![\"Cults,](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Cults-chaos-and-cocaine-Are-Fleetwood-Mac-the-most-cursed-classic-rock-band-in-history-Far-Out-Magaz.jpeg\")
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Credit: Far Out \/ Alamy \/ Album Covers<\/p>\n
Sat 30 May 2026 14:36, UK <\/p>\n
Rock\u2019 n\u2019 roll is just a laugh and a joke until the point that it really isn\u2019t. The many members in the rolling cast of Fleetwood Mac<\/a> know this all too well.\u00a0<\/p>\n From cults to the curbside and cocaine addictions, the band is one that has seen its brethren blighted by all sorts of ills since its inception in 1967. The musical output may have been outstanding over the various eras, but it has come at a heavy cost. <\/p>\n Such a bewilderingly heavy cost, in fact, that a few spiritualist folks in the music industry believe that there\u2019s a Curse of Mac afoot in classic rock. The first instance of this supposed scourge befell Jeremy Spencer. <\/p>\n In \u201867, after Peter Green and Mick Fleetwood left their band The Bluesbreakers, they teamed up with slide guitarist Jeremy Spencer and bassist Bob Brunning to form Fleetwood Mac. An avid fan of the Chicago blues scene, Spencer helped to define the band\u2019s early sound, but his status as an integral member didn\u2019t last long. <\/p>\n In the frigid February of 1971, amid a largely successful tour, Spencer nipped off to pick up a magazine and never returned. The distressed band searched for their starring blues influence for days, only to find that he wasn\u2019t quite leafing through Country Homes in a bus shelter. He was actually holed up as a happily ordained member of the Children of God cult. <\/p>\n This, however, was not some flowery, barefoot hippy jaunt that the musician had embarked upon. The Children of God cult remains one of the most despicable in American history. Its founder, David Berg, told members that God was love and that love was sex. Thus, it stood to reason to spread the sexual love of God to anyone and everyone, regardless of age or relationship. <\/p>\n When I spoke with Christopher Owens, the indie musician who fled the cult in his teens<\/a>, he remarked that while secular music was banned, Berg was keen to use hymns as a form of bonding. \u201cI wasn\u2019t really fully aware of songwriting as a concept,\u201d he said. \u201cI was learning to play the guitar at about 13, but that was just for like group singalongs\u201d.<\/p>\n Jeremy Spencer and the crooked cult<\/p>\n Although horrific stories<\/a> have continued to come from the cult (which now goes by the name The Family International), Spencer remains inexplicably blas\u00e9 about the whole thing. \u201cI was sad, uninspired musically, I had questions about life, death, love, my future, God \u2013 everything,\u201d Spencer responded when asked about the moment he nipped for a magazine and never returned.<\/p>\n \u201cI couldn\u2019t go on with it,\u201d he continued. \u201cBottom line, I had to leave in order to step back from the picture and get my life sorted out. I wouldn\u2019t be here today if I hadn\u2019t, and they would not have gone on to be one of the biggest bands in history!\u201d It\u2019s a unique take that conveniently evades the morality of his spotlight escape.\u00a0<\/p>\n Nevertheless, he concludes, \u201cI don\u2019t say that in a self-demeaning way, because I knew when I heard the first album with the Buckingham-Nicks line up<\/a>, that they had hit on something good with an enormously catchy appeal. Besides that, after I left them, I prayed for God to reward them with success beyond their dreams. He answered that prayer.\u201d<\/p>\n It is suspected by many that although Spencer\u2019s initial impetus to leave group behind seemed offhand and undefined, drugs may well have played a part in the matter just as they did for Peter Green a few years further down the line. <\/p>\n Green was the iconic guitarist who trailblazed blended rock \u2018n\u2019 roll blues riffs in scintillating style. He had an aura that led Christine McVie to compare him to \u201cJesus\u201d. And even his early Fleetwood Mac records elucidated the fact that he had songwriting skills to go along with his virtuosic chops in the shape of lilting ditties like the beauteous \u2018Man of the World\u2019. <\/p>\n The downfall of Peter Green<\/p>\n Sadly, however, he only lasted three albums with the band. Those first three albums had enamoured a European fanbase, and when they embarked on a huge tour, a tragedy befell them in Munich. Green was greeted at the airport by suspicious fans. This innocuous greeting was seemingly laden with cataclysm. <\/p>\n \u201cJohn McVie would certainly blame an evening in Germany where Peter took some more drugs and, for sure, never really came back from that to our recollection,\u201d bandleader Mick Fleetwood once recalled. \u201cJohn is, to this day, absolutely furious with these people. We call them the German jetset, and they captured Peter completely and pulled him away.