(Credits: Far Out / Mick Fleetwood)
Wed 4 February 2026 2:00, UK
There’s hardly any other musician who can claim to have the longevity that Mick Fleetwood has.
Throughout his entire career, it’s safe to say that Fleetwood has seen it all throughout his career, and even if he hasn’t, there’s enough miles on his soul for any other musician’s lifetime for all that time he spent with Fleetwood Mac. He may be part of one of the longest-lasting institutions in rock, but just because he’s still standing doesn’t mean that he can’t find artists that have him beat.
But when looking at the rest of the British blues boom at the time, Fleetwood Mac were already in a league of their own. Peter Green wasn’t necessarily the same flashy guitar player that Eric Clapton was whenever he performed, but there was a certain mystique around the band before they started singing about chains keeping them together and going their own way. Green was their foundation, so when he suddenly departed, the rug was practically pulled out from under them.
Then again, Fleetwood’s greatest trait as a bandleader was never throwing in the towel. Any other band would have easily quit after going through that kind of shakeup, but after years of soldiering on with different lineups and even other legends like Bob Welch, getting Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham into the band was practically a godsend. They weren’t blues musicians by any stretch, but they were going to bring something new to the band that no one had heard before.
Because, really, no one needed to hear any more blues from ‘The Mac’ at that point. They were practically gods of the genre and had classics like ‘Rattlesnake Shake’ and ‘Oh Well’ under their belt, so why try to regurgitate the same thing? They wanted to spread out, but even they were no match for what The Rolling Stones could do once they started working outside of their blues vocabulary.
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards would forever be students of people like Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson, but their greatest moments came when they worked outside their comfort zone. There was no template for how they came up with tunes like ‘Start Me Up’ or ‘Street Fighting Man’, but as long as they had the foundation of Jagger, Richards and Charlie Watts, they were more than ready to take on any other band that stood in their way.
Fleetwood may have been a peer at that point, but there was no sense in trying to argue with what they could do, saying, “My favorite band of all time is the Rolling Stones. They’re just a great rock ‘n’ roll band, and they come from the same world that I came from in the early days of Fleetwood Mac. They’re a blues band, in truth. Rock ‘n’ roll band, for sure, but their first love is a lot of the same folks that drove us to do what we’re all doing, and they’re still doing it.”
They had a common love of the blues, but the real superpower behind The Stones is the fact that they’ve never stopped. No one would have imagined that the bad boy version of The Beatles would have been able to last for decades at a time, but even on their latest work, they are still trying to make tunes that sound as dangerous as they were when they put out ‘Satisfaction’.
Fleetwood might still have a few more years before matching their track record, but The Stones’ legacy isn’t just defined by how long they’ve been around. It’s about the way that their music has affected people across generations, and even now, there’s no one that doesn’t get a sly grin on their face the minute that ‘Gimme Shelter’ or ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ starts.
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