(Credits: Far Out / Stevie Nicks / Lindsey Buckingham)
Tue 10 February 2026 20:00, UK
When Mick Fleetwood recruited Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks to join Fleetwood Mac, it was with the hope that they would sprinkle some of their musical magic into a group so desperately in need of a new direction.
During the band’s 1975 self-titled album, the first with Buckingham Nicks at the front and centre, Fleetwood would have been rightly optimistic. Nicks came in hot with a flurry of singles that proved her songwriting greatness, with ‘Rhiannon’ and ‘Landslide’ most noticeably topping that list.
Buckingham kept the rocky edge of the band appropriately sharp, allowing songs like ‘World Turning’ to exist under the new stewardship of the band, while dovetailing brilliantly with his new songwriting partner Christine McVie on songs ‘Say You Love Me’ and ‘Sugar Daddy’.
It pointed towards a bright new future for the band. Commercially, they fulfilled that expectation, with their follow-up Rumours becoming one of the biggest-selling albums in history. But it came at a brutal personal cost that ultimately made a martyr of Nicks in particular. Her crumbling relationship with Buckingham became the most exercised creative avenue for the band, as music listeners all over the globe rubbed their hands at the never-ending musical soap opera that was their relationship.
But it was on Rumours when that all culminated. The album’s unrelenting drama came at the real-life cost of the pair, who officially split up during the recording of the album. Nicks remembered, “In Sausalito, up at the little condominium. Lindsey and I were still enough together that he would come up there and sleep every once in a while,” she said.
“And we had a terrible fight – I don’t remember what about, but I remember him walking out and me saying, ‘You take the car with all the stuff, and I’m flying back.’ That was the end of the first two months of the recording of Rumours.”
Stevie Nicks
The pair’s relationship started in the very early years of that adult life and had endured the changing times of their lives as artists. Simply put, their personalities ached through the growing pains together, and it brought on personal changes that made an enduring commitment to each other, relatively untenable.
Despite the fury that was displayed in the subsequent music, it wasn’t easy on either of them. In 1977, the year of the record, Buckingham remembered, “It was a little lonely there for a while”.
He added, “The thought of being on my own really terrified me. But then I realised being alone is really a cleansing thing. As I began to feel myself becoming more myself again. I’m surprised we lasted as long as we did.”
Ultimately, the question became one of the band or the relationship. Buckingham and Nicks, like Christine and John McVie’s relationship, were falling apart, but at the benefit of the band, and so they all quietly realised that their personal trauma must beat on, if they want to achieve the sort of success they all desired.
“If Stevie and I, and John and Chris had remained as couples, the stability of the band would not have been very good,” Buckingham said, per the book Fleetwood Mac on Fleetwood Mac. “It was like that was a necessary thing to go through to eliminate all those weird vibes. And, we respect each other a lot more now.”