetwood in a mansion that he has rented in Malibu. It is the size of a stately home. I am sitting in the kitchen, which is painted in ice-cream colours: pistachio, strawberry and vanilla.

He arrives shower fresh. He is as long and thin as you imagine him.

In his new autobiography, Play On, Fleetwood says that he’s 6ft 6in. He looks even taller, languid in navy chinos, a blue striped shirt with epaulettes, a gold medallion, a perfectly trimmed beard and a burnt copper tan.

The medallion is a scarab made by a goldsmith in Canterbury, and, Fleetwood tells me, a symbol of immortality because Ancient Egyptian scarabs, which are still being dug up by archaeologists, “survive against hopeless odds”. You could say the same about his band, Fleetwood Mac.

Founded by Fleetwood, John McVie and Peter Green in 1967, it is routinely compared to a dysfunctional family. The band’s fame peaked, along with their excesses, around the time of the album Rumours in 1977. A Rolling Stone cover featured the two couples – Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, and Christine and John McVie – and Fleetwood, in a giant bed, but with everybody next to the wrong partner, which was more than just some art director’s mischievous wheeze.

Both the McVie and the Buckingham/Nicks relationship fell apart during the recording of Rumours, and not long afterwards, Fleetwood had an affair with Nicks before dumping her for her best friend, Sara Recor, whom the drummer went on to marry. All the while, the band were trying to squeeze the most out of every millisecond, all of them excessive, consuming giant amounts of cocaine. They would have hotel rooms repainted in advance of their arrival and insist on having fleets of limos put at their disposal. Nicks would demand there was a grand piano in her suite. Fleetwood Mac were patron saints of the ridiculous tour rider.

It was all fabulous and depraved and, at its worst, none of the band members was even talking to each other. Yet somehow they carried on, realising that the drama was also creating great art (and making them enormous sums of money). To date Rumours has sold more than 45 million copies and is one of the biggest-selling albums of all time.

Buckingham was out of the band for 16 years – between 1987 and 1997. Christine McVie only returned this year after a similar period of absence.

But throughout it all Fleetwood has remained wedded to the cause, chivvying his bandmates to patch up their differences. As we chat, guitars, amps and various other musical instruments are being collected from the house to prepare for another reunion tour that could last a year.

Full Interview at The Telegraph