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Jenny Boyd, a fixture of the Swinging London scene during the 60s and the ex-wife of Mick Fleetwood, has published a new book of musician conversations, "Icons of Rock".

Photo by Lezli Rose

If you’re going to write about “Icons of Rock -- In Their Own Words,” it’s always a benefit to know the icons those words are coming from.

Jenny Boyd does, to a large extent.

The one-time British model, a retired psychologist now turned full-time writer, grew up in England during the swinging ‘60s. Her sister Pattie was married to George Harrison from 1966-1977, then to Eric Clapton from 1979-1989. Jenny Boyd, meanwhile, inspired Donovan’s song “Jennifer Juniper,” worked at the Beatles’ Apple Boutique in London and traveled with them to study with the Maharishi Maresh Yogi in India.

Boyd was married, twice to Mick Fleetwood, and co-wrote a couple of songs for Fleetwood Mac. She was also married, briefly to rock drummer Ian Wallace.

She knows her way around the “Icons” of her latest book, in other words, her conversations with a diverse array of artists -- including Harrison, Clapton, Fleetwood, Ringo Starr, Joni Mitchell, Graham Nash, Don Henley and many more -- are different than others might have.

“Well, I know and understand how musicians are,” Boyd, 76, says via Zoom from England, where she and husband David Levitt reside -- though she returns to Los Angeles once a year to visit children and grandchildren. “Living with all of Fleetwood Mac in that kind of commune thing and the Beatles in India, you just know how they are. You know when to chime in and when to step back and let them be who they are. They can feel safe.

“And this didn’t come from thinking, ‘Oh, I came from this place’ with these musicians, or ‘I spent time with the Beatles or Fleetwood Mac or anything.’ I felt like it came from genuine interest. I wanted to know for myself -- ‘What makes you tick?’”

“Icons of Rock” (Mango Publishing) came from an earlier project, the dissertation for her Ph.D. from UCLA, which she turned into the book “Musicians in Tune: 75 Contemporary Musicians Discuss the Creative Process,” which she co-wrote with Holly George-Warren and published in 1992. Where that tome was more academic and thematic, however, “Icons of Rock” focuses on the individual conversations, adding more material and including particular extensive interviews with Henley, Clapton, Starr, Nash, Mitchell, Ravi Shankar and Tony Williams from recordings she had never full transcribed.

“They were so powerful and just as inspiring as when I first interviewed them,” Boyd says. “So I took those and bits out of the original book and just put them all together.” She was particularly awed by the Mitchell interview -- which, of course, comes out at a time when the singer-songwriter has returned to live performing after suffering a brain aneurysm rupture in 2015 and recently won a Grammy award.

“Her interview, she’s a storyteller and she couldn’t help herself,” Boyd recalls.” I couldn’t put the whole thing in ‘cause there was so much, but she was the storyteller and that’s what she started the interview with -- ‘I was the storyteller.’ It still inspired me. It still...like, ‘God, this is so amazing.’” She was similarly enamored with Henley.

“I’m really fond of Don,” she notes. “He’s a perfectionist, but I think he’s great. I think he’s a real sensitive soul, and he showed that when we spoke.”

She interviewed Clapton while he was “newly in recovery” from addiction, which allowed her to connect in a different way than when they were in-laws.

“He was so open and honest,” she says. “I used to go when he and Pattie were together and we’d all get drunk and listen to records together. And here he was; we were having our first great conversation that the two of us had had together, so listening to that again was very cool.”

Despite all her direct and personal connections to the artist, however, Boyd says she never steps back and marvels at the life she lived, particularly in her youth.

“People always say to me, ‘Oh, what was it like in the ‘60s? I wish I was there.’ But I was still on my own journey as a young teen, and it was just, like, my life, you know?” she explains. “When I first met George, when (Pattie) said ‘Oh, I’d love you to come meet him,’ he was just so normal it wasn’t like you were meeting someone who was the Beatles. He was so normal and always like that, so I felt completely chilled about it all.

“We’d go to clubs with Pattie and George, or the rest of the Beatles and we were just listening to music, or sometimes you might want to dance. It wasn’t like, ‘Ooh, can I have your autograph?’”

Others felt differently, however. “I used to get lots of fan mail when I was probably 16 -- ‘Oh, have you talked to George? Have you done this with George?’ Can you get me a lock of his hair?’” Boyd remembers with a laugh. “I’m getting fan mail and I’m still going to school! It was never too surprising when things like that happened. You just kind of accepted it. It was more exciting to see an American stamp on the envelope, I think.”

Boyd also published a memoir, “Jennifer Juniper,” in 2020, which was somewhat lost during the early days of the pandemic. But she says there’s interest in adapting it into a movie, but she has mixed feelings about the proposition.

“I don’t want it based on,” she says. “I’m like, ‘Get your scriptwriter and do a story that’s more based on (’Icons of Rock’) so it’s not just me. So if that happens, you never know; there are probably millions of ideas like that in Hollywood, so we’ll see. I’m not holding my breath.”

GLIDE MAGAZINE

Back in the 1960s, Jenny Boyd and her sister Pattie were top models in Britain, being courted by rock stars and living a jet-set life. Serenaded by Donovan on his 1968 Hurdy Gurdy Man album with the Top 5 UK single “Jennifer Juniper” and marriage to drummer Mick Fleetwood, the middle Boyd daughter ended up following a different path in her life: academia and psychology.

Still just as lovely at 76, Boyd spent this past weekend in NYC at The Fest For Beatles Fans, and on February 13th, an update of her 2013 book, Icons Of Rock: In Their Own Words, will be officially released. Not your run-of-the-mill music book, Boyd has always been interested in creativity, especially how musicians write songs. Having access to some of the world’s most famous artists – George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Don Henley – gave Boyd a chance to pick their brains about the muse that haunts them and how they capture the transcendental images she releases. Featuring over 75 songwriters and running 432 pages, this book is truly a holy grail for those who wonder how a song is given birth.

Boyd earned her degrees over time, ending up with a Masters in Counseling Psychology and a PhD in Humanities. Before that, the mother of two daughters with Fleetwood had been a rising star in London. Not only a model, she also worked at The Beatles Apple shop and helped run a clothing store in the heart of Flower Power San Francisco. She traveled to India with her sister, The Beatles, and the infamous Maharishi.

Boyd had spent her earliest years in Kenya on her grandparents’ estate, which sister Pattie described in her 2007 autobiography Wonderful Tonight, “stood at the bottom of a long, winding gravel drive … with glorious views in every direction across the game reserve that surrounded it.” As idyllic as that may sound, it was not perfect, with barely-there parents who divorced and remarried other people. Jenny’s own memoir, Jennifer Juniper, was released in 2020.

With both of us having busy schedules, we decided upon an email interview right before Boyd left for the Fest. She wrote about updating her book, talks with Sinead O’Connor and Eric Clapton, and what she learned from their revelations on creativity.

When did you decide that you wanted to update your Musicians In Tune book and what did you want to add to it?

