John mcvie cancer remission 2017
In 1977, police surrounded his house and he was arrested for threatening the band’s accountant, David Simmons, with a shotgun.īizarrely, the reason Green gave was that he was furious because Simmons kept sending him royalty cheques.Īnother notoriously wild founder member Jeremy Spencer took a turn for the worse during a tour if the US in 1971 after taking the drug mescaline. Way back when: Fleetwood pictured in 1982, left to right Lindsay Buckingham, Christine McVie, Mick Fleetwood, Steve Nicks and John McVie I ndeed Welch's tragic death was preceded by another former Fleetwood guitarist just six months earlier when Bob Weston was found dead in his bed in his London flat from a haemorrhage aged just 64.
John mcvie cancer remission 2017 mac#
He had had spinal surgery three months previously and been told by doctors that he would not regain the use of his legs - he opted to kill himself rather than become a 'burden' to his wife Wendy.Īnd sadly though the band's longevity has led to the release of classics such as Don’t Stop, Little Lies and Go Your Own Way the infighting, partner-swapping and drug-taking of the Fleetwood 'family' has rarely been out of the headlines.Īnd the phenomena which Lindsey Buckingham dubbed 'The Curse of the Fleetwood Mac Guitarist’ started back in the late Sixties. In 2012 band member Bob Welch, 66, was found dead by his wife after writing a suicide note and shooting himself in the chest. chart for seven months - until Michael Jackson released Thriller it was the best-selling album of all time.īut their stardom was blighted by drink and drug-fuelled excesses and tragedy.įormer guitarist Danny Kirvan became and alcholic by the age of 22, developed mental health problems after he was sacked from the band for his increasingly erratic behaviour, and eventually became homeless on the streets of London. Their album Rumours sold 40million and topped the U.S. “He had the authority to be a leader…always interested in organisational matters and cancer policy.Wished the best: Bandmates said they hoped fans would join them in wishing McVie all the best as he undergoes treatment “Gordon was interested in service delivery, how cancer medicine should develop, and what mattered to patients”, Eggermont says. He first met McVie through the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer, of which McVie was President from 1994 to 1997. Professor Alexander Eggermont, Chief Scientific Officer of the Princess Máxima Centre for Paediatric Oncology in Utrecht, Netherlands, agrees.
As Law sees it, “this was his commitment to patient benefit”. That the UK eventually found itself with an exceptionally high proportion of cancer patients in clinical trials was in no small part due to McVie. Before McVie took over, “all the clinical research had to compete with laboratory research”, she says. This was valuable, according to his then colleague Kate Law, who later spent a period as Director of Clinical Research for CRC's successor, Cancer Research UK. After almost a decade in the Netherlands as a consultant in oncology at the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital and as Clinical Research Director of the country's National Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, he became the Scientific Director of CRC in London and, in 1996, its Director General.Īt the CRC he established a clinical trials committee. From there he moved to Glasgow University's CRC Department of Clinical Oncology, and then to the Netherlands. In 1970, a year after his graduation in medicine, he was offered a Medical Research Council research fellowship on Hodgkin lymphoma at the Edinburgh University Department of Therapeutics, where he worked until 1976. But following unexpected success in a physiology examination, and having realised that medicine offered intellectual satisfactions, McVie threw himself into it. Having barely kept his head above water during preclinical studies at the University of Edinburgh, UK, it required parental pressure to keep him from giving up. When McVie took on the CRC directorship, he did so on the foundation of a solid previous career in academic cancer medicine that included work on drug discovery in a number of tumours-a career that might not have been predictable in his student days.