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Fleetwood Mac in 1969, the year before Peter Green walked out after suffering a disturbing dream: from top left to right, John McVie, Danny Kirwan, Green, Jeremy
Spencer, Mick Fleetwood. Green’s powerful, clean guitar-playing in the Sixties, below, helped to revitalise the blues and earned him the nickname “the Green God”One night in 1970 after taking LSD,
Peter Green had a demonic dream in
which he was visited by a green hell-
hound that barked menacingly at him.
“It scared me because I knew the dog
had been dead a long time,” he recalled
later. “It was a stray and I was looking
after it. But I was dead and had to fight
to get back into my body.”
When he awoke Green concluded
that the beast was the Devil and the
dream had been telling him that money
was the root of all evil. His first reaction
was to write a song about his demons.
The result was The Green Manalishi
(With the Two Prong Crown) in which
he described a satanic creature “Snea-
kin’ around, trying to drive me mad/
Bustin’ in on my dreams/ Making me
see things I don’t want to see.”
The song was both brilliant and har-
rowing; its sinister riff, eerie howling
and tormented lyrics made it one of the
most disturbing hit singles to infiltrate
the generally sunny terrain of the Top
Ten. It was also the last song Green re-
corded with his band Fleetwood Mac,
for his second reaction to his dream was
to leave the group and give all his
money away. He allegedly threatened
to shoot his accountant unless he
stopped sending him royalty cheques.
“It was a freedom thing,” he told The
Times in 1997, when after long years
away from music he was attempting a
comeback. “I wanted to go and live on a
commune. In the end I never did but I
had to get away from the group. Acid
had a lot to do with it.”
Having given his money to the anti-
poverty charity War on Want, his gui-
tars were donated to the local Oxfam
shop. Green was once assertive and
ambitious, but his self-confidence had
evaporated and he was sleeping for up
to 20 hours a day.
Instead of joining a commune he was
eventually committed to an institution.
“I was throwing things around and
smashing things up,” he told The Times.
“I smashed a car windscreen and the
police took me to the station. They
asked me if I wanted to go to hospital. I
said ‘yes’ because I didn’t feel safe going
back anywhere else.”
After electroconvulsive therapy he
made a brief recovery and, in 1978, mar-
ried Jane Samuels, an American fiddle
player and “Jews for Jesus” Christian,
with whom he had a daughter, Rose-
bud. There was also a return to music
with a series of solo albums that con-
tained flashes of his former virtuosity.
However, the twilight was soon to de-
scend again. His marriage ended in di-
vorce after little more than a year and
his ex-wife returned to North America
with their daughter. He also had a son,
Liam Firlej, from another relationship.
By the mid-1980s he had reverted to
his birth name, Greenbaum, and adopt-
ed a hermit-like existence. Fans and
journalists who sought him out invari-
ably came back with bizarre tales. He
was living as a tramp and was called
“the Werewolf” by local children. He
had grown his fingernails until they
were eight inches long. At various times
he was said to be working as a gravedig-
ger in London, then living quietly with
his mother and brother in Essex or
Great Yarmouth. All seem to have been
true at different points in his life, but as
the rumours swirled they became hard-
er to verify. Seldom can any influential
rock star have disappeared from view
so completely.
From time to time it was said that he
was about to stage a comeback. After
years of such reports, he finally made an
appearance at the Guildford Festival in
- It was evident that he had not
played a guitar in a long time and he ap-
peared a shadow of his former self. “It
hurt my fingers at first and I am still re-
However, he quit Mayall’s band a year
later, complaining that the arrange-
ments were becoming “too jazzy”. His
initial plan was to head for America.
When permit and visa hassles left him
stranded in London, he put together his
own group with Fleetwood and Mayall’s
bass player, John McVie, plus Spencer as
a second guitarist.
Billed as Peter Green’s Fleetwood
Mac, the band played their first gig at the
Windsor Jazz and Blues Festival in the
summer of 1967. At the time white British
blues bands were ten a penny, memora-
bly parodied by the Bonzo Dog Band in
Can Blue Men Sing the Whites? and sati-
rised by Adrian Henri and the Liverpool
Scene in I’ve Got These Fleetwood Mac
Chicken Shack John Mayall Can’t Fail
Blues. However, Green’s sensuous guitar-
playing, haunting voice and ability to
write original blues songs elevated Fleet-
wood Mac above the competition.
Sadly his imperial phase was all too
brief. His 1970 solo debut, The End of the
Game, was much anticipated but lacked
focus. His return a decade later was simi-
larly disappointing and when he resur-
faced in the late 1990s fronting the Peter
Green Splinter Group, much of the more
intricate guitar work was left to his
friend Nigel Watson, who had helped to
coax him back from obscurity. The
group ceased playing in 2004 when
Green reported that the medication he
was on made it difficult for him to con-
centrate. Having lived on anti-psychotic
drugs for so many years, he was prone to
nodding off. The Public Guardianship
Office stepped in to protect his interests.
