(Credits: Far Out / Raph Pour-Hashemi)
Fri 23 January 2026 16:42, UK
The life that Mick Fleetwood has managed to carve out with Fleetwood Mac was beyond whatever he could have dreamt up in his wildest imagination as a child.
Without him as the lynchpin, Fleetwood Mac wouldn’t have had the foundations to build upon to become one of the best-selling bands of all time. Making an honest living from playing the drums would have been enough for Fleetwood; world domination was nothing but the icing on the cake.
When he was growing up, music wasn’t readily accessible at the click of his fingers, but he was still bitten by the bug from an early age. This was in the late 1950s, before Beatlemania had yet changed the musical landscape forever. As a young kid in the English countryside, Fleetwood unsurprisingly wasn’t abreast of the blues coming out of Mississippi.
The local music scene in rural Gloucestershire was as vibrant as the atmosphere in a funeral home. As a result of the lack of choices, he had no choice but to settle for the crumbs of pop songs, which squirmed their way into his existence. Instead, his first musical love was the less impressive Cliff Richard and The Shadows, which still did the trick and lit a spark within him.
As much as Cliff Richard is lacking in cool points in the under-80s demographic in 2026, it was a different proposition when Fleetwood was young. Additionally, it was the beguiling talent of Hank Marvin on guitar that blew him away more so.
Mick Fleetwood in 1977. (Credits: Far Out / Fleetwood Mac)
Thanks to his love of the Shadows, he was bought his first drum kit by his parents aged 13. For the first time, Fleetwood had a passion. It provided him with an escape from the monotony of life as he pretended to be his heroes in his bedroom.
Speaking to NME, Fleetwood revealed the first album he ever bought was their 1960 release, Me and My Shadows. He said: “We lived just outside Gloucester and we used to buy singles, but the first album was Cliff Richard and The Shadows. They were the ultimate heroes.”
This interview isn’t the only occasion when Fleetwood has spoken about the importance of the group to him during his early life. In another conversation with BBC Radio London, which looked back at his life through music, Fleetwood said: “Cliff Richard and The Shadows was huge for me, as with a lot of people. If you talk to the guitar heroes we all love, Jeff Beck, and all these fantastic players, they all had a reverence for Hank Marvin in The Shadows.”
Just two years later, aged 15, Fleetwood moved down to London to follow his musical dreams. Here, he became aware of a much wider musical world beyond Cliff Richard and The Shadows, which was enthralling to his teenage self.
In the BBC Radio London interview, Fleetwood explained how the capital significantly expanded his horizons beyond Cliff, adding, “It was a weird mixture (his early music taste), but, it wasn’t until I came to London that I could get hold of the stuff, and records weren’t really around. There were a few places, and collectors.”
He then shared how they would get hold of obscure tracks, revealing, “What we used to do in the old days, if someone had something like a little office dictaphone, you’d go round if someone had a ’78 or an album from the States. You weren’t leaving with it, but you could tape a bit of it. The whole energy of London was like that.”
While the bands he discovered in the capital would eventually lead to the formation of Fleetwood Mac, it was his early fascination with Cliff Richard and The Shadows that started the lifelong love affair.
Although we can sit there and poke fun at the idea of Mick Fleetwood idolising Cliff Richard, it was a necessary musical discovery that changed the drummer’s life forever. After all, the first album that we all bought was probably not all that cool either.
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