Play On: Now, Then, and Fleetwood Mac: The Autobiography

by Mick Fleetwood

  CHAPTER 2

  HIGH TIMES ON CARNABY STREET

  I arrived at a state of determination while I was at the Rudolph Steiner School. Playing drums as a way of life was still a vague, fanciful wish, and I saw no realistic path to that goal aside from collecting instrument catalogues and dreaming. I had a pile of them, from which I’d build fantasy drum kits in my mind’s eye, and I carried them around for months, until they’d all become so weathered that I needed to bind them together with tape. I was distraught about school and the dim prospects in my future, so one day I hiked up a hill on campus far away from where anyone might find me, to seek solace under a shady tree. I sat there for hours, feeling desperate, until I could take it no longer and cried out for help. With my catalogues in my hands as if they were holy texts I offered up a forlorn prayer. Confused, sad and earnest to the depths of my soul, I pleaded to God and the universe to hear me. I begged for help to get me what I wanted. I knew I could do it and I knew where I had to go, I just needed someone, or something to please get me to London.

  I experienced what I consider to be a divine episode under that tree, much like Buddha, though at the time I hadn’t yet learned that fable. I saw myself in London, playing drums in clubs, in those smoky rooms I’d seen with my sister. In my vision I was there and I was doing it. It was so real I could feel it. I was uplifted and I had the sense that what I saw was there just waiting for me. It was all possible, but when I opened my eyes and looked to the sky I was acutely reminded that it was still out of reach. It was as if I were looking into the window of a store for which I couldn’t find the door; I could see it, but I didn’t know how to walk into that dream.

  So I sat there, under that tree and began to plead aloud. I stayed all afternoon, four hours or more, crying most of the time, talking to the greater powers the rest of the time. When I’d exhausted myself, I got up to leave, none the wiser, but I’d found my determination. I wasn’t going to wait for it to happen, and I wasn’t going to suffer any more. I wasn’t going to stay the course. I was going to strike out on my own, and wherever it might lead me, I intended to get inside of that vision of mine. I walked back down to school knowing that I had to leave for good, come what may.

  Telling my parents I was through with education was difficult, but they couldn’t have been surprised given my struggles. When I told them my mind was made up, they let me go without a fight, even though I was just fifteen. I’ll never forget telling my dad of my decision because it was one of the few occasions I ever saw him with tears in his eyes that weren’t from laughing. We were at a little café near our home, having a heart-to-heart and I just came out with it.

  ‘I can’t do it, Dad,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to go back to school, and I won’t make it through college. I don’t know how to do all that. I need to leave school and get on with my life. I want to play drums and move to London.’

  He held my hand, making me feel safe, and we both started to cry. I knew at that moment that he really loved me and that I would be okay because I had his support.

  ‘Well, we will have to sort you out. We have to get you a proper drum kit if you’re going to do this professionally. You’ll move to London and live with Sally, but you’ll have to get a job.’

  My father had a way of tempering his criticism and reprimands with the honest insight of a man, not a father, and I found that very enlightening. It allowed me to understand why he might not agree with me, or wished I’d reconsider, but ultimately that he understood my point of view. He did that when I ran away from school, telling me that he knew school wasn’t for me and he didn’t expect me to think about college, but that I needed to get back in the saddle and finish high school. When I was in a shooting phase with my air rifle as a ten-year-old and I shot an endangered local seagull off the back of the house barge, he told me every reason why what I’d done was wrong and said I needed to shoot tin cans. At which point I frowned and started to feel pissed off.

  ‘However,’ he said. ‘Damn good shot.’

  I know it wasn’t easy for my parents when I left for London, nor was it easy for me; but my parents handled their decision with the same grace, love and wisdom as they did everything else when it came to raising their children. They must have known that they’d instilled within me the tools to find my own way. As a father myself, I appreciate now that it takes great strength to let your teenager move to the big city with nothing but a drum set by way of a future. God bless them both for their faith in me.

  I’m sixty-five now and I have my own Club Keller; it’s called Fleetwood’s on Front Street in Maui, and it’s been a journey getting that off the ground, but it’s been worth it, every bit. When I signed the lease on it and set about designing the kind of restaurant where live music, great food and great wine would be the main event, my mother Biddy, who as of this writing is ninety-four, reminded me of something.

  ‘You always did want your own club didn’t you? Always inviting your friends round, selling tickets, that was grand. Quite precocious for a teenager. Well now at least you can serve more than Coca-Cola can’t you!’

  I was gone and away, on my own, leaving behind the last elements of a traditional British teenage upbringing. I had not the slightest idea of what it meant to be a young man of the world and was naive about what lay ahead. I’d never even played in a proper band, but thanks to my father, I was sent off to London with a brand-new full-sized drum kit. It was very flashy, slick black with a glittery finish that seemed as if only a professional should dare play it. A professional show-off at least.

