The drummer talks about the soap opera that has been Fleetwood Mac since 1967 — and the all-star tribute to bandmate Peter Green

For the past 54 years Mick Fleetwood, 73, has kept Fleetwood Mac going in the face of insurmountable odds. When the guitarist Lindsey Buckingham was fired from the band in 2018, in part linked to his former girlfriend Stevie Nicks announcing that she could not bear to share a stage with him again, it was just the latest hurdle for the soft-rock stadium fillers who have faced everything from divorces to affairs to drug-induced breakdowns.

The problems began when Peter Green, the band’s founder and one of the greatest guitarists, took LSD at a commune in Munich in March 1970 and never recovered. He left Fleetwood Mac a few months later.

“He was a lot of fun, right up until the day he walked out of the band,” says Fleetwood down the line from his home in Hawaii. “He had a real sense of ambition about what he wanted to do. You can listen to Man of the World now and hear the signs [in 1977 Green was diagnosed with schizophrenia], but I thought Peter had just written a sad song about a feeling.”

Perhaps that hindsight helped to spur Fleetwood on to put together a remarkable concert, which took place at the London Palladium on February 25, 2020 — just before the pandemic hit the UK — in honour of Green. Everyone from Fleetwood Mac’s keyboardist and singer Christine McVie to Pete Townshend to David Gilmour joined in, alongside some rather surprising Peter Green fans.

“I met Kirk Hammett in Hawaii and he told me that Fleetwood Mac had a lot to do with Metallica’s formation,” Fleetwood says of the heavy metal giants’ guitarist, who played Green’s electric blues classic The Green Manalishi (With the Two-Pronged Crown) in the concert. “Kirk loves Peter Green so much, he bought his 1959 Les Paul guitar.”

Then there is Noel Gallagher, who displayed an unusually sensitive side with a delicate three-song acoustic set halfway through the concert. “One of my nieces knows Noel and his wife,” Fleetwood says before revealing that said niece is the model Lily Donaldson. “I couldn’t make the connection between Fleetwood Mac and Oasis at all, but it turns out that they used to play our songs in sound checks.” What does Fleetwood think of Oasis? “I thought they were great fun and super-cheeky. All of this made me determined to revisit the world that had started this crazy band in the first place.”

It is all captured in a box set and DVD of the concert, which marked the end of an era for Fleetwood, not least because, had it been scheduled just a week later, it would not have happened. Two years in the planning, it became one of the final significant events in London before everything shut down. It also happened not long before Green died on July 25, 2020.

“It became extremely poignant for me,” Fleetwood says of the concert. “We lost Peter. We lost our lives as we knew them. The world of music stopped, and from what I’ve been told the concert was a line in the sand because you look at everyone who played on it and wonder if anything like that could happen again. So many of these people did one song and travelled across the planet to do it. That pretty much explains the emotive content of what this was all about.”

Fleetwood Mac started in 1967, gigging up and down the country in ancient vans and jamming on songs by obscure American blues musicians in the back rooms of smoke-filled pubs. Green, who grew up in a Jewish, working-class family in Bethnal Green in east London, made his name as part of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, something of a clearing house for 1960s Britain’s guitar greats with Eric Clapton, Mick Taylor of the Rolling Stones and the bassist Jack Bruce of Cream passing through its ranks. That’s where he met Fleetwood and the bassist John McVie, another of the band’s surviving founder members.

“We were the odd couple,” says Fleetwood, the self-described “academically challenged” son of a Royal Air Force pilot who went to a series of English boarding schools before leaving school at 15. “Peter would be the East End kid shouting, ‘F***ing give us the money now,’ to some promoter who had short-changed us. I would be the public schoolboy going, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t upset him too much . . .’

“Peter certainly knew what he wanted, but that didn’t transfer into his ego, which is why he named the band after John McVie and myself. He was funny, he was strong, he loved life. And emotionally he had a lot to say in his music after having had a shitty childhood of being bullied and so on.”

Fleetwood says that beyond the pain expressed in his songs, Green’s mental fragmentation came as a complete shock. “It was out of the blue. I don’t think he knew the enormity of what he was getting into [with LSD] and when he left the band we were devastated.”

Towards the end of his time with Fleetwood Mac, Green did start wearing robes and crucifixes and developed an increasing obsession that the band should give all their money away, but then it was the 1960s. “God knows I wish I had a degree in psychology at the time, but the truth is we didn’t see that someone was coming completely unglued emotionally,” Fleetwood says. “What we saw was someone who was on a mission, who had a gift from Heaven in his playing ability and in the unique expression in his songwriting. All I know is that I lost a dear, dear friend and I lost the inspiration of someone who had an enormous effect on me.”

All of this, Fleetwood says, served as the basis for what would become one of the biggest bands in the world. “What I learnt from Peter Green is that less is more. In other words, you don’t tread on someone else’s shit. You listen and give them space. And if you look at the history of Fleetwood Mac it is evident that the model Peter left is the one we’ve adhered to. It is almost artistically suicidal: we don’t ask someone to pretend to be someone that has been there before, so the style changes. Yes, John and me are always there, but look at the people that came through the ranks — and continue to. It is all based on Peter’s approach of welcoming these people in. Danny Kirwan used to be this young guy, sitting in the front row of the audience after hitchhiking across the country to join us. Peter not only invited Danny into the band, he gave him half the songs on [the 1969 album] Then Play On.”

Fleetwood also puts the band’s ever-shifting reality down to the fact that neither he nor John McVie sing or write. “I have always been the administrator,” he says. “I would be the one who would pack the van and do the driving because I didn’t trust anyone else. And with me and John the attitude has always been: we welcome someone in for who they are. Stevie and Lindsey were welcomed in, like Danny was. That is the story of Fleetwood Mac.”

As for the future, everything is up in the air. Buckingham was replaced by Neil Finn of Crowded House and the former Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell. John McVie has had to undergo treatment for cancer, and in February Christine McVie said of the possibility of touring again: “If we do, it will be without John and without Stevie. I think I’m getting a bit too old for it now.” Nonetheless, Fleetwood says that Green’s death brought a “gracious and open” reconciliation between himself and Buckingham, which means he may return to the fold. The soap opera continues.

“The last year has been so catastrophic for all of us,” Fleetwood says. “We’ve all been shocked that life can change so very quickly, but you’re talking to the dude who never gives up. We are still a band. We have not broken up. And here we are. I hope we can do something with dignity, that will make sense for all of us, and the will to go forward is there. In the story of Fleetwood Mac, the last tour was not meant to be the last tour. If that became clear — and it could — I would hope to find a classy way to say goodbye. Because one thing we’ve all learnt with Fleetwood Mac is that there are no absolutes at all.”

He concludes by giving his thoughts on the past year, although I think that, really, he’s talking about the band he has kept afloat since 1967. “Everything was nearly taken away,” Fleetwood says. “It taught me that when something is precious, really value it.”

Mick Fleetwood and Friends Celebrate the Music of Peter Green is out on April 30 and streams via nugs.net from April 24-29