Before Fleetwood Mac was the band that recorded Rumours, it was Peter Green's group, and Peter Green was widely considered the most gifted blues guitarist in Britain. B.B. King is reported to have said that Green was the only white guitarist who ever made him sweat. Eric Clapton replaced him in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, then watched him form the band that briefly outsold the Beatles in the UK. By 1970 Green had largely walked away. By the mid-1970s he was in psychiatric hospitals. The story of how he got there — and how he eventually came back, partially, decades later — is one of the most carefully documented cases of late-onset psychosis in popular music.
Early life
Born Peter Allen Greenbaum in 1946 in Bethnal Green, East London, Green grew up in a working-class Jewish family. He played bass briefly before switching to guitar and developed the soulful, restrained tone that would become his signature. By his late teens he was playing in the Bluesbreakers under John Mayall. When Mick Fleetwood and John McVie joined, the four became Fleetwood Mac in 1967.
The Fleetwood Mac years
Between 1967 and 1970, Fleetwood Mac released a remarkable run of records and singles. Green wrote "Albatross," a number-one instrumental in the UK, "Oh Well," "Man of the World," "Green Manalishi (With the Two Prong Crown)," and "Black Magic Woman" — later a hit for Santana. The band was, briefly, one of the most popular acts in Britain.
By 1969 Green was already showing signs of strain. Bandmates and biographers have described him giving away large amounts of his earnings, talking about wanting to live on a kibbutz, and asking his bandmates to do the same. He was thinking deeply about money, ego, fame, and what it meant to live a meaningful life. None of those concerns are pathological in themselves; what changed over the following year was the intensity and the disorganisation around them.
Munich, 1970
The most often cited turning point is a party at a commune in Munich in March 1970, where Green is reported to have taken a very large dose of LSD. He has described the experience in interviews as one from which he never fully returned. His behaviour shifted, his playing became erratic, and within weeks he announced he was leaving the band. His final Fleetwood Mac single, "Green Manalishi," is widely interpreted as a song about losing a sense of reality.
Heavy LSD use during a vulnerable developmental window is a known precipitant of long-term psychotic illness in some people, particularly those with an underlying genetic vulnerability. Whether the Munich trip caused Green's schizophrenia, accelerated it, or simply happened around the same time as a process that was already underway is impossible to know. The honest reading is closer to the third option, with Munich serving as a marker rather than the sole cause.
About the diagnosis
Green was diagnosed with schizophrenia and treated repeatedly during the 1970s and 1980s in psychiatric hospitals in the UK. Reports from biographers including Martin Celmins (Peter Green: Founder of Fleetwood Mac) describe periods of inpatient care, treatment with antipsychotic medication, and several courses of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Green himself, in later interviews, was generally accepting of the diagnosis but ambivalent about ECT in particular, which he felt had affected his memory and his playing.
The schizophrenia label has been broadly accepted by his treating clinicians, his family, and most biographers, though as with any case there is room for the question of whether parts of his presentation might today be described differently — for instance as schizoaffective or as a chronic post-psychotic course shaped heavily by trauma and treatment side effects.
The years of illness
For most of the 1970s and 1980s, Green lived quietly in Britain, often with family or in supported accommodation. He briefly worked as a hospital orderly and as a gravedigger. He grew his fingernails very long, partly because he was no longer playing guitar, and partly, by his own account, because he liked the way they looked. There was a notorious 1977 incident in which he was reported to have threatened his accountant with a rifle over royalty cheques he did not want to receive; he was sectioned to hospital after the event. Coverage at the time was lurid; the underlying reality, by accounts of those close to him, was a man genuinely distressed by money and by the meaning he attributed to it.
The slow return
Beginning in the late 1990s, with consistent psychiatric care and the support of fellow musicians, Green formed the Peter Green Splinter Group with Nigel Watson. He recorded several albums that returned to traditional blues, often without the elaborate solos of his Fleetwood Mac years but with the same restrained, melodic instinct. Reviews were respectful rather than rapturous — the consensus was that something had changed, but that whatever remained was still distinctly Peter Green.
He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Fleetwood Mac in 1998. In 2020, a tribute concert organised by Mick Fleetwood at the London Palladium brought together David Gilmour, Pete Townshend, Billy Gibbons, and others to play Green's songs. Green died a few months later, in July 2020, at age 73.
What his story teaches
1. The connection between heavy hallucinogen use and chronic psychosis is real
Green is, alongside Syd Barrett, one of the cleanest cultural examples of how heavy LSD use during a vulnerable period can precipitate or accelerate a chronic psychotic illness. The relationship is not deterministic — most LSD users do not develop schizophrenia — but the risk concentrates in people with family histories of psychosis, and is part of the broader literature reviewed by NCBI-indexed research on substance-related psychotic disorders.
2. ECT is part of the historical record
Green's accounts of ECT are mixed; some find it helpful, others, like Green, feel it took something from them. Modern ECT is given less frequently and at lower doses than in the 1970s, and is mostly used for severe treatment-resistant depression and catatonia rather than schizophrenia per se. Patients today should expect a much fuller informed-consent process than was standard during Green's era.
3. Withdrawal is a legitimate response, not always a tragedy
Green's choice to step back from public performance for two decades is sometimes told as pure loss. It can also be read as a person finding a way to survive an illness that had taken too much, by removing himself from the conditions that had broken him. His later, quieter records suggest that meaning could be rebuilt at a different scale.
4. The myth of the "ruined genius" obscures the actual person
The story Green's friends tell is not of a tragic genius but of a thoughtful, gentle man who had a serious illness, did not always get the best care available, and rebuilt a life that included music, family, and his own version of peace. That is the more useful frame for anyone navigating their own version of the same story.
This article is for educational purposes only and is not medical advice. Diagnoses of public figures are based on publicly available accounts and biographical sources, not direct clinical assessment. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 in the US, or your local emergency number.