\u201d<\/p>\n Even the aforementioned Spencer himself has commented on this strange incident. He describes a woman who greeted Green as a \u201cmodel\/actress looking girl dressed in black velvet\u201d. He says she was with \u201cthis John Lennon looking guy in wire glasses.\u201d These peculiar fans accompanied Green to the gig and watched the rest of the band with a certain disdain, before inviting everyone back to \u201ca party at this huge mansion place in the forest.\u201d<\/p>\n Amid a manic, psychedelic party in the commune-like mansion, Green descended into the basement and arrived out of the other side \u201cin tears\u201d. In the band\u2019s eyes, he was distraught. However, Green asserted that these were tears of joy. He had just played the most spiritual music of his life in the bowels of that psychedelic basement, he explained.<\/p>\n How Danny Kirwan succumbed to homelessness<\/p>\n Another member of the band present that day was Danny Kirwan<\/a>. Fate also besieged him that night in the forest, partly because of his affable character. \u201cPeter Green and Danny Kirwan both went together to that house in Munich,\u201d their one-time manager Clifford Davis recalls, \u201cboth of them took acid, as I understand. Both of them, as of that day, became seriously mentally ill. It would be too much of a coincidence for it to be anything other than taking drugs, as of that day.\u201d<\/p>\n While Green would, to some extent, recover and enjoy a creative life away from the spotlight despite persistent health problems, things fared differently for Kirwan. \u201cDanny had been a nervous and sensitive lad from the start. He was never really suited to the rigours of the business,\u201d Mick Fleetwood once opined. <\/p>\n In a rather callous reflection of the times, he continues, \u201cTouring is hard, and the routine wears us all down \u2026 Our manager kept us touring non-stop, and we were being stretched to our limits \u2026 and the pressure was obviously taking its toll. He simply withdrew into his own world.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI suppose I am homeless, but then I\u2019ve never really had a home\u201d.<\/p>\n Danny Kirwan<\/p>\n One night, while backstage, this regression came to the fore. \u201cDanny was being odd about tuning his guitar,\u201d Mick Fleetwood continues. \u201cHe got up suddenly \u2026 and bashed his head into the wall, splattering blood everywhere. I\u2019d never seen him do anything that violent in all the years I\u2019d known him. The rest of us were paralysed, in complete shock. He grabbed his precious Les Paul guitar and smashed it to bits.\u201d<\/p>\n He was promptly sacked from the band, and in the ruthless world of showbiz<\/a> in those days, very little was done to provide a parachute for the former star. Once he was turned away, his mental wellbeing was largely disregarded. As Mick Fleetwood bluntly told Men\u2019s Journal, \u201che was wonderful, but couldn\u2019t handle the life,\u201d eventually ending up homeless on the streets of London.<\/p>\n When Bob Brunning tried to track Kirwan down for a memoir, he found him holed up in St Mungo\u2019s Community Hostel for the Homeless in the leafy district of Covent Garden. The derelict man that Brunning recalls merely looked at him and said in an incoherent mumble, \u201cCan\u2019t help you Bob. Too much stress.\u201d <\/p>\n A little over four years later, he was traced once more. This time he was in a Los Angeles hostel for the homeless. He had been there for four years, apparently living on social security and a small trickle of royalties. As he told The Independent: \u201cI\u2019ve been through a bit of a rough patch, but I\u2019m not too bad. I get by. I suppose I am homeless, but then I\u2019ve never really had a home since our early days on tour.\u201d <\/p>\n The end of the road for Fleetwood Mac?<\/p>\n After the departures of several bandmembers, Fleetwood Mac, as an entity, was next to be stricken by the so-called curse. When Bob Weston was brought in to replace those lost to a German basement, he soon found out that he and Mick Fleetwood\u2019s wife, Jenny Boyd, were \u201cborn within an hour of each other\u201d, and trouble was afoot.