I decided to update Musicians In Tune at the end of 2022 and worked on it for most of last year. I had 8 of my original audiotapes from the 1988 – 1990 interviews and I wanted to include them in the new book in their entirety. These interviews, which had never been heard or seen before, were of Joni Mitchell, George Harrison, Ringo, Eric Clapton, Don Henley, Graham Nash, Ravi Shankar, and Tony Williams. The interviews from the original book are still there but under the heading of each individual artist rather than parts of their interview in different chapter headings to do with the creative process. I also wanted to interview four current musicians to show the reader the difference between the music world in the late eighties compared to the present day.

What fascinated you about the creative process, especially with musicians and their songs?

What fascinated and inspired me, was reading psychologist Abraham Maslow’s book about the transcendent moments in a Peak Experience and how much more likely it is to take play during artistic, athletic or religious activities. I had experienced these moments occasionally while writing and I wanted to know more, I wanted to know if the musicians I interviewed ever felt any of their songs came through them.

When and how did you realize that you wanted to pursue a degree in Psychology? Was that sparked by something in particular? And how long did it take for you to pursue this?

I read Carl Jung’s book Memories, Dreams and Reflections in my early teens and was fascinated by it. I was always a deep thinker, trying to make sense of the world I was brought up in, wondering if there was more to life other than the mundane. I was a spiritual seeker, which seemed to resonate with what made people tick. I’d already got my Masters in Counselling Psychology, but after a short bout of counseling, I realized I didn’t want to become a therapist. What I wanted to do was research and knew that if I went for a PhD at the college I was already attending in LA, I would have to write a dissertation.

Of all the musicians you talked to for the book, did anyone’s creative process surprise you, and how so?

I was surprised by American singer-songwriter and guitarist Stephen Bishop’s description of what gave him the drive to create. His stepfather hated rock and roll, and so Stephen would shut himself in the bedroom closet, trying to finish off a song or a melody before his angry stepfather returned home. That became his drive.

What did you find similar in all these artists regarding creativity?

Except for Stephen, they all had nurturing parents or grandparents, or in the case of George Harrison, the man down the street, who encouraged them with their creativity. Another thing that surprised me was they all had humility, and this was because of the Peak Experience they felt while composing songs or playing their instrument. At times it would feel as if the words or the music was coming through them. Certain songs they had no memory of writing, it was as if they were channels to a higher power.

I’d like to ask you about a few particular artists, starting with Sinead O’Connor whom we lost last year. You wrote in her intro that you “had the feeling she rarely felt listened to.” Can you elaborate more on your thoughts about her and how she may have confirmed that to you?

After doing my interview with Sinead, she came to my house in Malibu a couple of times with one of her friends and her small son. She wanted to borrow my daughter’s old teddy bear for her son to play with. I could tell she enjoyed being there and talking to me and my kids. I think the questions I’d asked her in our interview touched something deep inside her and allowed her to feel that someone understands her. Maybe because there was a sense of familiarity, she felt safe enough to open up.

Regarding Peter Green, you wrote that it was the first time you had seen “creativity become a disruptive force.” Knowing him personally, can you describe him from that earliest time to how you saw him change, personally and creatively? Was he such a sensitive soul?

Peter was a sensitive soul; you could just tell when you saw him play. His persona, when I first met him while both of us were in our late teens, showed him as an East End lad with mutton chop sideburns and a great sense of humor. A couple of years later when Fleetwood Mac was in full swing as a Blues band, gone were the mutton chops, jeans, and short hair, replaced by long hair, velvet trousers, and robes. It was the beginning of his dissatisfaction with playing the circuit for money, and the beginning of what was to become schizophrenia. I would see him occasionally during this time either on meds or without, but although I heard he did the occasional gig, I never got to see him play again.

I thought John McVie’s enthusiasm for creating music was very enlightening since we often see him as the quiet one, but his love for the art is unmistakable. Any comments on what you learned from him?

John was just always a very cool guy! It was a treat to interview him having known him for many years. He really opened up and revealed another side of himself.

You spoke with blues artists like BB King, Buddy Guy, and John Lee Hooker. Did you find they reached down to more of a spiritual place than modern songwriters tend to do?

The word ‘Spiritual’ has a different meaning when spoken about by one of the blues artists, it is more in the context of the religion, of their church. The other musicians described their Peak Experience as spiritual, as an all-encompassing feeling of a connection to something greater than themselves, when the moment, whether playing or writing a song, can become timeless.

Eric Clapton talked about “potentially life-taking experiences.” How did you see music saved his life?

Like any artist, these moments of feeling a connection to a higher power through their music which they all describe, feed their soul and allow them to have a deeper understanding of themselves. A lot of the musicians I interviewed, including Eric, believed they were here for a reason, a sense of destiny. He felt he’d been handed something to carry on in this generation and with that came a very strong sense of responsibility to do exactly that.

Was modelling satisfying for you?

It was for a short while, usually the photographers were young and easy to work with. I danced along catwalks to great music instead of the more traditional walk. I enjoyed working with Pattie, and it was during a time when models, photographers, and musicians often hung out together. It was fun until I needed to find out more about life.

What inspires you today?

Writing inspires me, connecting with other people, a beautiful sunset or sunrise, nature in general. Listening to music, dancing, and discussing creativity.

Who was the first real rock star you ever met and how/when did you meet them?

George Harrison in 1964. My sister introduced me to him when they both started going out with each other.

What song did you obsess over the most as a kid? And what about it do you think made it so much fun?

I was obsessed with listening to Buddy Holly when I was about eleven or twelve. It touched something deep inside me but also some of his songs made me want to dance.

What did you love – and not love – about living in Africa in your early childhood?

I loved the smell of the earth, the big skies during the day, and the twinkling stars at night. I didn’t like and was scared of the snakes.

What was something you learned about yourself while writing Jennifer Juniper that maybe you hadn’t realized before?

I have tenacity, even through the rejections from publishers, I just kept writing and never thought for a minute I would give it up. I felt as though I had found my voice and how it felt being true to myself.

And lastly, what’s up next for you?

Talking at the 50th anniversary at the BeatleFest in New York this coming weekend!! Just enjoying life, my family, my friends and being open to what presents itself next.

GREAT BRITISH LIFE

From modelling in Carnaby Street in the swinging 60s to meditating with the Beatles in India and hanging out in the studio with Fleetwood Mac as they recorded Rumours, Jenny Boyd has lived an extraordinary rock and roll life.

She was married to Mick Fleetwood (twice) and drummer Ian Wallace, who played with artists including The Eagles, and was the inspiration for Donovan’s hippy anthem Jennifer Juniper, while her sister, model Pattie, was married to George Harrison and Eric Clapton.

In her 30s, Jenny returned to education, studying for a bachelor’s degree, followed by an MA in counselling psychology and then a PhD, for which she needed a dissertation subject.

Having spent her life around some of the most famous musicians in the world, she was fascinated by their creative process and embarked on a series of interviews to try and get to the heart of their songwriting.

The result was possibly the starriest ever piece of academic work – featuring George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Joni Mitchell, Eric Clapton, Graham Nash and many more, it reads like a who’s who of 20th century music.

