Guitarist/vocalist Peter Green was flown in to rejoin his old band temporarily so that the band could continue the US tour. To me that was a Stones-type drug, and the feeling of invincibility that it gave you just seemed wrong to me.” When my Stranger Blues Elmore James thing came on I just blurted out: ‘This sounds like shit.’ I went to my room and just prayed to God to somehow get me out of this. He was very distraught, listening to this live recording of the band before Peter left. The night before I left, we were all in Mick’s hotel room.

“I should’ve told them right away, but I was desperate. “The way I left was wrong and a mistake,” he now readily admits. Now in his mid-50s, a boyish, slightly mischievous smile sometimes punctuates what he has to tell you. These days the ex-Geordie (born in Hartlepool, brought up in Lichfield in Staffordshire) blues wonder is minus the corkscrew hair and plus a mid-Atlantic accent. I guess that’s journalism,” he says, quizzically. But he’s wary of journalists, and with good reason: “It’s the misrepresentation… They just insist on putting in those things. Thirty-five years after his ‘mysterious disappearance’, Jeremy Spencer laughs at the old tales – more in exasperation – and is happy to set the record straight. Basically, he was like a zombie.” Even the band’s drummer has apparently been sold on the myth. Many years later Mick Fleetwood tells a reporter: “His head was shaved and he had a different name. That ‘religious zombie’ story, it now turns out, is like the one about onetime Mac mainman Peter Green flipping out and threatening his accountant with gun unless he takes back a fat royalty cheque: both are fabulous Fleetwood Mac myths, and too juicy to be upstaged by what really happened. Apparently, ‘he’s with about 500 of these people and they’re just like vegetables’.

The paper then ratchets up the story with hearsay that he’s joined ‘a strange religious cult’, is ‘walking around in a daze like a zombie’ and ‘just mumbles “Jesus loves you”’. The NME also reports that early on in Fleetwood Mac’s lengthy tour their slide guitarist suddenly went missing in LA. A headline in UK music paper Sounds reads: ‘Jeremy Spencer “Lost in America?”’.

Download everything fleetwood mac