(Credits: Far Out / Mick Fleetwood)
Fri 13 March 2026 20:30, UK
Even before the wild days of Rumours, Fleetwood Mac had endured their fair share of drama.
Long before the American duo, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, joined the line-up, Fleetwood Mac were a blues-rock band with world-dominating potential – working the circuit of London’s 1960s blues scene, where Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck were all playing and propping up this burgeoning scene, Mick Fleetwood’s bright new outfit were becoming a force to be reckoned with.
The drummer had broken off from John Mayall and The Bluesbreakers, which became something of a blues-rock university for a generation of young artists, to try and make it on his own. Armed with his trusty companion, John McVie, the pair formed their own band under the assurance of their own surnames and recruited those they thought would be the frontman who would take them to global fame.
Peter Green was very much a worthy candidate in that regard, with unparalleled performative charisma and a level of guitar playing skill that was the envy of any great blues player at the time. With McVie alongside him in the rhythm section and his wife Christine soon joining to provide an extra layer of vocal harmonies, Fleetwood wholeheartedly believed he had the winning formula.
That was, of course, until Peter Green spiralled into a state of drug-induced madness that ultimately sparked his exit from the band, and in one swift movement, the entire world was ripped out of Fleetwood’s palms, and he was right back where he began: at square one.
Desperately searching for the answer, he stumbled upon Buckingham and Nicks, who, despite initial reservations, proved to be his saviour – their unique style of songwriting pivoted the band’s sound, before descending them into a whirlwind of drama that would ultimately go on to define some of their most treasured work.
Buckingham and Nicks locked horns and engaged in one of the most public break-ups of music history, which ran parallel to that of his old mate John, who was midway through a divorce with vocalist Christine. As these four scorned lovers spiralled into heartbreak, the band finally found the success he had been dreaming of, and so in some bizarre twist of fate, the future of his own band would depend on each of its members accepting the trauma of their reality.
The band largely accepted that despite their success and despite fate’s design to keep them together, they would never truly be friends. That was an unspoken rule, with only Fleetwood and John McVie being the only ones willing to break it, for as the two original members of this ever-dramatic band, they forged a friendship that could quite simply never be broken.
“John is truly my best friend,” Fleetwood once said. “I adore him. It’s mutual. We’ve been through so much. He is the most truthful person I know. We share a sense of humour. Loyalty; Musically, we’ve done it for so long together that anything else is shallow compared to John. Long ago, playing the blues, we learnt that a rhythm section needs to be gracious: you’re creating a platform for others. We don’t have musical egos at all.”
Together, their friendship made up the backbone of this unpredictable band, and without them, they wouldn’t have existed at all – through thick and thin, these two bastions of the rhythm section consistently looked after one another, promising that they would always stick it out, no matter how tough it got.