It has been published as a book in the UK and the US under different titles, and now Jenny, who divides her time between rural Norfolk, London and LA, has written a revised version, re-named Icons of Rock, which features several of the interviews transcribed in full for the first time.
There are also new interviews with contemporary artists including Jacob Collier, songwriter Eg White, who has worked with Adele and Dua Lipa, and Oscar-winning composer Atticus Ross.

‘I had a near drowning accident in Hawaii,’ says Jenny, speaking to Norfolk magazine from an Airbnb in Northamptonshire following an appearance at Oundle Festival of Literature.

'That was my wake-up call to actually start doing something in the world and so that’s when I went to college for the first time.
‘I’d always heard that you should write about what you know, and I knew about musicians because I’d lived with them. I also thought, well I’ve never felt creative, although I love to write, so if I do this, that will hopefully help other people who also don’t feel creative.’

She was also inspired by psychologist Abraham Maslow’s book in which he writes about the ‘peak experience’ of creativity.

‘Say when you’re writing a song and the words just come from nowhere, where you’re what they call nowadays “in the zone”,’ says Jenny. ‘I asked questions such as: was their creativity encouraged as children? What gives them the drive to create?, Had they ever experienced this peak experience? What did drugs and alcohol do, did they enhance creativity or block it? Did they believe that we all have the potential to be creative? ’

Jenny’s first interviewees included George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Mick Fleetwood and his fellow members of Fleetwood Mac, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Bonnie Raitt and Don Henley.

Then others started to come to her as if by magic.

‘I would think about somebody else I’d really love to contact, then suddenly someone would say “oh did you know Ravi Shankhar’s in town”. It happened like that one after the other, so in a way I was in my own peak experience writing this, and when I was writing it things just came to me and it was just an extraordinary experience,’ says Jenny.

With Paul McCartney and George Harrison in Rishikesh

The answers were illuminating, and the result is a truly intimate portrait of some of the most legendary names in rock.

‘What these musicians said is that they’re kind of a servant to the inspiration and the creativity and my feeling was that there wasn’t any sense of ego because they just said it’s like they channel it in a way as if it’s something higher than them,’ says Jenny.

‘Graham Nash said that he knew when he was younger that he would be famous one day. And others said that they had a sort of sense of destiny, which I asked them about.

‘The other thing that all of them felt that they were nurtured - they had either musical parents or grandparents, or the man down the street like George Harrison, they had someone there encouraging them.

‘Some of them actually had had real problems with drugs and alcohol. David Crosby said to begin with it was inspiring and it would loosen you up, but in the end he couldn’t do anything, he couldn’t write music, it had just got too much. Joni Mitchell would talk about the different kinds of ways of getting high, and say that the long distance runner of them all is the straight mind. A lot of them were able to talk objectively what the effects drugs and alcohol have.’
Jenny conducted the interviews between 1988 and 1990 and they were first published in book form in 1992.

She recorded the interviews, but felt burdened by being the caretakers of so many tapes containing such personal revelations, so now only a few of them remain.

‘After about 20 to 25 years of protecting the tapes with my life, I thought “I can’t do this any more”,’ says Jenny.

‘I didn’t want anybody to be able to steal them or copy them, so I destroyed them, except for eight and the eight that I kept were Don Henley, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Ravi Shankhar, a jazz drummer called Tony Williams, Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell,’ she says.

And in the new version of the book, those eight interviews have been transcribed in full for the first time.

‘I was transcribing these interviews and what they were saying was so inspiring, like Joni Mitchell. As I was typing I was still just amazed and felt so fortunate and grateful that I was in a position where I could actually interview them and listening to what they were saying, all these years later is still so current.’

‘I also wanted to know what the is difference between the music world now compared to 35 years ago, so I interviewed current musicians like Jacob Collier, Eg White, who’s a songwriter who writes for people like Adele, and Atticus Ross who’s a musician and a songwriter, but also writes film scores with Trent Reznor.’
And circling back to Jenny’s feeling that she was not a creative person, she also interviews Sarah Warwick, who was instrumental in helping her to find her own (singing) voice.

In the 1990s, Sarah was a pop star who performed under the name Sarah Washington and now runs singing groups, of which Jenny has been a member.

‘She believes that anyone can write a song. She is also a survivor of cancer and the healing power of music is what I wanted to allude to.’

Jenny’s creativity has flourished in recent years. In 2020, just before the pandemic hit, her autobiography Jennifer Juniper: A Journey Beyond the Muse, was published. It is a jaw-dropping account of her life at the centre of two incredible moments in popular culture – swinging 60s London and California in the 1970s.

Speaking back in 2020, she described herself as being like ‘a little leaf’, who blew where the breeze took her, not ever realising that she was part of something so seismic.

Jenny grew up in Kenya and London. She became a house model for Foale and Tuffin in Carnaby Street when she was a teenager and became part of the extraordinary music scene when her sister, Pattie, began dating George Harrison and she started seeing Mick Fleetwood.

‘You’re young and you don’t think “oh one day in 50 years this will be extraordinary” or “this will be amazing”, because when you’re that age you’re just so excited to be 16 or 17 and everything that is opening up to you. So the fact that I was with Mick and Mick was just in this local Notting Hill Gate band and Pattie was just with George and we’d see the Beatles, it didn’t feel like an enormous deal, it just felt like “this is life now, this is great, we go to clubs and we love dancing”. And it’s so funny in a way now to look back on it because it was very different to today in many ways, there was such an innocence.”
Curious about the world and spirituality, Jenny was drawn to San Francisco during the Summer of Love.

She later travelled with Pattie and The Beatles on their famous trip to Rishikesh, India, to meditate with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

'We would see the Beatles’ songs evolve from nothing.,’ Jenny told the EDP in 2020. ‘It could be anything, it could be John Lennon saying "I didn’t sleep very well last night" and then suddenly they would start coming up with lyrics,' she says.

Back in London, Jenny ran the Beatles’s first retail store, Apple, and then her own boutique, Juniper, named after Donovan’s song about her.

Jenny with Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac.

The 70s wasn’t such an innocent decade. Jenny married Mick Fleetwood and they had two daughters, Amelia and Lucy. Jenny accompanied the band from their early gigs together in rural England to Los Angeles, where they met Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham.

As they rose to international fame the constant touring, coupled with drug and alcohol abuse, led to heartbreak and divorce.

‘Coming to LA was quite exciting to begin with, they met Stevie and Lindsey and watching that progress was exciting, but then pretty quickly, because they had to get the first record out in record time, that’s where the cocaine came in and the late nights in the studios.'

By the time they were recording the landmark album Rumours, the drama was all-encompassing.

‘It was lovely going to the studio and listening to the music, but on the other hand I was the only one that had children and I would long for their father to be around, so there were lots of positives and negatives in the whole scenario,’ says Jenny.

‘Sometimes it was just heartbreaking, you’d hear these songs from Stevie about Lindsey or Chris about John and Mick and I were really struggling, but my love of music was so encompassing and it was a really beautiful album.’

That heady period is the inspiration for the book, and now TV series, Daisy Jones and the Six, which stars Norfolk actor Sam Claflin and is on Jenny’s watchlist.
‘People keep telling me about it. I've got to see it,’ she says.

