(Credits: Far Out / Fleetwood Mac)
Fri 29 August 2025 17:00, UK
Any band can find themselves with their backs against the wall every now and again. It’s not easy for anyone to get their foot in the door in the music industry, let alone try to kick the whole thing down, but Mick Fleetwood is among the few artists that has felt that pressure more than anyone in Fleetwood Mac.
Having been there since the beginning, Fleetwood was there for every single ugly moment in the band’s career. While Peter Green’s drastic mental decline led to him being let go from the group after a few years, the next decade was about to be one of the biggest whirlwinds that any band would ever have to face. Apart from losing band members and having their manager go out with a completely different version of the group, Fleetwood could have easily said that he had had enough and put an end to the whole operation.
But that’s not how he was wired. He was a touring musician, and he wasn’t going to rest until he felt that he had done his job, which didn’t exactly help when Bob Welsh decided to leave the group. The band were clearly fracturing in the 1970s, but as soon as Fleetwood heard the debut of Buckingham Nicks, he was blown away.
No one was talking about this folk duo, but one listen to ‘Frozen Love’ was enough for Fleetwood to pluck up the two music legends from obscurity and ask them to join the group. There was a lot of promise to this version of the band, but let’s play a game real quick. Imagine you have a band that’s been around for decades and hasn’t had a major hit in a while, and they suddenly pick two completely random artists to be their songwriters. You’d probably get cold feet as well, right?
It’s not like it wasn’t a founded fear, either. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks did have a great sound whenever they performed, but the fact that their first album sank without a trace wasn’t encouraging, especially since a handful of songs on ‘The Mac’s new record were holdovers or re-recordings of tracks from their debut.
Despite the chilly feeling in the air, Fleetwood remembered being determined to get the band’s self-titled White Album on the radio, saying, “I took some of the tracks to [record executive] Mo [Ostin] and said: ‘If you don’t hear something special here, will you let us go? Because I really believe this is something special.’ It was a kind of naive threat. And of course, Mo loved it. Then I said: ‘This is so special, I think we need to go out as a band.’”
And while it took its sweet time getting up the charts, the amount of momentum from the band’s first Buckingham-Nicks album did set up Rumours perfectly. No one could have predicted that they would come out with ‘Go Your Own Way’ and ‘Dreams’ one album later, but since they were releasing their new record when tunes like ‘Over My Head’ were climbing up the charts, that left everyone eager to hear whatever else was coming down the pipeline.
Barging into any record executive’s office and pulling an all-or-nothing play like Fleetwood did was always going to be a gamble, but it’s also what makes the music world so exciting. Some of the best songs of all time are made by people who think that they have nothing to lose, and even if it was a bit naive in Fleetwood’s case, he knew that millions of fans would relate to the musical world they created every time they played ‘Rhiannon’ and ‘Say You Love Me’.
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