  I moved into the attic space at the top of my sister Sally’s house and she continued her role as my saviour and cultural guiding light. Sally lived in the Notting Hill area with her husband John Jesse, who was an art dealer, and after I settled in I did the only thing that made sense and went to find a job. I landed one at the department store Liberty, where to my utter bewilderment, they hired me to work in the accounting department. I would have understood if they’d put me on the floor to sell goods, because I could compose myself and was friendly and determined enough to move product, but placing me in an office with paperwork involving numbers? That was madness. In terms of my Blackboard Syndrome, mathematics has always caused my heart to palpitate dangerously. I really have no idea how I got that job. I don’t recall the interview, or whatever I wrote on the application that convinced them I was their man. Clearly they didn’t ask me to do calculations because if they had the next words I’d have heard would’ve been ‘We’ll be in touch’ instead of ‘You start on Monday.’

  I can’t be trusted to keep track of how much is coming in or going out when it comes to my own finances, though I’ve always been good at it when it comes to others. When I was Fleetwood Mac’s acting manager, I knew our budgets and stuck to them. But my own? Well, that has been an ongoing saga involving a number of business managers who often produced no better results than I could have. As a result I’ve seen my share of ups and downs.

  But all of that was in a very distant future when I was still a lad of fifteen, living in my sister’s attic, a space I accessed via a rickety iron ladder. As a member of Liberty accounting department, I was tasked with reviewing applicants for the store’s charge accounts. I had a small office, where I’d sit and pretend to work. I’d have a notepad to doodle on alongside my actual work so that if someone passed by my doorway it looked like I was busily writing away. I’d open the folder that held the application and the documents the applicants were required to provide and I’d arrange all of that on the desk, before starting to draw on my doodle pad. When I grew bored of the current doodle, I’d stamp the application ‘Approved’, move on to the next and begin a new drawing. Most days I also enjoyed a satisfying nap after lunch.

  The guy who’d hired me thought I was well-spoken and well-dressed (clearly the only reason I got the job) and he told me that if I applied myself and stuck with it, I might have myself an office like his one day. His was much larger and better appointed with a win
dow and all the trimmings, but it looked like a fucking cage to me.

  I needed the job but I didn’t want it. I also couldn’t quit because the family would have been disappointed, so instead I decided to get fired. I did everything I could not to fit in. Liberty was very posh and proper, and I’d dressed the part for my interview, but once I’d decided they must make me go, I wore more casual clothing, typically a roll-neck polo sweater in place of the expected starched shirt and tie. I also grew my hair long and didn’t comb it so that it might be more unruly, and I chewed gum as visibly and often as possible when in the company of my superiors, because that was a clear violation of the etiquette guide given to all Liberty employees. I made sure to stride just over the line of acceptable behaviour and my plan worked famously.

  Within a few months, my co-workers began logging complaints about me and soon my boss could ignore it no more. He called me in one day and told me that Liberty wasn’t the proper fit for me and so it was, with a heavy heart, that he had to let me go. I was probably smiling like a fool the entire time. I remember agreeing with him heartily, as politely as I could. As I walked out of the store that day, I’d never felt more relieved in my life. That was the first and last time I held any manner of straight job. My parents weren’t angry, but they didn’t offer to support me, though when I did run into problems they gave me a few pounds here and there to sort me out in the short term.

  The only problem, of course, was that soon I had no money. That troubled my family more than it bothered me. I was willing to trade money for my freedom. Without a job, I could spend every single day playing my drums in my sister’s garage, which is why I’d come to London–to play, though not exclusively in a garage. Sally’s garage was a great place to start though, it was a spacious double-doored affair, originally built to house horses. There was plenty of room for my kit, and it sounded nice too. With no gainful employment to take me away from practising, that’s all I did, all day, every day, all by myself.

  I had no idea what I was going to do next but I found a great comfort in that; the kind of strength a person can only derive from committing themselves to a course of action, come what may. It’s not to be done lightly, it should be the result of a very brave, or conversely a tremendously foolish perspective. It can also be inspired by having no other choice, which in my opinion is when it means the most. That’s how it was for me; after failing at school and having no prospects ahead, my back was against the wall. Playing drums was the only thing I wanted to do. I had no idea if that would see me through life, I had no idea if I was even very good at it. I didn’t care. That was how I felt and it was liberating. If I’d been mature enough to consider the ramifications of such a pledge, it would have been a bit scary, too.

  As a shy young man, it wasn’t easy being tall (I’m six feet six) and all the more noticeable because of the way I chose to dress. I wore bright-coloured blousy shirts, tight trousers, big belt buckles, boots, and I wore my hair long. Perhaps shy isn’t exactly the word, because I’ve always been social and jovial just like my dad, but when I think about my first days in London, what strikes me is how shy I was in the presence of girls. I’d always liked the girls at school, but I was suddenly out of my league. The girls in London were absolutely gorgeous and enchanting and they were everywhere. I was awestruck in their presence and would fall apart just walking down the street. I could be chatting with a bloke about the blues, confident and knowledgeable, but the moment a beautiful girl walked by I became a complete idiot. This may be odd to hear from a guy who adores meeting fans and chooses to hold court to thirty or forty of them every night on tour before the show. Nowadays I have no problem greeting people, whatever the situation. But when I was young, girls were my kryptonite. I wanted to talk to them but I couldn’t. I was completely dumbstruck.