After completing her PhD, Jenny worked with the Sierra Tucson alcohol and drug treatment centre, based in Arizona. In 1997, she married the architect David Levitt and today, in addition to her writing she is a public speaker. This month she is due to appear at the 50th anniversary Fest for Beatles Fans in New York.

We speak not long after the release of the final Beatles track Now and Then. The song was completed in 2022 and, thanks to advances in technology, it features all four Beatles performing together for the last time.

As someone who was so close to The Beatles, what does she think of it?

'It's pretty amazing,' she says. 'How it came about is extraordinary and I think very moving.'

Icons of Rock: In Their Own Words, by Jenny Boyd, is out now published by John Blake.

PODCAST INTERVIEW

‘Icons of Rock – In Their Own Words’ by Jenny Boyd is out now. Further details can be found at thejennyboyd.com. Audio version of this podcast coming soon. Visit: The Strange Brew Website here (Offsite link).

Photo by Steve Bainbridge

We delve into the fascinating layers of Jenny Boyd’s life and the genesis of her book ‘Icons of Rock – In Their Own Words.’ From her roots in the 1960s London music scene alongside sister Pattie Boyd who was married to George Harrison, to her early marriage to Mick Fleetwood and the vibrant days of Fleetwood Mac. Jenny shares intimate moments from the Beatles’ ashram in India, the magic of Fleetwood Mac’s evolution, and the creative whirlwind of the 60s counterculture in San Francisco and London.

Jenny reveals candid conversations with over rock legends, including George Harrison, Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash. Central to her discussion with Jason Barnard is the enigma of creativity, exploring how iconic songs seemingly emerge from the subconscious. Jenny’s insights underscore the significance of nurturing one’s inner creativity and embracing the authentic inner voice.

I’m really pleased to talk to you because when I read ‘Icons of Rock’, it’s very different from many rock biographies. I’m assuming it comes from a different origin to the way that people speak to artists or how artists explain their story.

Well, the original interviews that I did were 1988 to 1990. It was for a PhD dissertation. I didn’t even think it was going to be a book when this all started off. Of course, we had George Harrison in the family, Eric Clapton and Mick Fleetwood – my ex, and all the band. I was then with drummer Ian Wallace, who was going out on the road with Bonnie Raitt and Crosby, Stills and Nash, Don Henley. So, there were a lot of musicians that I knew and knew well. So that’s how it started. It was only after about 40 interviews that I thought, maybe this could be a book.

It’s a fantastic overview of music and stories, but also in this new edition, you also have current artists.

Yes, we’ve got Jacob Collier and also Atticus Ross, who won many Grammys for films including The Social Network. He and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails are doing more film music now. So I thought, well, that’s interesting. And then Eg White, who’s a terrific songwriter for Adele and many others. And then another musician called Sarah Warwick, who used to sing teenage, boppy kind of music, always on the road. She’s actually a three-time cancer survivor, and she changed the way she uses her music, and she gets people to write their own songs. I used to be in her singing group, so we have her too.

For twenty-something-years I carried the 75 cassette tapes of the original interviews with me wherever I went. I’d moved from LA back to England during that time, moving around from here to there but the responsibility of keeping them safe was getting too much. I didn’t want them to be changed into MP3 because I couldn’t trust anyone. It’s pretty dynamic stuff. So in the end, I started tearing them up, which is just awful. Then in my madness, I kept just eight cassettes, and thought, well, I can keep those, and I’ll have room to put them somewhere safe. A few years later the eight cassettes were transferred to MP3s through a friend, so I had my interview with George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Don Henley, Joni Mitchell, Ravi Shankar, Graham Nash, Ringo and jazz drummer, Tony Williams. So, for the first time, as well as pieces of the original interviews from all the other musicians from my first book, I have transcribed the whole of these eight interviews that have never been seen before. So this new book is quite different.

Music’s always been a real thread through your life, all back from the start, it seems.

Oh, yeah. We grew up in Africa. My first six years were there. When I came back to England, I was about eight or nine years old. My sister, Pattie, had bought some records, real rock and roll records. ‘See You Later, Alligator’, all these fifties songs. I just loved it. I wanted to dance and we would jive together. So I knew I loved that sort of rock and roll beat.

You met Mick Fleetwood at quite an early age.

We were both 16. I was still at school and I was in Notting Hill Gate. After school, I would go with my friends to a coffee bar. That was obviously where Mick had seen me and told himself, I heard later, that’s the girl I’m going to marry. He was in a band called The Cheynes, a local Notting Hill Gate band. So he would see me coming back from school. Then gradually he asked me if I’d like to watch The Cheynes play. It was in Brentwood. It was the first time I’d seen live music. And it was great. A lot of R&B.

Was it around that period that through your sister, Pattie, you met George and some of the Beatles?

Yeah. Pattie was in Hard Day’s Night. She was playing the part of a schoolgirl and she then asked me if I’d like to meet George. I remember she was living in Chelsea with friends. I must have been about 15 maybe. I went over and met George and I thought it was going to be an incredible moment, but it wasn’t. He was just a regular guy, quite small and not this larger than life image one had. He was lovely, very easy to be with. Then he’d come to our family Sunday lunches. It was very sweet.

It was an amazingly creative time for artists and musicians. You were around that London scene and going into the clubs and being around many creative people.

I’d left school because I then became a model and Pattie was also a model. It seemed to be that a lot of people we knew would go to clubs. To begin with, because I was going out with Mick, I’d go to the Flamingo in Soho while he’d do the all nighters. There’d be Eric Clapton on guitar and John Mayall, with his blues band. So I’d go to those clubs, but then we’d also go to clubs with Pattie and George and they were the Scotch of St. James’s and the Crazy Elephant. That’s where we’d see all the musicians of that time. There was no sense of hierarchy or fans or anything like that. It was just hanging out, dancing to great Motown music. It was wonderful.

So when did you become in the orbit of Donovan? He wrote ‘Jennifer Juniper’ for you. How did that happen?

What happened was that in 1967, I decided I wanted to find out more about life and a friend of mine who lived in San Francisco said she was opening up a shop. “Would I like to come and help her with it?” I had enough money for three months rent or a one-way ticket to San Francisco. So I decided to go off and it was amazing. I would go and listen to all those amazing San Francisco bands, like The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin. It was as if there was a subculture and it was very different. Then I remember telling Pattie and George about it and saying, “You have to come over. This is incredible.” But by the time they came over, it was August and all the good hippies, real hippies had left and gone to Marin County or Sausalito. Instead, all the kids had been told to turn on tune in and drop out right across America.

So they were all in Haight Ashbury. Pattie and George arrived and then they wanted to take some acid before they went for their walk to get the vibe. It was all fine for about two minutes. Then suddenly all these people realised it was George. They just started following us and it got quite frightening because we were pretty out of it anyway. I remember him sitting down in the Panhandle and someone said, “Oh, give him a guitar, give him a guitar.” And someone did. Everyone was shouting out, “Play us some chords. Come on, George, play us some chords.” So George then went C, D, E, and gave the guitar away. We started walking back to the limo because it wouldn’t drive down Haight Ashbury. As we walked closer and closer to it, the crowds just got bigger and bigger and it started getting a little bit hostile. Once we were in the car Pattie and George decided I’d been in San Francisco long enough, six months was long enough!

