(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still / Press)
Tue 23 September 2025 18:20, UK
To say that things between Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks have been tumultuous is an understatement.
Being in a band with your ex-partner is one thing, but becoming idols side by side, where your careers will forever and always be intertwined, that’s a whole other story, and one that’s become a cautionary tale ever since.
You hear it often. When band members threaten to be growing slowly too close, the story of the Fleetwood Mac duo looms over it like a warning sign. Sure, Buckingham and Nicks managed to make it work in the way that even in the height of their emotional drama, they managed to write hits, make albums and get the work done. But really, even considering that, it was their personal issues that tore the band asunder, rumoured to even still be the reason for Buckingham’s departure in 2018, decades and decades into their messy connection.
“Well, we don’t use that word because I think it’s ugly,” Mick Fleetwood said in 2018 when asked if Buckingham had been fired. But really, there have been ugly moments, especially back in the 1980s when things between them were hitting a real fever pitch.
It was after the emotional outpouring of Rumours that things seemed to get even harder. Once the catharsis had faded, they were then left with the struggle of simply sticking it out. They still had to be around each other with little to no break or time to go off and heal. Tusk in 1979 made it worse, then the Tusk tour just compounded it all into something insurmountable.
It all came to a violent head one day in 1980. It was the same are normal; the band were on the road and backstage was littered with emotional landmines and heavy with tension. The challenge was trying to leave it in the wings and not bring it into the show, but this night, they failed. Adding drugs and alcohol into the mix with high emotional stakes, and it seems almost inevitable that eventually things would be aggravated, but no one in the band thought it would as it unfolded.
One night on stage, Buckingham mocked Nicks out loud in front of their crowd and then threw his guitar at her and then reportedly kicked her. The audience looked on shocked but the band watched on furious.
“I think he’s the only person I ever, ever slapped,” Christine McVie said of that night, adding, “I actually might have chucked a glass of wine, too”.
Firstly, she thought it was disrespectful to their fans, stating, “I just didn’t think it was the way to treat a paying audience”. But obviously, as she watched her best friend be attacked, her love for Nicks came into it too, adding, “I mean, aside from making a mockery of Stevie like that. Really unprofessional, over the top. Yes, she cried. She cried a lot”.
The worst thing is that it wasn’t the first or the last time. Right before Buckingham left for his first sabbatical from the band in 1987, there was another night when he violently lashed out at Nicks. “He ended up chasing me all the way out of Christine’s maze-like house,” Nicks recalled of that night, “Then down the street and back up the street. And then he threw me against a car, and I screamed horrible obscenities at him. I thought he was going to kill me, and I think he thought he was probably going to kill me too.”
As for Buckingham’s defence, the guitarist merely said, “I’m not sure that happened”.
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