Mick Fleetwood - Play On Now, Then, and Fleetwood Mac The Autobiography

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For my children, Tessa, Lucy, Ruby and Amelia

• Start close in,
• dont take the second step or the third,
• start with the first
• thing
• close in,
• the step
• you dont want to take.

• Start with
• the ground
• you know,
• the pale ground
• beneath your feet,
• your own
• way of starting
• the conversation.

• Start with your own
• question,
• give up on other
• peoples questions,
• dont let them
• smother something
• simple.

• To find
• anothers voice,
• follow
• your own voice,
• wait until
• that voice
• becomes a
• private ear
• listening
• to another.

• Start right now
• take a small step
• you can call your own
• dont follow
• someone elses
• heroics, be humble
• and focused,
• start close in,
• dont mistake
• that other
• for your own.

• Start close in ,
• dont take
• the second step
• or the third ,
• start with the first
• thing
• close in ,
• the step
• you dont want to take

Play on. Two words, no more, but theyve said it all to me.

Theyve been, at different times, a simple direct order, a call to action, a mantra and a comforting concept that promised rebirth. I first read them in the most beautiful and romantic couplet in Twelfth Night , my favourite of Shakespeares works. Ive never forgotten it; in fact I took it to heart immediately because it spoke to me. When things have moved me so profoundly in this life, be they people, places or things, no matter how theyve come to me, Ive made them forever a part of me. Ive signed countless autographs with the phrase Play on. Ive said it to many people in many contexts. As Ive made my way through life, as intricate and difficult as it has often been, as ecstatic and debauched as it has too often been, those words have always been with me. What theyve come to mean to me has been a rock when the rest of my world was set adrift.

The entire couplet is the inspiration behind the title of Fleetwood Macs fourth studio album, Then Play On , released in 1969, which I still count as my favourite record. My second favourite is easy to choose: its Tusk , released ten years later by a very different incarnation of the bandthe only one that many of our fans are familiar with. To those fans reading these words, please do stick around, youll be amazed to learn how many roads we travelled before we met you.

On the surface, Then Play On and Tusk have little in common sonically, but listen deeper and youll hear a band with its back against the creative wall, recording music at the brink of its existence. Both of those albums were made when we would either play on or cease to be, and when the idea of overcoming the insurmountable through creating anew was the only way out for us. I cant say that I saw it as a solution, but I felt it as my faith, and I preached to my compatriots to play onand thats what we did.

Im still here, lucky enough to be partnered with the greatest musical comrades I could ever hope to have. We have been through so many ups and downs, and though I denied it for years, particularly to my loved ones, I know now that since this band began, I have devoted my entire life to it. In every incarnation Fleetwood Mac has brought me so much joy that I hope whatever our fans have taken from the music is a fraction of what Ive got from it. Ive also realised, through trial, lots of error, growing older and hopefully wiser, how much that choice has weighed on my family. Its hard to devote yourself to a musical family of our magnitude while trying to nurture one of your own; its an unfair tug-of-war I am still working out.

Music is a beautiful language, one that anyone with a beating heart can understand, no matter where theyre from. We need to share that, we need to honour that; its one of the only things that defies the boundaries humans love to erect. Music has seen me through everythingbecause when all else failed me, it remained the one thing I could rely on. It was, literally, the only thing I knew I could do with some degree of skill. More than that, it has always brought me joy and allowed me to find my centre. When Ive felt lost in life, if Ive lost myself in music, Ive always found my way again.

I am sixty-five years old at the time of this writing, looking back at forty years in rock and roll. My first gig as a drummer took place in London in the 1960s when I was still a teenager too young to be legally drinking, even in England. I had no proper training, just a desire to be a part of the culture I saw evolving, combined with an innate attraction to rhythm. I went after a dream and found it backing some of the best English blues players of my generation during a time that changed history. I didnt plan any of it, but I did believe that if I stayed true to my muse, I would find my way. And I havethough its never been easy.

On my farm in Maui, Hawaii, an island that Ive been visiting regularly since the 1970s, and of which Ive been a full-time resident for over a decade, I have a weather-sealed barn full of memorabilia: photographs, journals, clothes, cars, endless video tapes, concert recordings, all of it bits of Fleetwood Mac and my life. As much as Ive always been driven creatively to move forward toward something bigger, brighter and unknown, Im also a deeply-rooted nostalgic. I adore photos, mementoes, all bits of ephemera that represent each and every time and space I traverse. Im a hoarder when it comes to these things. I love to document the moment, as much as I realise how much that moment is transient, nothing but a stop on the road.

I am thankful for that preservationist instinct because, having moved houses so many times, across continents, from the UK to Australia to Europe and the States, its a minor miracle that so much of this stuff is still in my possession. Im not sure how to accurately convey what its like to open a photo album and find a Polaroid of a friend who has passed away, or pages of handwritten lyrics of songs, all of them with edits by my bandmates, from decades previous. A flood of memories wash over me when I find these treasures, all of them new again, focused by the perspective Ive gained in the years since. Its a beautiful kind of limbo, seeing yourself, your past alongside your present, through a new set of eyes.

I share this by way of an explanation of how this book began. My co-writer and collaborator, Anthony Bozza, interviewed me on my farm in Maui for Playboy magazine in March 2012, at a time when Id just unearthed over fifty hours of footage of Fleetwood Mac touring Japan in 1977; the culmination of the Rumours tour. We were in our prime and it was the finale of the bands highest high to date, so I hired a film crew to travel with us, giving them free rein to capture us both on stage and off. My intention was to edit the film and release it as a feature to run in cinemas the year after we wrapped the tour. That never happened; so many things got in the way, and I forgot about that little film for thirty years . I wasnt even looking for it when I found it: I was trying to locate home movies my parents had shot of my siblings and me when we were kids. Instead I found a pile of tins in a box that had somehow made its way intact through the various storage units Ive had over the years.