Monthly Archives: September 2025

Buckingham/Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, Release Info, Reviews, Solo Activity, Stevie Nicks, UK Articles

The album at the heart of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham’s volatile relationship | The Telegraph

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By Craig McLean
18 Sep 2025

The couple’s ‘lost’ first album was the reason they joined Fleetwood Mac – and it’s being re-released after 50 years

When penniless, high-school sweethearts Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham released Buckingham Nicks in September 1973, 16 months before they joined Fleetwood Mac, it flopped. Then it went out of print.

But its gauzy, West Coast-folk, hippie-romance-heavy 10 tracks – not to mention its cover image of the hirsute pair, topless and cosied up – were a soft-launch distillation of the songwriting, singing, harmonising and emotional heft that the couple would bring to the floundering Britons. When band founder and drummer Mick Fleetwood heard the record playing in Los Angeles recording studio Sound City, he moved quickly to recruit the young Californians to the ranks of his band.

It became a great “lost album” – it never appeared on CD and certainly wasn’t available to stream (legally, anyway). It was a mythical premonition of the golden music-making that would appear on the Stevie-and-Lindsey-powered Fleetwood Mac (1975) and Rumours(1977) albums. But now, finally, 52 years on, Buckingham Nicks has been remastered and reissued for the first time.

But how was it lost? I asked Stevie Nicks the question one summer evening in Santa Monica in July 2013, when interviewing her for this newspaper. She was sitting in her sea-front condo by the Pacific, taking a short break from Fleetwood Mac’s world tour before it came to the UK.

She explained to me that the rights to it were split between her, Buckingham and Keith Olsen, producer of the album. “It’s like sharing ownership of an old car,” she said. “But the stars never seem to exactly align.”

In 2011, also in Los Angeles, I asked Buckingham the same question: why wasn’t their album available on CD?

“I don’t know!” the guitarist shot back. “One of Stevie’s managers has the masters in her house. Why? Well, because somebody’s got to have them somewhere. I don’t know, don’t ask me… The politics of Fleetwood Mac are strange.”

Continue reading The album at the heart of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham’s volatile relationship | The Telegraph →
Buckingham/Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, Release Info, Reviews, Stevie Nicks, UK Articles

Choose love – Buckingham/Nicks review | MOJO

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Debut LP by the Mac’s golden couple – pre tantrems and tiaras – gets reissued. By James McNair.

Buckingham Nicks
★★★★★

“ IT WAS just a one-off moment,” Stevie Nicks recalled of her and Lindsey Buckingham’s duet on The Mamas & The Papas’ California Dreamin’ at a San Francisco Christian youth party in 1966. Two years later she’d joined the Fritz Rabyne Memorial Band, Buckingham’s psychedelic rock act. The pair weren’t yet an item, but support slots with Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin seeded their romance with rock’s mythos. “I would stroll through San José State University with my guitar, thinking, Does everybody know who I am? Because I’m a rock star,” Nicks told this writer in 2013. “I felt it and really believed it.”

Despite the best efforts of Fritz’s manager David Forrester, no record deal was forthcoming. It was Keith Olsen, already a producer for The Millennium and Joe Walsh’s pre-Eagles band The James Gang, who helped secure Buckingham and Nicks’s contract with Polydor – but only after he’d persuaded them to ditch the rest of Fritz and make some demos as a duo. Recorded sporadically through much of 1973 at Sound City, Los Angeles, Buckingham Nicks proved to be one hell of a debut. Given that Nicks was working hamburger joints and as Olsen’s cleaner to support herself and Buckingham while making it, Long Distance Winner, a brilliant Nicks song about “living with a difficult musician” seems a wholly valid inclusion.

Though best known as their serendipitous conduit to tenure in Fleetwood Mac after Olsen played Mick Fleetwood its magnificent closer Frozen Love on a whim, it seems astonishing that Buckingham Nicks is only now gaining re-release after languishing online in bootleg form for decades.

Continue reading Choose love – Buckingham/Nicks review | MOJO →
Buckingham/Nicks, Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey Buckingham, Release Info, Reviews, Stevie Nicks, UK Articles

Buckingham Nicks review | Uncut

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Uncut Magazine
October 2025
By Piers Martin

Buckingham Nicks (reissue, 1973)
RHINO
7/10

Fabled sketchbook for Fleetwood Mac’s imperial phase, reissued after so many lost decades.

TAKE it with a pinch of salt, but it’s a tough time to be a Fleetwood Mac fan. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks are still at loggerheads after the guitarist was turfed out of the band in 2018 – Nicks declared she was “no longer willing to work with him”; he suffered a heart attack soon after being fired – and the window has all but shut on a Fleetwood Ma classic lineup reunion now that each member is pushing 80 and Christine McVie has gone.

Holograms could be the answer.

But before the credits roll on this most enduring rock’n’roll saga, a key chapter in the band’s origin story from a more harmonious time 52 years ago is finally being reissued. Buckingham

Nicks, the mythologised 1973 folk-rock debut by Buckingham Nicks, as Lindsey and Stevie were known back then, has been cleaned up and remastered from the original tapes and is in print for the first time since 1982, and on streaming services and CD for the first time (there’s also a limited vinyl edition with two reissued 7″ singles).

In some ways, this offers a sense of closure: let’s put it out properly before it’s too late.

Why such a pivotal record in Fleetwood Mac’s history has been ignored for so long does lead you to question the pair’s affection for the material. Surely any scheduling or legal issues preventing the release could have been resolved at any point over the past 40 years if they’d wanted it out, especially given the band’s multi-generational appeal this century. Indeed, it’s such fandom that has kept Buckingham Nicks alive all this time, when it pretty much sank without trace upon release and fared little better when reissued in 1977 and ’81 in attempts to capitalise on the Mac’s global domination.

Continue reading Buckingham Nicks review | Uncut →