<\/p>\n From the outside looking in, it remains difficult to see why that would\u2019ve been an issue. However, according to Weston, this happenstance created an \u201castrological\u201d connection so profound that they simply had to have an affair with Boyd.<\/p>\n Mick found out, fired Weston, cancelled the tour, and temporarily called a halt to the band. He\u2019d had enough. He had seen Green and Kirwan lose themselves to drugs. Spencer fled mid-tour to join a problematic cult. Now, his wife was riding Weston because they shared a birthday. Meanwhile, the hits were waning, the money was drying up, and substances were flying around like an explosion at Johnson & Johnson.<\/p>\n It was time for Mick to hang up his top hat and pack away his waistcoat. Everything went very quiet until 1974. With so many members coming and going in their seven years as a band, the contractual question of \u2018Who owns Fleetwood Mac?\u2019 came to the fore when the drummer looked to settle up.<\/p>\n Manager Clifford Davis said, \u201cThis band has always been my band,\u201d while the band themselves said that he had the matter the wrong way around: the band will always be the band, and he will very shortly not be their manager. With the legal arm wrestle ongoing, the beleaguered group thought that if they were fighting for their name (literally), then they may as well make use of it. So they reformed, moved to America, signed to Warner Bros., and eventually settled out of court with Davis four years later.<\/p>\n Bob Welch\u2019s broken \u201cbridge\u201d era<\/p>\n This reunion, however, did little to change the fortunes of the band. Their new label had far more successful acts on their roster, and Bob Welch \u2013 who had been brought in back in \u201871 to replace Spencer \u2013 felt like they were being neglected. He hatched a plan to summon the band to Los Angeles, where he thought they could stake more of a claim and connect with entertainment attorneys. <\/p>\n He was also pivotal in the band\u2019s decision to self-manage. Yet, at a point when he was the only remaining guitarist in the moribund group, his almost singular determination to keep them going wasn\u2019t just borne from love of the Mac. His marriage was failing, and despite creative exhaustion, he was keen to avoid two major losses at once. That was a battle he wouldn\u2019t win. In Decemeber 1974, he resigned from the band.<\/p>\n While he departed on good terms, he began to allege that the band had since signed new deals with Warner that dwindled his royalties. The legal battle turned acrimonious, and the stress of this further exacerbated his personal issues. This was compounded when the band were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and Welch wasn\u2019t included.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMy era was the bridge era,\u201d he raged in Plain Dealer in 1998. \u201cIt was a transition. But it was an important period in the history of the band.\u201d Once again, the anger that he felt over this perceived slight negatively impacted his health. In 2012, he would receive much-needed spinal surgery, but he was told his condition would not improve, he fell into depression. Unable to cope with this news, three months later, he shot himself in his Nashville home, and died by suicide.<\/p>\n Not much is mentioned about Welch in the annals of Fleetwood Mac\u2019s story, but in Mick\u2019s memoir, he looked to right this to some extent, crediting him with helping to save the band and set up their Californian future in the mid-70s. <\/p>\n 1975 and the start of a new cursed chapter<\/p>\n While all this might seem like a sorry symptom of the era, when the band rose from the ash heap of history and welcomed Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, the good time of their 1975 self-titled LP soon fell to ruin as tour stresses and addictions took their toll once more. The soap opera that followed is well-renowned sitcom fodder\u2026 if only it wasn\u2019t so truly tragic. <\/p>\n![\"Fleetwood](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/1763539456_429_Fleetwood-Mac-Peter-Greens-Fleetwood-Mac-1960s-Far-Out-Magazine-F-1024x768.jpg\")
<\/a>Credit: Far Out \/ Columbia \/ Sony BMG<\/p>\n![\"Fleetwood](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Fleetwood-Mac-Border-Far-Out-Magazine-1024x768.jpg\")
<\/a>Credit: Far Out \/ Alamy<\/p>\n![\"From](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/What-was-Fleetwood-Macs-only-number-one-hit-in-the-US-1024x768.jpg\")
<\/a>Credit: Alamy<\/p>\n
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<\/a> The Far Out Classic Rock Newsletter<\/p>\n