(Credits: Far Out / Polydor)
Tue 23 December 2025 20:00, UK
By the end of the 1970s, it would have been a miracle to get Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks to agree on nearly anything.
They were absolutely magnetic whenever they performed together, but the idea of them having to share any time together offstage would have been a pipedream after months of fighting in the studio, making records like Rumours and Tusk. But for all of their bickering, each of them knew when to lay down their arms and compromise for the sake of the music.
After all, Nicks knew that their breakup was never going to be the thing that split up Fleetwood Mac. They had a job to do as two of the main songwriters in the band, and while it was never going to be easy listening to the other person take shots at them, they each knew how to grin and bear it whenever a song came on that didn’t necessarily paint them in the best light by the end.
Whenever they went into the studio, though, they weren’t in there to simply have a good time. The magic behind Rumours is watching little moments come to life over the course of a few minutes, and while no one would have been all that crazy about the opening fingerpicked lines on ‘The Chain’, it was all about building up an atmosphere before Buckingham’s guitar comes screaming in above John McVie’s bassline.
Then again, that wasn’t any different from what Brian Wilson had done with The Beach Boys back in the day. Wilson was a mad genius when he walked into the studio, and whenever he tried to make something new, some of his wild experiments became the standard for what everyone should look for, whether that was the avant-garde arrangement of ‘Good Vibrations’ or the symphony going on in the middle of ‘California Girls’.
Among all members of ‘The Mac’, Buckingham was by far the biggest Wilson acolyte, saying, “I remember hearing ‘Surfin’ Safari’ first when I was in sixth grade. It had the beat, the sense of joy, that explosion rock & roll gave to a lot of us. But it also had this incredible lift, this amazing kind of chemical reaction that seemed to happen inside you when you heard it. A lot of what you find later on Pet Sounds or Smile, you could find in a different form early on.”
And while Nicks would be the first person to say that she was practically forced to study records from the likes of The Beatles at Buckingham’s insistence, it’s not like she couldn’t acknowledge the genius on display, either, saying, “A lot of the big groups really did play off The Beach Boys and really get so much inspiration from them and really listen to them carefully and how they worked out their little intense vocal background parts. They were the reason why a lot of us sang and put stuff together the way we did.”
Granted, there was a way to overdo Wilson’s influence, and Buckingham did end up crossing the line a few times when making Tusk. He wanted to make his warped masterpiece to complement Rumours, and while the record is more interesting for it, Nicks was more interested in how Wilson’s music made her feel when she eventually left the group for a while to focus on her solo career.
But Fleetwood Mac isn’t the kind of band that really needs to flaunt their inspiration from Wilson. Because if you listen to anyone from Nicks to Crosby, Stills, and Nash to Tom Petty, they are all drawing from what Wilson did, whether they know it or not, whenever they start layering those voices on top of each other.
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