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 →