His glory years may have been fleet-
ing, yet his legacy was profound. “As the
plaudits have been heaped upon Clap-
ton, Beck and Page as the holy trinity of
British guitar-playing, Green has be-
come something of a forgotten man,”
Uncut magazine wrote in 2019 in a re-
view of some previously unheard live
Fleetwood Mac recordings. “But on his
night, he was capable of out-playing all
of them.”Peter Green, guitarist and songwriter,
was born on October 29, 1946. He died in
his sleep on July 25, 2020, aged 73learning,” he told The Times a year later.
“I’ve gone back to basics. I used to worry
and make things very complicated.
Now I keep it simple.”
The music world welcomed his return
though he never recaptured the great-
ness of his early years in the 1960s, when
he was one of several British guitarists
who revitalised the blues, which had
fallen out of fashion as black America
embraced the younger, more pop-
orientated sounds of soul music. BB
King, the doyen of American blues
guitarists, rated Green as the best of the
talented exponents who emerged
during the 1960s British blues boom.
“He has the sweetest tone I ever heard;
he was the only one who gave me the
cold sweats,” King said. Given that the
competition included Eric Clapton,
Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck, it was some
compliment.
By the time of his breakdown, Fleet-
wood Mac were one of the biggest Brit-
ish bands of the era, with a string of hits
written by Green including Black Magic
Woman (later covered by Santana); the
chart-topping instrumental Albatross;Man of the World, which was only kept
from the No 1 slot by the Beatles’ Get
Back; and Oh Well, which made No 2 in
the British charts. It was claimed that in
1969 Fleetwood Mac sold more records
than the Beatles and the Rolling Stones
put together.
However, Green’s erratic behaviour
was increasingly destabilising the group.
He had embraced a mix of religions in-
cluding Buddhism and Christianity, ap-
pearing on Top of the Pops wearing white
robes and a crucifix. “He was taking a lot
of acid and mescaline around the same
time his illness began manifesting itself,”
Mick Fleetwood, the group’s drummer
and co-founder, said in 2015. “We were
oblivious as to what schizophrenia was
back in those days but we knew some-
thing was amiss.” Nor was Green theBB King said that
Green ‘has the sweetest
tone I’ve ever heard’
Peter Green
Influential blues rock guitarist who co-founded Fleetwood Mac but quit the band as he struggled with drugs and mental illness
CHRIS WALTER/GETTY IMAGES; RAY STEVENSON/REX/SHUTTERSTOCKonly member of the band with mental
health issues. Jeremy Spencer, his fellow
guitarist, disappeared while on tour in
1971 after saying he was going out to buy
some groceries. It transpired that he had
left to join the Children of God cult. A
year later, the guitarist Danny Kirwan
(obituary June 15, 2018) had a break-
down and was asked to leave after
smashing up the band’s dressing room
and refusing to go on stage.
Somehow Fleetwood Mac not only
soldiered on but found even greater
success by abandoning the blues for a
radio-friendly soft-rock style and em-
bracing a new line-up. Green never
played with the later incarnation of the
group and talk of a reunion of the origi-
nal line-up came to nothing, but Fleet-
wood organised a trib-
ute concert for Green
at the London Palladi-
um in February this
year. Pete Townshend,
John Mayall and Pink
Floyd’s Dave Gilmour
were among those
who performed his
songs but Green him-
self did not attend.
He was born Peter
Allen Greenbaum in
Bethnal Green, east
London, in October
1946, the youngest of
four. Unlike many of
his peers on the Brit-
ish music scene of the
1960s, he was not a
middle-class art stu-
dent from the lace-
curtained suburbs,
but came from a
working-class Jew-
ish family and grew up in the East End.
His father, Joe, was a tailor turned post-
man and his mother, Ann, was of Polish
extraction. On leaving school at 15 he
became a butcher’s boy.
His brother Michael had taught him
to play the guitar and he had swiftly
graduated from playing copies of the
Shadows’ hits to venerating Muddy
Waters and the other Chicago blues-
men who had moved north from theMississippi Delta to escape Jim Crow
and had electrified the blues in the city’s
South Side clubs. By 1965, after cutting
his teeth playing bass in semi-pro
groups, he was playing lead guitar in
Peter B’s Looners, where he met Fleet-
wood.
That same year he enjoyed a brief
spell playing in John Mayall’s Blues-
breakers as a stand-in for Eric Clapton,
who had taken a two-month holiday in
Greece. He got the role by “turning up
at gigs and shouting from the audience
that he was much better than whoever
was playing”, Clapton reported. Mayall
was the godfather of the British blues
scene and most of its best players
passed through his band but when
Clapton returned, Green was ousted.
“He was a real Turk — a strong,
confident per-
son who knew
exactly what he
wanted and
where he was
going,” Clapton
wrote in his
autobiography.
“More impor-
tantly he was a
phenomenal
player with a
great tone. He
was not happy to
see me, as it
meant rather a
sudden end to
what had obvious-
ly been a good gig
for him.”
He did not have
long to wait for
a recall. Nine
months later, in the
summer of 1966,
Clapton left for good and Green became
his permanent replacement. His prede-
cessor had built up a following that had
resulted in the graffiti “Clapton Is God”
appearing on the streets of London, but
Green filled his shoes admirably. After
making his recording debut with Mayall
on the innovative Hard Road album, his
powerful, clean and spare blues style led
to him being dubbed “the Green God”.hE tEnds e w w g w a “ t p p g w s m s w l f l a m s