  I didn’t lose my virginity until I was almost eighteen and by then I’d been a gigging musician for a few years. That’s kind of pathetic, considering my advantages and the mores of the time. My introduction to sex was very late and basically I had to be railroaded by my first girlfriend, Sue Boffy. Sue was a society girl who always got what she wanted, and when she saw me on stage one night, she decided that I was it. She had me all right. She took me back to her flat in Chelsea and taught me what it means to be a man and a woman.

  I was a sheltered country boy in so many ways. I didn’t even know what homosexuality was until I moved to London. I had to ask my sister about it because I kept hearing people saying that so-and-so was ‘queer’, to which I would just smile like I knew what they meant. It reminded me of being at boarding school, when I realised that I didn’t know what being a virgin meant. I was even less happy when I found out that I still was one. If I hadn’t learned to play in bands, I can’t imagine how much longer it might have taken me to lose my virginity.

  The world I’d landed in fascinated me and I became a sponge, soaking up everything I could. Though I was not an astute student, I am a keen observer and I took in all of the new customs and concepts that presented themselves to my young mind. It was ‘swinging’ London, when the mod fashions in Carnaby Street were all the rage, and the sensory overload was incredible. I went anywhere that I heard something interesting might be going on and attended all manner of happenings, where people gathered and talked about ideas. My sister’s house was in a cul-de-sac called Horbury Mews in Notting Hill, which, along with neighbouring Ladbroke Grove, was the epicentre of the underground movement in art and music that was soon to define the sixties counter-culture as we now know it. Those neighbourhoods were the real shit, the low-life, hip, starving-artist reality. Jamaicans and art students lived side by side and the working class of all races had to find ways to get along. Out of these burgeoning cauldrons of people and energy, the music, the art and everything that played a part in changing England’s cultural identity, and then the world’s, started to happen.

  Notting Hill is a very different place now; it’s extremely expensive to live there and the former diversity and bohemian elements are long gone, but back then it was glorious and larger than life to me. Even at my age, with my inexperience, I knew it was significant. I could feel that this moment in time was something. I was aware that I was living in an historic period. If you lived there you were instantly a part of it too because these vibrations were all around you. There was a tangible shift occurring on an international level too, which made for a uniting and vivid moment in time that I don’t think can be appreciated properly now.

  Today the world is united through technology, so ideas spread and knowledge is shared in a much less organic, human way. It is all done so quickly–only to be replaced with new information. The transaction of sharing ideas is fundamentally different. But there was a time when a band like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or later on, Fleetwood Mac, united like-minded people around the world the way the Internet or Facebook does today. Bands were a reason for people to gather in groups and exchange ideas–and they used to have to do that in person, not from the comfort of their computers.

  Bands were a way for people to connect with each other and if the bands were good, then their fans were able to plug into something greater than all of them. People are still fans of bands in the same way, and music still accomplishes that goal, but back then was the moment that type of relationship was born. The founding fathers of rock and roll started it, but the bands of the 1960s made it a language that teenagers (and the rest of us) still speak today. It was a revolution that brought a shift in values and a change in times.

  In the United States, because of the Vietnam War, that revolution was much more dramatic and visceral than it was in the UK. It had a purpose and a common goal, to end the violence, whereas in the UK it was more about fashion, music, art and a loosening of that traditional British reserve. Everyone was united by music, because music was our vessel to a deeper, mutual understanding. The fact that they loved the Beatles and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ was something teenagers from both Dusseldorf and Des Moines could ag
ree upon, no matter how different they were. Love, rhythm and teenage lust are universal, and so is shouting ‘Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!’ at the top of your lungs. If more people did that together more often, the world might be a better place.

  I didn’t give up on my dream and kept playing in my sister’s garage day in and day out, with no audience until the day a guy from the neighbourhood, just a few years older than me, poked his head in to listen. I wasn’t playing along to anything, I was just making up beats and fills and enjoying myself so much that I didn’t notice him there at first.

  ‘Hey! Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m Peter Bardens.’

  And with that, I awoke into my living dream. If it weren’t for Peter Bardens, I could have been alone in that garage for high times on carnaby street five years. Peter was well-educated, intelligent, extremely witty and always stroking his hair out of his eyes when he spoke. He was eloquent and a great musician, and I suspect he would have been a great writer because his father Dennis Bardens was a well-known author and journalist. Peter was also a great draughtsman and was always drawing satirical comics that were hilarious. He was a complete dreamer, more so even than me, and we shared an ineptitude for handling finances. Peter never deserted his dream, and struggled as a musician, achieving recognition and a modicum of success, but until his death he was still envisioning the next band, the next album, and next project.