(Credits: Far Out / Fleetwood Mac)
Sat 1 November 2025 20:45, UK
You’d think, for all the soap opera dramas Fleetwood Mac stoked up in their midst, that being a bunch of party animals would also go hand in hand with that. But they were a far more civilised group than we give them credit for.
This is not to say that they were sitting around an evening with a board game and a cup of tea – far from it. Sex and drugs, and rock and roll were still very much the mode of choice, it’s just that they didn’t see themselves as the supreme leaders of that mantra when there were so many more bands doing it in a much more exuberant style. They were frankly far too busy fighting with each other to get high, anyway.
As the longtime leader and permanent namesake of the band, it was Mick Fleetwood’s job to sell that idea of the group’s relative tameness to the world, even if it occasionally fell short of the true reality of the situation. But within this came the covert admission that while most of the band perhaps weren’t as wild as they could have been, there were two slightly rougher outlaws among them who liked to live things up a little more. What possibly egged them on even more was the fact that they were a married couple.
“We were only like every other band of that era. I’ve given up all that now. John and Christine were… hmmm. Well, the whole band was at it. We weren’t misjudged; we were in with the worst of them,” Fleetwood later confessed, long after the guards had fallen down. Leaving the antics of John and Christine McVie to the imagination was probably a wise move, lest it run the risk of ruining any long-held admiration for the pair and their musical tenures, but it certainly doesn’t settle any sense of trepidation either.
But the frontman was keen to counter this with the sense that, even with their party spirit in tow, things were nowhere near as bad compared to some of their other rock counterparts. “But when I talk war stories with other bands, I think we weren’t so bad,” he tried to claim. “‘You did what?’ We were lightweights compared to many. Look at The Stones or Johnny Cash, the stuff they took. We didn’t do that, we were just boozers and mounds of cocaine. I thank God we didn’t go to the opiate place.”
While this is hardly the most glowing advert to add to the ‘don’t do drugs, kids’ campaign, it does provide a greater extent of insight to the inner workings of the Fleetwood Mac machine than much of what has been said before. Fleetwood himself even got candid when he said, “Cocaine eventually is bad, but we were still young kids. It didn’t hamper us, it just meant we stayed up for three or four days and did some good music.”
As such, he has somewhat pinned the blame on the McVies for many of the band’s supposedly wildest moments – but it didn’t seem like the rest of them were all that far behind. Sure, Fleetwood Mac may not have been the most raucous offenders on the drink and drugs front, but what they lacked in this one area, they certainly made up for in the rest of their personal pariahs. Really, you could just see this as Fleetwood’s attempt at passing the buck.
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