Mick Fleetwood Says There’s No Final Tour In The Works For Fleetwood Mac

Mick Fleetwood is setting the record straight on Fleetwood Mac and rumors that the band he formed in 1967 is headed for a final tour and possible retirement. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Fleetwood said he doesn’t know where stories about a final tour are coming from because the band has agreed that they won’t be doing a final tour—at least not now.

While Fleetwood Mac songbird Christine McVie has reportedly hinted that the band’s tour in 2018 might be a farewell, Mick shoots the notion down.

“I don’t know where that is coming from,” The Fleetwood Mac founder said. “In my mind, it’s not, and everyone in the band has decided that it’s not.”

Mick went on to say the band thought they were finished 30 years ago, then added that while “final tour” isn’t in his vocabulary, mortality could make any tour a final one.

“I don’t know if morbid is the correct word here, but when everyone is in their seventies and you think about five years from now… Phil Collins is calling his tour ‘Not Dead Yet.’ Well, we’re not dead yet, but God forbid, we might be, so you could be like, ‘I better go and see them!'” he said. “But you will not see a poster saying this is our farewell tour that I could dream of.”

Morbidity aside, Mick, who turns 70 this year, acknowledges that the band’s days in the recording studio may be over, even if he doesn’t want them to be. Of Stevie Nicks’ previous comments that she has no plans to ever record another Fleetwood Mac alum again, Mick says that’s “everyone’s prerogative,” but he didn’t deny that he wouldn’t mind making new music with the fabulous five.

“The utopian dream would be that before we hang it up, we all play [new] stuff [in the studio],” Mick admitted. “But we play on stage! God knows we’ve sacrificed huge chunks of time for this strange animal known as Fleetwood Mac.”

For next year’s tour, Fleetwood said he recently met up with Nicks and they listened to some old Mac music that they may want to incorporate into the not-so-final tour. Fleetwood added that he would love to see Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham do a Buckingham Nicks song in the set, while Christine McVie should do a blues song. (There’s also that new Buckingham McVie music.)

Fleetwood also joked about eventually playing the entire Rumours album on tour. The band plays nearly every song from the hit 1977 album in their concerts, but he says performing the epic masterpiece in its entirety would be a major undertaking—and could lead them all to an early grave.

“It would be fantastic,” he admitted. “But we’d have to be like Bruce Springsteen, out there for seven hours. Then it could be the last tour. You’ll see wooden boxes on stage. Five of them.”

Mick Fleetwood knows that time is no longer on the band’s side, but he doesn’t want to think that far ahead. At age 70, the rock legend is still a spring chicken compared to his mother, who lived to age 98. But Mick does admit he does think about being an aging rock star.

“No matter how clever you are, however fit you are, you’re doing going to die someday,” he said. “It hits me when someone asks me about Fleetwood Mac’s future plans. It hits me that if we tour and then maybe do something else and then possibly live out a pipe dream of a Broadway play, that’ll take five or six years. I’ll be on the red carpet and 76, even closer to death than I am now.”

You can see Fleetwood Mac in concert below.

[Featured Image by Brian Killian/Getty Images]