While I was staying with them Maharishi was giving a talk in the Hilton Hotel. We all went along to listen to him after which he wanted us to go to Bangor in Wales to get initiated. We started doing our transcendental meditation, but then Brian Epstein died so we all had to come back early. I remember driving back with Pattie and George. As they dropped me off in London, George said, “Would you like to come to India with us? We’re going to Maharishi’s ashram”. I said, “That’s amazing, how can I ever thank you?” And he said “Just be yourself.”

But there were two months we had to wait before we went to the ashram. They just were starting to open up the Apple shop and asked me if I would work there. While I was working there, Donovan came trotting down the stairs one day. I’d met him before. He wanted to know about San Francisco, meditation and all this kind of thing. Then he asked me to his manager’s house one day and he said he’d got a song for me. And he just started singing ‘Jennifer Juniper’. I was pretty shy in those days. So I didn’t know quite where to look because it was obviously a sort of declaration of love or he’d got a crush on me. But it’s a lovely song and I often hear it. I hear people who’ve called their kids Juniper. For some reason, it really touched people.

You mentioned the Maharishi, another theme of your book is sources of creativity. In Rishikesh you had Donovan, The Beatles, Mike Love. It was the spark of so many great songs. You were there watching this play out.

Yes, we had our own little bungalow set of rooms and everybody else further down the track had theirs. John, Paul and George would get up onto the roof of the bungalow and Cynthia, Pattie and I, would sit there too, listening to them playing.

I remember hearing John saying, “Well, I didn’t sleep very well last night”. Then they’d start playing their guitars and start turning it into a song. That happened a lot. It happened with Prudence, Mia Farrow’s sister too. She’d overdone the meditation and gone into a sort of trance and nobody could get her out of it. So I went in there with my flute from San Francisco. And John was in there with his guitar singing ‘Dear Prudence’. ‘Bungalow Bill’ was another song. Whatever was going on in the ashram, that’s what they made a song from. It was incredible, it’s like every day they’d be singing and creating more songs.

You also mentioned your former husband Ian Wallace. You’ve got interviews with members of Crosby, Stills Nash. One of the interesting aspects Graham was talking about was that it’s very hard to write simple songs like ‘Our House’.

Right, it seems so simple, but it’s more complicated. I suppose it’s like Picasso doing a painting, he doesn’t need to do one, but, he had to go a long way before he could do one line. Graham is actually one of the eight cassettes I saved. So his whole interview is in the book.

Graham spoke about how he was drifting apart from The Hollies and followed his own path. Maybe that’s another thread – where songs come from. For many of the artists, songs come to them, they just arrive.

That’s the bit I loved. There’s a psychologist called Abraham Maslow, and he was the one that termed it Peak Experience in the fifties. So I asked them all if they’d experienced this feeling when they’re writing a song, and songs, as you say, just come from nowhere. Or if they’re on stage singing together, there are often times when they all get tuned in with each other. I think it was Graham that said they would all start the wrong verse at the same time. They would get so connected.

It was interesting because a lot of musicians would say that they often got their lyrics at night. They would be in a dream or just in a half sleep when lyrics would come to them and if they didn’t write them down, they would disappear. At least one person said that if they didn’t write it down, they would actually hear the song somewhere else. It’s almost as if songs are all around us, but you just tune in and connect with them. It’s quite magical.

You’ve had your own moments of creativity with ‘Purple Dancer’. That was originally one of your poems, wasn’t it?

It was after Peter Green had left Fleetwood Mac, and they were a little bit desperate for lyrics. Danny Kirwan came up to me and said, “You write poems. Can I have a look at them?” So he saw that poem and made a song out of it. The other time was with Chris McVie. I think it was before she’d been asked to join the band, but they were still in need of songs. So she and I wrote one together while we were staying at Kiln House called ‘Jeweled Eyed Judy’.

Quite an interesting experience was the communal living of Fleetwood Mac, you were all sharing a house and again you’re there at a hub of creativity.

Yes. It was sort of crazy, but also inspiring at the same time, because at one point, while they were recording Bare Trees, and they had the Stones’ recording truck outside the front door. I was the only one with children after Jeremy Spencer left, he and his wife had a couple of little kids. But I think he was there for when the Stones had their truck. But after he left, I was the only one that had children. All the road crew would be there, there were three floors and they’d be running in and out of the house. A lot going on at times. But then you’d also hear beautiful music coming out of the rehearsal room, of Danny singing and everyone playing their instruments.

And you were there from the UK to the US and the permutations of the group as they evolved, band members came and went. They had struggles before eventually, Buckingham Nicks arrived and things lifted again.

And took off. I remember listening to them, when they were first together and they were rehearsing and seeing what came out of it. I knew immediately they were going to be huge. There was something about their harmonies and the songwriters and it was just like it was meant to happen. It’s like a jigsaw finding the missing piece. It happened pretty quickly.

In the book as well, it does seem to come across in the conversation you have with Stevie Nicks about the moments where she’s waiting tables and she’s still struggling, but she’s still got that incredible drive that eventually paid off.

That’s it, because the drive is definitely one of the questions that I asked all the musicians, what gives you the drive? It’s this thing where they just know this is what they have to do. So there was almost a sense of destiny there too. Of course, pretty much all of these are famous musicians. So they’re not just musicians, they are musicians who actually became very famous. I think a lot of that is the drive. It’s the drive and probably timing.

Don Henley as well. You first came across The Eagles when you came over with Fleetwood Mac, is that right?

Yeah, I’d heard The Eagles when we were living in Hampshire. I think we’d only just arrived in LA and they were playing in Santa Monica and so we went to see them. I think we were probably still jet lagged but they were great. For me, it was very exciting going to LA because we could listen live to many more musicians than we did when we were living in Benifold – that was the name of the house in Hampshire. It was very exciting. It felt very buzzy.

In the discussion you had with Don, he talks about moments of where those moments of inspiration come from, like ‘The Boys Of Summer’, and it seemed to come from his subconscious.

Yes, but that’s the thing. That’s that same thing as peak experience, it’s the same as synchronicity when everything come together. Joni Mitchell speaks a lot about synchronicity and what part that’s played in her singing life. Pretty much all the musicians talk about things that just sort of appear. Nowadays we call it being in the zone.

In terms of the conversation you had with Joni as well, there were aspects of where she’d sometimes use the more difficult elements of her life.

That’s one of the questions I asked, “Do you need to have the broken heart? Do you need to have unhappy events where you need to pour it out in a song?” Most of them said they had in the past. I think Don Henley says now he’s trying to change that, to be able to write without having the broken heart.

There’s a moment where Joni describes helping to craft ‘Goodbye, Pork Pie Hat’ and Charlie Mingus is dying. It’s interesting how the different sources of inspiration that artists tap into for songs. That’s another example.

