1. Daniel David Kirwan was a British musician and guitarist, singer and songwriter with the blues-rock band Fleetwood Mac between 1968 and 1972.
88 Facts About Danny Kirwan
1. 2.
Danny Kirwan released three albums as a solo artist from 1975 to 1979, recorded albums with Otis Spann, Chris Youlden, and Tramp, and worked with former Fleetwood Mac colleagues Jeremy Spencer and Christine McVie on some of their solo projects.
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Danny Kirwan was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Fleetwood Mac in 1998.
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Danny Kirwan was born Daniel David Langran on 13 May 1950 and raised in Brixton, South London.
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Danny Kirwan's parents separated when he was young and his mother, Phyllis Rose Langran, married Aloysious J Kirwan in 1958 when Danny was eight.
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Danny Kirwan left school in 1967 with six O-levels and worked for a year as an insurance clerk in Fenchurch Street in the City of London.
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Danny Kirwan began learning guitar at the age of 15 and rapidly became an accomplished musician and guitarist.
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Danny Kirwan was influenced by, among others, Hank Marvin of the Shadows, Django Reinhardt, Jimi Hendrix, and particularly by Eric Clapton's playing in the Bluesbreakers.
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Danny Kirwan was 17 when he came to the attention of established British blues band Fleetwood Mac in London while fronting his first band, Boilerhouse, a blues three-piece with Trevor Stevens on bass and Dave Terrey on drums.
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Danny Kirwan played beautifully, getting a subtle tremolo effect from his fingering.
11.
Danny Kirwan had a guitar style that wasn't like anyone else I'd heard in England.
12.
Green found that he and Danny Kirwan worked well together, and suggested to Fleetwood that Danny Kirwan could join Fleetwood Mac.
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Danny Kirwan's arrival expanded Fleetwood Mac to a five-piece with three guitarists.
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Danny Kirwan wanted to be open to other musical styles and bring in more of his own material.
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Danny Kirwan was the ideal foil for Green's new approach: he played gentle, supportive rhythm guitar to Green and Spencer's fiery solo work and introduced vocal harmonies to some of the songs.
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Danny Kirwan's playing was always very melodic and tuneful, with lots of bent notes and vibrato.
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Danny Kirwan was full of ideas that helped to move Fleetwood Mac out of the blues and into the rock mainstream.
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Danny Kirwan was interviewed by weekly music paper Melody Maker soon after joining Fleetwood Mac and gave the first indication of the breadth of his musical influences.
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Danny Kirwan progressed from being an 18-year-old guitarist in a small pub band in south London to being a member of an internationally known touring band in one move.
20.
Danny Kirwan played his first gig with Fleetwood Mac on 14 August 1968 at the Nag's Head Blue Horizon Club in Battersea, London.
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Danny Kirwan's first recorded work with Fleetwood Mac, in October 1968, was his contribution of the second guitar part to Green's blues instrumental "Albatross".
22.
Green had been working on the piece for some time, and Danny Kirwan completed it by adding the counterpoint harmony in the middle section.
23.
Danny Kirwan provided the instrumental "Jigsaw Puzzle Blues" for the B-side of "Albatross".
24.
Danny Kirwan worked it out from the record and adapted it for Green and himself to play on guitar, but Green remembered, "I couldn't do it properly, I can't play that sort of big band Prohibition-time thing," so Danny Kirwan played all the guitar parts himself.
25.
In early January 1969 Danny Kirwan was on his first tour of the United States with Fleetwood Mac, and they opened for Muddy Waters at the Regal Theater in Chicago.
26.
Two of Danny Kirwan's songs, "Talk With You" and "Like It This Way", were included on the album.
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Danny Kirwan's skills came to the forefront on the band's mid-1969 album Then Play On, recorded at Kingsway Studios in Holborn, London.
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Green took a back seat during the recording sessions and left most of the guitar work to Danny Kirwan, who composed seven of the fourteen tracks.
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Danny Kirwan's "Coming Your Way" opened side one of the album.
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Danny Kirwan began a two-month tour with the band to promote English Rose at the Fillmore East in New York on 1 February 1969.
31.
Fleetwood Mac's hit singles from 1968 to 1970 were all written by Green but Danny Kirwan's style shone through, thanks to Green's desire not to act as the band's musical focus.
32.
Producer Martin Birch recalled Green growing increasingly frustrated because he could not get the sound he wanted, and Danny Kirwan reassuring him that they would stay there all night until they got it right.
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One of the band's roadies, Dennis Keane, recalled that Danny Kirwan had begun to clash with Green.
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Producer Martin Birch remembered that Danny Kirwan often sought reassurance from Green, and seemed to be in awe of him.
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Danny Kirwan said Green wanted to be free to play with other musicians and not be tied down to a particular musical format.
36.
In January 1969, Danny Kirwan made his first musical appearance outside Fleetwood Mac when he contributed to Otis Spann's blues album The Biggest Thing Since Colossus with Green and John McVie.
37.
Danny Kirwan included a version of Kirwan's "When You Say" on the album, which was chosen as a single.
38.
Danny Kirwan worked with Fleetwood and John McVie on the first solo album from a then-current member of Fleetwood Mac when Spencer recorded his album Jeremy Spencer, released in January 1970.
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Danny Kirwan played rhythm guitar in various styles and sang backing vocals throughout.
40.
The album was not commercially successful, but Spencer discovered that he and Danny Kirwan worked well together without Green.
41.
