A decade before Fleetwood Mac released their bestselling album Rumours, the band’s lineup looked a lot different. Before Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham showed up, Fleetwood Mac included Peter Green, Jeremy Spencer, John McVie, and Mick Fleetwood. But even though they had two guitar players already, founding member Green wanted a third…and that’s where Danny Kirwan came in.
“We met Danny at a little club in Brixton, the Nag’s Head, one night when we played with a local band called Boilerhouse,” Fleetwood recalled in his 1990 book Fleetwood: My Life and Adventures in Fleetwood Mac. “Danny played beautifully, getting a subtle tremolo effect from his fingering.”
Fleetwood asked Kirwan, an “exceptional” guitarist who happened to be just 18 years old, to join Fleetwood Mac in 1968. The addition of a fifth Fleetwood Mac member came as a shock to fans like future Whitesnake member Bernie Marsden, also a teenager at the time.
“I adored Fleetwood Mac,” Marsden told MusicRadar. “I would go all over to watch them. And now, suddenly, I was reading in Melody Maker that a new guitarist had joined. I already thought they were the perfect group. They didn’t need an 18-year-old guitar player. And how dare they get a guitar player the same age as me! Why didn’t they ask me, y’know? So, I wanted to hate Danny Kirwan.”
But when Marsden saw Kirwan play with Fleetwood Mac, he couldn’t deny the young musician was remarkably talented.
“What turned my head that night,” Marsden recalled, “was seeing this fresh-faced blond teenager up there on the stage, in-between these wizened professionals — who were probably only about 22 themselves at the time. It was so obvious they’d been on the road for a long time, because Danny looked so clean and fresh. But his playing was a revelation.”
Kirwan went on to appear on five of Fleetwood Mac’s albums, including 1969’s Then Play On and Blues Jam at Chess, 1970’s Kiln House, 1971’s Future Games, and 1972’s Bare Trees.
“His impact was significant,” Spencer said. “The original four-man lineup was Chicago blues-driven, and Danny’s addition and contribution quickly took the music in a different direction. Besides being a blues player himself, his main influences at the time were The Beatles and Cream.”
“His creative originality most certainly helped to bring new life to Fleetwood Mac and consequent commercial success,” Spencer added, “and I don’t mean this disparagingly.”
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With Kirwan’s creativity, however, came a “temperamental” nature, as he himself put it. During Fleetwood Mac’s 1972 U.S. tour, Kirwan and bandmate Bob Welch got into an argument over the latter’s tuning before a gig. Kirwan lost his temper, smashed his guitar and not only refused to perform but heckled his bandmates from the audience. He was subsequently fired.
“It was something we simply could not forgive,” Fleetwood wrote in his book. “Danny had broken the code that said you don’t hang your bandmates out to dry on stage.”
Though Kirwan pursued a solo career, his struggles with mental health, substance use and homelessness stood in the way of his success. In 1993, The Independent located him living in a homeless shelter in London’s West End after Fleetwood asked for help finding his former bandmate. In an interview with the British outlet, per NPR, Kirwan called himself “lucky to have played for the band at all.”
“I just started off following them around, but I could play the guitar a bit and Mick felt sorry for me and put me in. I did it for about four years, to about 1972, but…I couldn’t handle the lifestyle and the women and the traveling,” he said.
Kirwan died in London in 2018. He was 68 years old.
“It’s hard to say what caused Danny’s later problems,” Spencer said. “Some blame the drugs and the alcohol, which in some ways enhances inherent psychological problems, and him being a ‘sensitive musician’ to boot. He was jittery and nervous, and the pressure became too much for him.”
The year before his death, in 2017, Fleetwood credited Kirwan as being ahead of his time.
“Danny was a quantum leap ahead of us creatively…He is the lost component. In many ways, Danny is a forgotten hero,” he told music critic Jim Farber.
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