Yes, I think she’s extraordinary. Obviously a lot of her interview is stories that she tells, and she tells it so beautifully, so eloquently. I think that’s probably like the songs that she sings too. The ‘Big Yellow Taxi’. She turns them into songs.

Given that you’ve got this new span in this new edition, you can also see the shifts in the music industry and the different ways that songs are created. But also the different ways that the media is spread out. It also impacts the artists.

That’s right. That’s why I wanted people from now, more current musicians, so that we can see how different the music world is now compared to when I did the first interviews in 1988 to 1990.

It’s so different. You have someone like Eg White and Atticus too, who talk about how we’ve got Spotify now. We’ve got social media, we’ve got all these different things and people don’t necessarily have to have record companies. So it was great having that so you can just see the difference and it’s huge. I think it might have been Atticus who said that, or Eg White, that if the Beatles were here now, I don’t know if they would be that famous. What’s their social media like? how many people are following them? It’s just the whole music world has turned upside down in that way.

You’ve also had a memoir out as well, which reflects your life.

That was called ‘Jennifer Juniper, A Journey Beyond the Muse’. It came out a little while ago. In fact, I’m giving a talk at the Beatles Fest in New York in January. I’m talking about both my books. They all kind of match up because in the Jennifer Juniper book, I’m talking about just being yourself, just learning to “just be yourself.” That’s the message. In this one, it’s more about getting in touch with your own creativity, listening to the voice within. We all have the potential to be creative, you just have to listen to that inner voice. So they’re linked in that way. They’re saying similar stuff.

Given your PhD you’re able to create the books that you have that are related to the music world, in a different way. For example, with ‘Icons Of Rock’, you asked artists questions that many people don’t usually say.

That’s right. I think pretty much all of them said, I’ve never had an interview like this before. Usually it’s like, what do you have for breakfast or something. But I think because I had just got my Masters in counselling psychology, I was in a position where they knew I’d been part of the music world, through being married to Mick for a long time, living all together with Fleetwood Mac and all of that. So they knew that, but also I think learning to be a therapist meant there were times when I’d ask a question to which you’d get an answer or a bit of an answer. Often you don’t want to have a silence, people get awkward in silence, but it was great because I knew when to be silent, which then often would take them deeper and get closer to what they’re really saying. There was a lot of support when the book came out. At the moment I’m sending the book off to many of the musicians. Mick’s got his copy and Ringo’s been given his copy. I’ve had a lot of great feedback. I just heard from Eg White today, who texted saying he’s just got the book and feels so honoured to be part of it. So it’s very cool.

Excellent. Jenny, it’s been amazing to talk to you. It’s been fantastic to read ‘Icons of Rock’, and I heartily recommend it.

Thank you very much. It has been fun.

INTERVIEW

EXCLUSIVE: Close friends with The Beatles and The Stones, married Mick Fleetwood (twice) and a lovelorn Donovan even wrote a song about her. Now, Jenny Boyd shares her extraordinary memories of a life at the beating heart of the Swinging Sixties.

Photo by Steve Bainbridge

When Jenny Boyd was 15, and still at school, her elder, model sister Pattie brought a new boyfriend home. He was none other than George Harrison. “We knew he was in this group called The Beatles, but it could have been any new boyfriend coming home to meet us,” recalls Jenny who is now a youthful 75 years old. “Everything is exciting when you are 15, so I wasn’t overawed that he was a musician.”

By day she was studying for her O-Levels, but by night she was drinking scotch and coke, and tapping ash from Gitanes cigarettes into oversized onyx ashtrays, with the music turned up to full volume.

“I was very aware of how luxurious the flat was, but I didn’t take any of it very seriously and I’d be back to school the next day,” says Jenny, whose beguiling, beautifully written memoir about her extraordinary life is out in paperback on February 23.

Introduced to London’s music and cultural scene via her older sister, she immersed herself in the Swinging 60s, becoming friends with many of the most famous musicians of the era. Even the title of her memoir – Jennifer Juniper: A Journey Beyond The Muse – is taken from a song written about her by the Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan.
She soon signed up as a dancer on the ITV show Ready Steady Go! where she shared the green room with the likes of Sandie Shaw and Dusty Springfield. Each time she left the studio, she found herself mobbed by Beatles fans desperate for her autograph.
“There were positive and negative implications to having a Beatle as my sister’s boyfriend,” she explains, looking back on her amazing teenage years.

At school, the taunts of female Mods shouting “Beatle lover!” would echo around the corridors. Being a young woman at that time posed other challenges, too. After all, this was long before the #MeToo era.

“I would go to school on the Tube and there was always some man with an umbrella going up my skirt,” she recalls. “I didn’t know you could say ‘Stop it!’ or ‘How dare you!’. In that way, innocence didn’t help. But although there were sleazy guys, I knew to avoid them. Women have a voice now and they speak out. We are at the beginning of a new era.”

With her blonde hair, doe-ish eyes and impeccable connections, Jenny soon fell into modelling. “I wasn’t tall, but I was the spirit of the new look that designers wanted.”

Later, she married Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac – twice, in fact, with a divorce in between. Together they had two daughters, Amelia and Lucy. Jenny’s own upbringing had been very disruptive. Born in Guildford, Surrey, she was just a toddler when her parents separated. Her pilot father suffered what might now be recognised as PTSD following the Second World War, and her mother remarried a man prone to violent rages.
This fractured childhood left her beset with anxiety, vulnerable and may have contributed to her future issues with drugs. She shared her first joint with George and Pattie when she was a teenager.

“I didn’t feel anything from it, so George picked up a wooden animal and held it in front of me, bouncing it up and down and speaking in a funny voice to make me laugh,” she recalls of her first foray into drugs. Years later, addiction would almost cost her her life in a near-drowning incident.
In August 1967, she was with The Beatles when they first met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of Transcendental Meditation, in London. Mick Jagger and his girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull were also there, together with Paul McCartney and his girlfriend Jane Asher.

“Paul was just charming,” she recalls. “Really funny and nice; there was none of the grit that John [Lennon] had, in my view.”

She remembers being very shy of Lennon. “I knew he had a quick wit and I was a bit intimidated by him. He seemed so bright, and I didn’t think I was bright. But he was also very sweet.”

Then 19 years old, Jenny was excited by the Maharishi’s teachings, so when The Beatles asked her to join them on their fabled trip to visit him in India in 1968, she jumped at the chance.

“There was a feeling of absolute camaraderie between the band,” she recalls. “Our little party would spend time sitting on the roof of our bungalow in India. John, Paul, and George playing their guitars and singing their latest songs to each other – songs that were later to be heard on their next album.”

She remembers McCartney and Lennon being of “one mind” at the time. “After all, they had known each other since they were kids. They had been on this journey to fame, and it united them.”

On her return to London, Jenny found herself right at the heart of fashion and pop culture.

“I met the singer Donovan through Pattie, and we chatted for ages about meditation and the Maharishi. And then he asked me for lunch at his manager’s house. He got his guitar and said, ‘I have a song I have to play you’. I didn’t know where to look. It was like a declaration of love, courtly love, and I realised he was talking about me. He was making an overture.”

