Credit: Dangerous Minds / W.W.Thaler - H. Weber, Hildesheim

With a band that lived through as much chaos as Fleetwood Mac, it’s par for the course that it would take something truly dramatic for members to leave.

This is a band that kept on sailing through creative differences, inter-band infidelity, drug addiction, and so much more besides. It’s very telling that the thing that truly ended Fleetwood Mac, at least in the eyes of Stevie Nicks, was the death of Christine McVie. They could go on without Lindsey Buckingham and his will-they-won’t-they relationship with the whole band. They could go on without the rhythm section that gives the band its very name. They could even go on without Nicks herself due to her successful solo career, but not without their songbird.

However, that line-up only came from a number of members leaving the band initially. What’s more, the two highest-profile departures from the group come from their close ties to the dark side of the hippy movement of the late 1960s. The first and most famous was Peter Green, the guitarist the whole project was built around. He left after his LSD habit grew so capacious that he began wearing robes and a crucifix, then demanded Fleetwood Mac start giving away every penny they earned before retiring from the group to join a hippie commune in Munich. The commune didn’t last, but the departure from the Mac did.

However, the most unsettling story regarding a departure from Fleetwood Mac comes from their slide guitarist and piano player, Jeremy Spencer.

A founding member of the band, by 1970, Spencer was the member of The Mac most affected by their dramatic lifestyle. As their sound grew more poppy and away from the Elmore James covers that were fuelled by his slide playing, he grew more and more disheartened by life in the band. This wasn’t helped by the superhuman quantities of drugs and alcohol he was consuming. Things rarely are.

Why did he leave Fleetwood Mac for a cult?

In 1971, the band moved from their native UK to Los Angeles chasing a record deal, a move that Spencer, already in a fragile state, was profoundly affected by. He hated the music they were making, saw no worth in his own abilities as a musician and was constantly being convinced to stay in the band by his fellow bandmates.

The last straw came when the band embarked on a US tour that Spencer was desperate for the band not to go on. On the last night of the tour, before a gig at the Whisky A Go Go, Spencer left his hotel room, telling the band he was going to a bookshop. He never returned.

Panicked, the band cancelled the tour and spent the next few days scouring LA for any sign of him. Five days later, they found him in the headquarters of The Children of God, a notorious paedophilic cult which was later found guilty of shocking sexual child abuse crimes. It turned out that on his way to the bookshop, Spencer had gotten talking to a lovely fellow named Apollos (of course), who talked him into joining him at a nearby mission where he and some other cultists were staying.

According to Spencer, that very evening, he became totally convinced that The Children of God was where his future lay. Once the band found him, he flatly refused to get back with them and, as soon as he could, moved his entire family out to join him in The Children Of God.

Spencer is still a fully paid-up member of the cult to this day. He’ll tell anyone who listens that joining the cult was something he did of his own free will and that there was no brainwashing or conversion needed. It’s pretty much what all cultists say. One thing is for sure, though. Fleetwood Mac did just fine without him.