He is not only a drummer, but also the namesake of one of the most famous bands of all time: Mick Fleetwood wrote music history with Fleetwood Mac. The legendary musician has been performing for around 60 years. Now he is celebrating his 75th birthday.
Mick Fleetwood can see the sea from the roof terrace of his restaurant. Fleetwood’s On Front Street is located directly on the Maui shore. The Hawaiian island has been a home for the British drummer for years – when he’s not on a world tour with Fleetwood Mac. The successful pop and rock band, which he co-founded as a blues combo over 50 years ago, still fills arenas and even entire stadiums to this day. Mick Fleetwood is now 75 years old – and it’s probably only a matter of time before it says: “The Mac is back.”
Fleetwood is currently busy with other things. The six-foot-tall musician is producing the TV series ’13 Songs’ about an aging rock star who has just months to live after being diagnosed with cancer but plans to record 13 songs with his former band first. Fleetwood, who has released several solo albums since 1981 and still plays solo today, is said to contribute the music.
Michael John Kells Fleetwood, born in Redruth/Cornwall, England in 1947, moved to London as a teenager because of music. He had previously lived with his family in Egypt and Norway, among other places. His father, a RAF fighter pilot, had been posted there. He is said to have made his first appearance when he was 16. As a drummer for the band The Cheynes, Fleetwood also supported the Rolling Stones before they had their big break.
As drummer for John Mayall
Several line-up changes followed, including the arrival of John McVie’s wife, keyboardist and vocalist Christine McVie, and the band’s move to the United States. It was there that the drummer made the landmark decision to add a US duo to the band – vocalist Stevie Nicks and guitarist/vocalist Lindsey Buckingham. The first studio album in this line-up, the tenth overall, was just called “Fleetwood Mac” and was a great success. Songs like “Landslide”, “Rhiannon” or “Say You Love Me” are classics today. But the follow-up work overshadowed everything. “Rumours”, released in 1977, with songs like “Dreams”, “Don’t Stop” or “The Chain” topped the charts in Great Britain and the USA. “Rumors” sold ten million copies in the first month alone. It won a Grammy for Album of the Year and remains one of the best-selling albums in music history to date.
The album came at a turbulent time when Nicks and Buckingham’s relationship and McVies’ marriage had just broken up and the band members were consuming drugs and alcohol in excess. Curiously, these circumstances led to some of the best songs in Fleetwood Mac history, where private drama became the order of the day and dominated the songwriting. Fleetwood himself was also temporarily in a relationship with singer Nicks. “I ended up falling in love with her and it was messy,” he wrote in his autobiography Play On. “It happened on tour and was a crazy love affair that lasted longer than we really remember.”
The affair ended when Fleetwood hooked up with Nicks’ girlfriend Sara. The song of the same name from the album “Tusk” is said to be about her. At this point, Fleetwood was still married to Jenny Boyd, the mother of his daughters Lucy and Amy. Sara Recor became his second wife in 1988. The marriage lasted four years. The drummer was married to Lynn Frankel from 1995 to 2015, with whom he has daughters Ruby and Tessa.
It was the girls who dragged their father to a concert by boy band One Direction years ago, where Fleetwood befriended backstage singer Harry Styles, almost 47 years his junior. This led to a curious collaboration: the mid-70s recently became the face of a nail polish advertising campaign for Styles’ brand Pleasing. The old rocker poses in a hippie outfit with colorful nails in psychedelic photos. A sense of “why not?” or “I would never have thought of something like that” prompted him to do so, he told “Vogue”.
Incidentally, at Fleetwood Mac the internal dramas continue to this day. Most recently, Buckingham had to leave the band at the insistence of his ex-girlfriend Nicks – of all things for the band’s 50th anniversary. A renewed reunion still seems possible and would also be in the spirit of Mick Fleetwood, who said he spoke to Buckingham. “Crazy things can happen,” he told Rolling Stone magazine. “I know I want to make music with Lindsey and I want to play with him again.”
Until he repeated his famous sentence “The Mac is back!” in a packed concert arena. says he’ll probably be sitting on the stage behind the drums in his restaurant a few more times. The “Fleetwood’s” is not only a restaurant, but also a concert club. “I’m a musician,” he emphasized a few years ago in conversation with his colleague Sammy Hagar on the US program “Rock
