Stevie Nicks’ stretch limousine is so long you can sit with your legs out and not touch the feet of the passenger opposite. On this occasion, it’s Stevie Nicks wearing a pair of her signature platform boots.

The morning sun glints off the vehicle’s tinted windows, but the singer is cocooned in an ankle-length jet-black overcoat and two matching shawls. She’s dressed for a funeral in the Arctic Circle, rather than an airstrip half an hour’s drive from Detroit. Fleetwood Mac are on the reunion trail and selling out arenas across the US. Stevie is scheduled to board a private plane flying the group to their next destination: Buffalo, New York.

In the meantime, she’s giving an interview. As it’s the twentieth century, Stevie is answering questions into a miniature cassette recorder. She talks constantly, but during the occasional pause, takes a mouthful of water, lemon and honey from a glass tumbler on the seat beside her.

‘Oh, I could easily have fallen for John,’ she says suddenly, between sips. Stevie is talking about Fleetwood Mac’s bassist John McVie. ‘It’s those eyes,’ she adds.

Had this happened, it would have brought more turmoil to a group that had already survived three broken relationships between its members. Yet based on past form, Fleetwood Mac would have weathered the storm and spun it into another hit record.

It’s tempting to wonder if the band’s mainstays, John McVie and drummer Mick Fleetwood, sold their souls to the devil, sometime in the ’60s. Fleetwood Mac would go on to sell millions, but to the detriment of their personal lives and mental well-being. A later interview with their troubled ex-guitarist Peter Green brought this truth home to me, and then some. Unlike his former bandmates and successors, Green wasn’t seeing out his days in a beachside residence in Maui or a mansion in Bel Air. He was living modestly in Canvey Island in Essex.

In autumn 2023, Stevie Nicks announced that Fleetwood Mac were no more, after the death of their bandmate Christine McVie, ‘the one who wrote the really big hits,’ she explained. However, Fleetwood Mac had returned from the brink many times before.

Since 1967, there had been at least four Fleetwood Macs. There was the original blues band of ‘Albatross’ hit-single fame; the version that made those curious folky, progressive records in the early ’70s; the one behind the multi-platinum-selling ‘White Album’ and Rumours, and the later fluid incarnation, missing either a Stevie, a Christine, guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, or sometimes all three. There was even a bogus version without any of its existing members.

Dreams draws from many original interviews and eyewitness encounters to join the dots between each version of Fleetwood Mac. It charts their unique journey from post-war London to ’70s California; how the ’60s British blues boom fuelled the money-spinning West Coast rock of the next decade, and how two gifted female songwriters overcame widespread prejudice to turn a previously all-male ensemble into one of the biggest groups in the world.

Fleetwood Mac may be over, but the music isn’t. Instead, it’s leapfrogged generations, genres and formats and been used to soundtrack Hollywood blockbusters, television adverts and social media videos.

Then again, emotional anguish and sexual tension never go out of fashion. ‘If I wasn’t in Fleetwood Mac,’ said Stevie Nicks that day in Detroit, ‘I would so want to be in Fleetwood Mac.’