The song in question was Jennifer Juniper, and inside the box set of Donovan’s album A Gift From A Flower To A Garden there is a photograph of Jenny herself.

Although there was no formal relationship, Jenny does admit to “doing some kissing” with Donovan. “I went to Cornwall with him, but I wasn’t up for a relationship,” she adds. “Although he did later propose to me, after I’d broken up with Mick.
“Mick first asked me to marry him after I got back from India. We had broken up when we were younger.

“But I thought, ‘Gosh, that’s very grown up. Married!’” At the time she was living the hippie lifestyle in Wales. Mick came down to lure her away. “I was playing the part of cooking brown rice on the open fire and weeing outside, even though it was the thick of winter,” she remembers.

“Mick said, ‘What on earth are you doing here? I get that it’s back to nature, but it’s f*****g freezing’.”

They married in 1970, and Jenny joined Fleetwood Mac on the road. “A lot of cheap hotels and driving through blizzards,” is how she recalls those early years as the band built up their reputation.

Jenny has a habit of unspooling her memories in this freeform way. She sounds half her age, and you can imagine her dancing like a winsome flower child, buffeted by the twin forces of love and curiosity, unsure which shore she will wash up upon.

Her tempestuous relationship with Mick – which involved numerous shifts of continent with their two young daughters – was built around their cocaine drug habit.
This span out of control as he went from highly regarded musician to global superstar, and it took a toll on Jenny’s health.

“I would get ill each time we got on the road. I wanted stability,” she confesses. “I always had visions of a little cottage and reading fairy stories with my two young daughters. Instead, we were touring, our nerves on the edge.”

They got divorced in 1974, but were married again briefly in 1977. “Even in the process of getting divorced, we were drawn together,” she explains. “But cocaine is a really evil drug: it kind of chills your heart. Mick was starting to look a bit like Rasputin.”

He had also started an affair with the band’s singer, Stevie Nicks.
“I realised I had to take the children back to England if I wanted them to respect their father,” Jenny adds.

Still a freewheeling force, in 1984, she married Ian Wallace, the drummer in the band King Crimson. On their honeymoon in Hawaii, Jenny went swimming after ingesting synthetic magic mushrooms.

“I thought I could breathe underwater. I was mesmerised by the fish but came up spluttering and very nearly drowned,” she recalls with dread.

She made it back to shore – but reborn as a different version of herself. “I spent the next three months going to schools, talking to children, warning them about drugs and alcohol.” After that she dedicated herself to her studies, achieving a Masters degree in Counselling Psychology followed by a PhD.

“Before I nearly drowned, I had no plan. But it helped me discover who I really was.”

In 1997 she married architect David Levitt who, for the last 25 years, has provided the steadiness and dependability she so obviously craved in her younger years.

“David is fun and he is stable,” Jenny says. “We trust one another, but I will always be friends with Mick.”

INTERVIEW

EXCLUSIVE: In her latest release, Jenny Boyd reminisces on her life hanging out with rock royalty.

Finding eight old cassettes hidden in a cupboard transported former model Jenny Boyd right back to the 1960s. The sister of Pattie Boyd and former sister-in-law of both George Harrison and Eric Clapton, Jenny had conducted interviews with the greats of the rock world back in the late 80s/early 90s for a book which was originally published in 1992.

And decades later she has come across those interviews again – including George Harrison, Ringo Starr and Joni Mitchell – which form part of an updated version of the book, now titled Icons Of Rock.

“Hearing George brought back all of the memories,” says Jenny. “You hear their voice and go straight back there.

Jenny, now 75, was at the epicentre of the Swinging Sixties, even travelling to India with the Beatles to visit the controversial Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. In the 1970s she married drummer Mick Fleetwood, not once but twice.

Does she pinch herself that she was at so many pivotal moments in music history – from the creation of the Beatles’ White Album to being in the studio when Fleetwood Mac recorded the album Rumours?

“That was just how it was,” says Jenny, nonchalantly. “It was incredible really when you look back.

“That’s what a lot of people wish they had now. The spirit of it, living in the moment.” Jenny had known George from when she was 16 years old. In 1968 she was invited by the Beatles to Rishikesh along with Pattie, during the band’s “transcendental meditation” phase. By then Pattie had been married to George for two years. “At the time I was a very shy 19-year-old,” says Jenny. “I found it so exciting.”

And regarding the Beatles’ songwriting, she said: “It’s almost as if they didn’t have to think about the songs. They were transmitters, they just picked it up. “They would have their guitars, sitting on top of the bungalow – then came the song Bungalow Bill. “All the songs they wrote were what was happening then. They were so in the moment.

“One song John Lennon got on the rooftop." He said, ‘I couldn’t sleep last night’, and that became I’m So Tired.”

READ MORE: Jenny Boyd on life at the heart of the the Swinging Sixties

One Beatle not in her book is Sir Paul McCartney, because his late wife Linda, a vegetarian and campaigner, turned her down.

“I did originally approach Paul,” says Jenny. “I spoke to Linda to see if I could interview him. “She said, ‘Do you eat meat?’ I said, ‘I eat chicken’. She said, ‘Well chicken is meat, so no, he can’t’.

“I was almost tempted earlier this year to see if I could get hold of him, but it was a bit late. Somehow I’ll get a book to him…” Between them Pattie and Jenny inspired some of the best love songs from the 60s and 70s.

In Pattie’s case George Harrison wrote Something for her while Eric Clapton wrote Layla and Wonderful Tonight. Sixties star Donovan wrote Jennifer Juniper for Jenny, although their relationship was more of a friendship. “We were just part of the music world,” says Jenny, who also had a stint as a dancer on 60s show Ready Steady Go. “It’s so odd. Pattie had two guitarists, I had two drummers.”

Jenny married Mick Fleetwood in 1970, divorced, then married him again in 1977, finally divorcing in 1978. She subsequently married drummer Ian Wallace from King Crimson in 1984 which lasted until 1990. Still good friends with 76-year-old Mick, she recalls being in the studio in 1976 when Fleetwood Mac were recording Rumours, which became one of the biggest-selling records in history.

“It was heartbreaking because Mick and I were breaking up at the time,” says Jenny. “Everybody was breaking up. You would go to the studio and listen to Stevie Nicks singing her song about Lindsey Buckingham or Christine McVie about John. Then you would go into one of the little sitting areas and there would be someone weeping. It was such an extraordinary time.

“I heard them rehearsing and I knew, absolutely beyond a shadow of a doubt, this was going to be big.

“It was to do with the harmonies. That’s what the Beatles were about too. Every song was amazing.” Jenny and Pattie’s dad Colin, a pilot, was injured in the Second World War and badly traumatised. “I have vague recollections of this man just staring at walls,” says Jenny. “He didn’t communicate.”

She was determined her daughters Amy and Lucy would have a good relationship with their father.

Jenny now enjoys spending time writing, dividing her time between London and California, and regularly sees Pattie, 79, who is married to property developer Rod Weston.

“She’s great, doing very well.”

Before releasing the interviews in their entirety for Icons Of Rock, Jenny checked with Ringo, Eric and George’s widow Olivia.

Read on The Express Website.

