(Credits: Far Out / Steve Proctor)
Sat 30 August 2025 17:30, UK
There’s no easy way for someone to announce that they’re leaving a band. Most of the best artists in the world aren’t going to have warm feelings about their former bandmates all the time, but for as much animosity as Lindsey Buckingham had towards Fleetwood Mac, he knew when some of his colleagues went a little too far.
But it’s not like Buckingham wasn’t already a bit of a handful behind the scenes. He was a fantastic guitarist and had his own fair share of classics under his belt, but the second that he walked into the room to start working with the blues-rock legends, a lot of his perfectionist tendencies were clear from the minute he walked in. He was after a specific sound, and he wasn’t above trudging over some people’s egos to get it.
Even for someone who’s determined to get songs right, though, Buckingham did have his limits where things could get heated. He had already attempted to strangle an engineer during the recording of Rumours, but after spending time sitting on his hands waiting for Stevie Nicks during the album Tango in the Night, the meeting about them going on tour for a year at a time wasn’t going to sit well with him.
And it’s not like he was going to go quietly, either. Nicks had been determined to make this version of Mac work at all costs, and even if Buckingham had mixed opinions, she was going to fight to keep everything together. Once one of their fights became physical, no one had any doubts that the idea of them hitting the road was over. Their resident Brian Wilson was officially out, but Buckingham had more of an axe to grind with Mick Fleetwood after the fact.
Despite going through some of the biggest band shakeups anyone could have gone through, Fleetwood was more agitated with how Buckingham behaved, and when he wrote a book on his time in Fleetwood Mac, he held nothing back. Nicks was already taken aback by how much he included in the book about their relationship, but Buckingham was dragged through the mud so much that Nicks eventually intervened.
When talking about Fleetwood’s book, Buckingham thought he was trying to stir the pot by saying that the guitarist called them “selfish bastards”, saying, “That never happened! I hadn’t seen Stevie for a long time and she came up to me and apologised to me for Mick having written that. If you were to ask any of the members in the band, I think you’ll find they were all a little hurt by things like that that never happened, a lot of inaccuracies, the general trashy level. What I saw of it, anyway.”
While the wounds were still fresh around the time of them working on The Dance, Buckingham always had a better working relationship later down the road. Hell, even when working on his solo album in 2003, Fleetwood was among the few that convinced Buckingham to turn it into a Fleetwood Mac project and to release it as Say You Will.
There were always bound to be a few dust-ups in a band that was made up of 80% former couples, but Buckingham wasn’t looking to defend himself at every turn. The rest of the band could say anything they wanted to about the way he behaved or what they didn’t approve of behind the scenes, but as long as he heard the sounds in his head being translated onto the tape, that was all he needed.
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