Dreams: The Many Lives Of Fleetwood Mac
Mark Blake
★★★★
NINE EIGHT
Did Fleetwood Mac thank their cocaine dealer on the sleeve of Rumours? Did Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie insist on having grand pianos in their hotel suites during the Tusk tour? Did the band steal the house cat from the Albuquerque Tingley Coliseum in November 1979? It’s testament to the lavish sprawl of the Fleetwood Mac story that MOJO writer Mark Blake can round up the most enduringly scurrilous myths about the band and squash them into a brief “true-or-false?” chapter without diminishing the ludicrous richness of their story. (Answers: no; yes; only the female members).
-
READ MORE: Stevie Nicks: “Without Christine there is no chance of putting Fleetwood Mac back together.”
From their first appearance at The Windsor National Jazz And Blues Festival in August 1967 (“you’ll never be a star if you dress like that,” a bejewelled Eric Clapton admonished their troubled jeans-and-T-shirt-wearing guitarist Peter Green) to their final “Evening With Fleetwood Mac” in Las Vegas in 2019, Dreams charts all the band’s romantic, psychological, financial and musical complexities, using Blake’s own catalogue of interviews with key players to tether the narrative.
Given the knots and twists in their story, Blake wisely – and entertainingly – divides it into seven broadly chronological parts, each one featuring brisk chapters that zero in on a band member, an associate, a song or an event. Guitarist Jeremy Spencer, for example, who notoriously vanished mid-tour in 1971 to join the Children Of God cult, gets a section; so too does super-fan Harry Styles, who chose Mick Fleetwood as the face of his skin and nailcare brand Pleasing in 2021. There’s a snap essay on their influence on Status Quo, another on notorious ’70s stage prop Harold The Dildo. No matter how transient someone’s role – 1994’s “forgotten” singer Dave Mason, or Crowded House’s Neil Finn, their “last” vocalist – Blake smartly analyses what it shows about the band’s seething collective psyche at that moment.
It’s a refreshing approach, highlighting oblique connections, odd legacies and echoes. Yet while he has an expert eye for the illuminating digression, Blake also undertakes a thorough journey around Fleetwood Mac and their turbulent personalities. He makes sense of the bizarre cultural cut-and-shut between British blues players and Californian pop dreamers that occurred when operatically star-crossed lovers Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined the band in 1974, suggesting that the twirling Nicks “was the closest Fleetwood Mac had to a showboating Daltrey, Jagger or Plant”. Dreams also shows how dividing the band’s convoluted, intertwined personal lives from their music is a fool’s errand, digging into the “psychic trauma” of 1977 mega-hit Rumours (the English spelling was by command of bassist John McVie) and its 1979 follow-up Tusk, known as “Lindsey’s folly”.
It’s an ugly, beautiful melodrama, one that ended first in 2018, when Nicks accused Buckingham of “smirking” at her during her speech at an awards ceremony, resulting in the guitarist’s departure from the band. A real line was drawn in 2022, though, with the death of the supremely gifted songwriter Christine McVie.
“Who’s to say where the line is, where the show stops and the reality starts?” said Buckingham, wistfully contemplating his on-stage chemistry with Nicks. “We always brought out the voyeur in everyone.” If you want more of Fleetwood Mac’s class-A, premier cru melodrama, look through this book.
What We've Learned From Dreams...
-
Christine McVie’s mother Beatrice Perfect was a healer and psychic. She claimed to have a Native American spirit guide called Silver Shadow who allowed her to paint. “She couldn’t paint at any other time,” said McVie.
-
The title Tusk “had nothing to do with Mick’s penis,” grumbled producer Ken Caillat. Cover artist Peter Beard insisted the LP was named after the elephant tusks on the inner sleeve. Stevie Nicks, meanwhile, attributed it to two fake tusks framing the studio console.
-
The dog on Tusk’s sleeve, meanwhile, was Ken Caillat’s pet Scooter; the women of Fleetwood Mac were not fans, with Nicks once joking she had hexed the beagle mix.
-
Stumped by the challenge of finding a bassline for Losing My Religion, R.E.M.’s Mike Mills solved the problem by thinking “What would John McVie do?
Dreams: The Many Lives Of Fleetwood Mac by Mark Blake is published 12 September by Nigh Eight.
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | Waterstones
Get the definitive verdict on all the month's best new albums, reissues, books and films only in the latest issue of MOJO. More information and to order a copy HERE.