In 1969, Danny Kirwan contributed as a session guitarist to the first album by London-based blues band Tramp, titled Tramp, which was recorded at DeLane Lea Studios in Soho.
42.
Danny Kirwan recalled that when his bass amplifier was stolen in 1969, Kirwan had given him a vintage Marshall amp as a replacement.
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The new line-up allowed Danny Kirwan to develop more melodic rock.
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Danny Kirwan sang distinctive backing vocals on some of Spencer's numbers, such as the 1950s-flavoured opening track "This Is the Rock".
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The unsuccessful single "Dragonfly", recorded late in the year, was written by Kirwan and included lyrics adapted from a poem by W H Davies.
46.
Once the band got into their stride, Danny Kirwan is reported to have felt annoyed and overshadowed because Green was taking a leading role in their guitar playing.
47.
Danny Kirwan arrived in London from Paris, where he had been stranded after his previous band fell apart.
48.
Danny Kirwan had a precise sense of phrasing and timing and he was well-trained, as opposed to us, who had just wandered into it.
49.
Danny Kirwan was always very intense about his work, as I was, but he didn't seem to ever be able to distance himself from it and laugh about it.
50.
Danny Kirwan would take offence at things for no reason.
51.
Welch brought a couple of new songs, notably the lengthy title track, which featured Welch and Danny Kirwan playing long instrumental sections.
52.
In 1971 Danny Kirwan began an 11-month tour of America and Europe with the band, opening a couple of dozen shows for Deep Purple and for several months playing second on the bill to Savoy Brown.
53.
The album contained five new Danny Kirwan tracks, including another instrumental, "Sunny Side of Heaven".
54.
Danny Kirwan noted that after Spencer had left the band, Kirwan had become "the sole focal figure".
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Danny Kirwan had shouldered much of the songwriting responsibility during the band's recent troubled and uncertain period and through changes in line-up and musical style.
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Danny Kirwan had found himself pushed into the spotlight as lead guitarist and front man to replace Peter Green.
57.
Danny Kirwan was going inside himself, which we put down to an emotional problem that we had no idea about.
58.
Danny Kirwan smashed his Gibson Les Paul guitar, trashed the dressing room and refused to go on stage.
59.
Danny Kirwan watched from the mixing desk as the rest of the band struggled through the gig without him, with Welch trying to cover Danny Kirwan's lead parts, and offered unwelcome criticism afterwards.
60.
Danny Kirwan started to throw this major fit in the dressing room.
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Danny Kirwan was pissed [intoxicated with alcohol] out of his brain, which he was for most of the time.
62.
Danny Kirwan went off on a rant about Bob never being in tune.
63.
Danny Kirwan grabbed his precious Les Paul guitar and smashed it to bits.
64.
In 1993, Danny Kirwan looked back at his time with the band and his departure from it without any resentment.
65.
In 1974, Danny Kirwan worked again with Mick Fleetwood at Southern Music Studio in Denmark Street, London, in recording sessions for the second album of London-based blues band Tramp.
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Danny Kirwan played with Tramp in a 1974 BBC Radio One live broadcast to promote the album, and Tramp later performed a few live shows with Danny Kirwan on guitar and Fleetwood as one of the drummers.
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Danny Kirwan said in 1997 that McCartney had been one of his early influences.
68.
One song, "Look Around You", was written by fellow Mac refugee Dave Walker, with whom Danny Kirwan had worked in Hungry Fighter a couple of years previously.
69.
Danny Kirwan was barricaded in a womb of studio baffle boards much of the time.
70.
Danny Kirwan appears to have played rhythm guitar on that album, but he couldn't handle the lead guitar work.
71.
Danny Kirwan was not well at this time and it is not clear how much, if any, lead guitar work he contributed to the recording, although he did sing on all the tracks.
72.
Danny Kirwan did not play any live gigs after a few shows with Tramp and a single performance with Hungry Fighter, all in 1974.
73.
Danny Kirwan was described by those who knew him in Fleetwood Mac, between the ages of 18 and 22, as a brilliant and exceptionally talented musician, but as nervous, sensitive and insecure.
74.
Danny Kirwan would take offence at things for no reason.
75.
Danny Kirwan was one of the strangest people I've ever met, very nervous, hard to establish a rapport with.
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Danny Kirwan had a lot of problems with self-confidence and security.
77.
In 1980 Fleetwood Mac, then based in Los Angeles, were in London for a concert and Danny Kirwan turned up at their hotel.
78.
Danny Kirwan couldn't talk coherently, just said, 'Can't help you Bob.
79.
In July 2000, a few weeks after his 50th birthday, Danny Kirwan was settled in a care home for alcoholics in south London.
80.
Spencer said later that the meeting had been pleasant, although Danny Kirwan was "in his own world".
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Danny Kirwan was said to be well looked after, and was visited by family and friends.
82.
Danny Kirwan was my best friend in the band at the time.
83.
Dawson states that Danny Kirwan did not go to the commune, and that when Keane returned to the band's hotel and told them that Green would not leave the commune, neither Danny Kirwan nor Davis went to fetch him, leaving the task to Keane, Dawson, and Mick Fleetwood.
84.
Danny Kirwan appears to have taken LSD before the Munich commune incident.
85.
Danny Kirwan was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1998 for his work as part of Fleetwood Mac.
86.
Danny Kirwan died in London on 8 June 2018 aged 68.
87.
Danny Kirwan was a hugely important part of the band.
88.
Danny Kirwan was a fantastic musician and a fantastic writer.