(Credit Raphael Pour-Hashemi)
As an icon of classic rock’s most memorable band, Mick Fleetwood has been behind some of the greatest songs to come out of the genre. The literal beating heart of Fleetwood Mac, the drummer and co-founder has been there since the band’s inception and through their meteoric rise with the 1977 record Rumours. Even soured relationships and cocaine abuse couldn’t stop them from churning out chart-topping gold, and, as recently as 2022, ‘Dreams’ continued in that tradition after spending four weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Fleetwood Mac’s enduring cachet as one of soft-rock’s most prolific bands had seen them release handfuls of tracks like that. Mick Fleetwood has often reflected on the life-changing songs of his career, citing the likes of ‘Albatross’ and ‘Love That Burns’, and was just as quick to name the songs so good he wished he had a hand in their writing.
Fleetwood sees himself as a “frustrated harmonic musician”, telling MusicRadar that because he doesn’t play the guitar or the piano, he had a “huge interest in the people that I play with, and the songs that they have written”.
Reflecting on the band’s work, Fleetwood named ‘Walk A Thin Line’ as the song so good that he wished he had come up with it. The Lindsey Buckingham number from 1979’s Tusk built on Charlie Watts’ drums featured on ‘Sway’, which Buckingham seized on in multi-layered drum rolls played by him – not Fleetwood. While Fleetwood treasured the song, he was said to have been appalled by the idea people would think it was his playing.
However, Fleetwood rectified that in good time by covering it. “I redid it for The Visitor, the album I recorded in Africa, and the reason I did so was because I really loved the song and wished that I’d written it,” he said. “I approached it with a whole ensemble of African musicians, so as a percussion player, during these recordings, I was, as we say in England, ‘like a pig in shit.’”
When he tackled the track on his 1981 solo album, Fleetwood was joined in Ghana by the African music group Adjo, who played percussion and provided vocals on the track. “I had the greatest time playing with these musicians on this rendition of this particular song,” he recalled. “The most important thing to me was, I knew I was taking this song to Africa to reinterpret, and what you hear on the whole of The Visitor is an extension of what you hear on ‘Walk A Thin Line’.”
As well as Fleetwood’s own stamp of approval on the Buckingham written number, George Harrison, Fleetwood’s ex-brother-in-law, came into the studio back in London to lay down some “beautiful” slide guitar on it. Musing on more material he wished he had written, Fleetwood said: “I adore him and his music, and he is sorely missed.”