INTERVIEW

Sixties It girl Jenny Boyd tells Will Hodgkinson about marrying Mick Fleetwood twice, going on retreat with the Beatles and coaxing rock stars to confess all.

Jenny Boyd in 1966

Jenny Boyd and I have just sat down outside a café by the Brunswick Centre in Bloomsbury, central London, to discuss her time with the Beatles, marrying Mick Fleetwood (twice) and her part in the Sixties at its most swinging when a group of excited schoolgirls start shrieking at the table next to us. I almost march up to them and say, “Do you mind? This is the woman Donovan wrote Jennifer Juniper about!” but I fear the reference may be lost on them. Instead Boyd, 75, tells them with polite authority that we are doing an interview, the girls apologise to the nice lady, and we get on with the story.

“I never felt I was creative,” says Boyd, who is slight and well spoken, with big eyes, an oval face and straight blonde hair with a fringe that evokes her Sixties model days. “Then, in 1984, on holiday in Maui with my second husband, the drummer Ian Wallace, we all had magic mushrooms. I went swimming and thought I could breathe underwater because I was one with the universe. Needless to say I started sputtering and panicking, got back to the shore, and Bonnie [of the rock-soul duo Delaney & Bonnie] gave me some Bach remedy. At that point I thought: I’m ready to get back into the world.”

Boyd is using a roundabout way of explaining how she came to write Icons of Rock, a collection of interviews with everyone from George Harrison (who was married to Boyd’s sister, Pattie) to Eric Clapton (who was married to Pattie too) and the 29-year- old multi-instrumentalist Jacob Collier (who wasn’t married to Pattie). The original version was published in 2013, but Boyd has updated the book to include interviews with a new generation of musicians. She does not take herself too seriously. Recounting one story, she asks herself: “Now, which husband was it?” (There have been three including her present one, the architect David Levitt. Or four, if you count Fleetwood twice.)

Perhaps because the interviews were not initially intended for publication but as research for a PhD, perhaps because she was already friendly with so many of the people involved, the results are remarkably unguarded. Joni Mitchell argues for the creative benefits of depression. Harrison admits that he spent an undue amount of time in front of the mirror asking: “Who am I?”

“It was Eric [Clapton] who said: ‘We never talk about this stuff,’” Boyd says on her delving into the psychological urge to make music and get on stage. “But they all experienced similar things, like hearing songs in their sleep. They all had an encouraging parent or teacher, someone to inspire them early on. And they all liked talking about it.”

The only one who said no was Bob Dylan. “Then my second husband, Ian, was playing a concert with him in Maui. Bob saw a copy of the book and took it away with him, and when he returned it the next day, loads of the pages had the corners folded. It proved he was interested.”

Boyd entered this world at the age of 16, when she went to Holland Park School in London (after years of being holed up in a series of convents) and met Fleetwood at a Notting Hill coffee shop in 1964. “At the time a friend of mine had a crush on him, so when I felt his foot go onto my foot I would be going: ‘Move it to the left!’ But we started going out, and by the time Pattie was with George [Harrison] we would go to the Scotch of St James and hang out with the Beatles, Keith Moon ... all of them.”

The artist John Dunbar once said of the Scotch, a Mayfair club beloved of rock stars, that unless you were very rich, very famous or wearing a very short miniskirt you were not getting in. “But it wasn’t ‘we’re famous’,” Boyd says of the scene. “It was ‘we’re cool’.”

Jenny with Mick Fleetwood in 2014

Boyd became a model for the designers Foale and Tuffin, for which she was taken out to New York for a catwalk show that almost ended in disaster. “I was so short-sighted that I couldn’t see the end of the runway and was very worried about falling off the end of it. As it happened, this great Motown music was playing, so I just danced about.”

What followed was a front row seat at Sixties rock’n’roll life: arriving in San Francisco in 1967 just as the Summer of Love was flowering, witnessing Ravi Shankar blow a few thousand hippies’ minds at the Monterey International Pop Festival, accompanying the Beatles to Rishikesh for their immersion in transcendental meditation. She remembers San Francisco as a short- lived utopia lasting only a few months before it all fell apart.

“I told George and Pattie that it was amazing and they had to come out. But they didn’t get there until August, by which point all the good hippies had left and the place was filled with people who had been told to turn on, tune in and drop out,” Boyd says. “We took acid, walked down Haight- Ashbury, and everyone started crowding around George. They were going: ‘Show us some chords, George!’ So he sat down on the pavement and played C, G and A on a guitar — the most basic ones. They thought they had been duped by their hero.”

As for the Rishikesh trip, Boyd says she loved the meditation the Maharishi espoused. It was the man himself she wasn’t so sure about. She was feeling extremely sick one morning and went to the Maharishi for help. “He said I was getting an ‘iceberg’, which is when you come out of meditation and still have unresolved karma. All I had to do was go back and meditate. The following morning the doctor came and told me I had dysentery.”

With Donovan in 1967.

Plenty of songs emerged from the period. John Lennon wrote Dear Prudence after Mia Farrow’s sister went into a meditational trance and couldn’t get out, Paul McCartney came up with the old-time pastiche Rocky Raccoon, and Donovan fashioned Hurdy Gurdy Man as an encapsulation of the Maharishi’s teachings. Donovan also wrote Jennifer Juniper, a ballad of courtly love for Boyd, shortly before leaving for India.

“Donovan said to me, ‘Let’s get married,’ but that wasn’t the plan at all,” she says of being proposed to by the folky troubadour. “The thing is, I didn’t find him terribly attractive. He was like a child from the time of King Arthur.”

A less spiritual period came a few years later, when Boyd was with her husband Fleetwood as he led his band Fleetwood Mac through the chaotic, fractious sessions for their 1977 classic Rumours. “Stevie [Nicks] and Lindsey [Buckingham] came to our house, I really liked them, and as soon as they joined it was obvious: this was going to be huge. At the same time cocaine was everywhere. With Mick it was all about Fleetwood Mac. I was the only one with kids so it wasn’t easy. It was a rebirth for the band, but where is the father for our children? I went down to Sausalito, where they were recording, and Stevie was singing songs about Lindsey, Christine [McVie] was singing songs about John [McVie], someone was sobbing, someone was storming out, and it was like that all the time: intense but beautiful.”

After Boyd separated from Fleetwood she left Los Angeles and moved into a little cottage in Cranleigh, Surrey, with her two daughters, around the corner from her sister Pattie and her husband of the time, Clapton. “He was like an annoying older brother,” she says of the guitarist. “He would goad me and I would end up crying, but it was alcoholic behaviour.”

Why did she marry Fleetwood twice? Wasn’t once enough? “Well, one reason was me saying ‘I’m going to make this work’,” she replies. “It wasn’t easy, because there was so much coke around. The other reason was the band was taking off, and we needed green cards, so we needed to be married.”

That answer helps to explain why all these musicians must have opened up to her. Bar the odd magic mushroom- inspired revelation, Jenny Boyd was the most sensible person at the rock’n’roll table.

Icons of Rock by Dr Jenny Boyd (John Blake £22) is out on Thursday. To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Special discount available for Times+ members.

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