Record Collector Magazine
April 2022
Terry Staunton

Musicians with careers as long and as successful as Lindsey Buckingham’s tend to have a wealth of stories to tell, but few have involved quite so many plot twists. From relatively unassuming beginnings as a recording artist via a sun-kissed album made with his then-girlfriend Stevie Nicks, he was catapulted into the white heat of superstardom with Fleetwood Mac, as a creative linchpin of the makeover that brought them global acclaim. A solid, parallel solo career garnered more plaudits, if not the same sales, but there have been myriad pitfalls and problems along the way Oddly, despite the stratospheric success, he remains, in a sense, a cult artist, “I was determined to avoid becoming a caricature,” he tells Terry Staunton.

Lindsey Buckingham opens with an apology. While happy to be grilled about any and all aspects of his professional and private life, he’s concerned some events may be trickier to recall than others: “I want to say sorry in advance, in case I draw a blank on some of your questions. There may be memory lapses, especially during those years we weren’t behaving ourselves.”

The misbehavior he alludes to is a frequently referenced component in the story of Fleetwood Mac, a band whose appetite for frowned-upon substances has, in some quarters, defined them as much as any of their million-selling albums. The same can be said about the unraveling of in-house romantic entanglements that inform the contents of their most iconic work, the “musical soap opera”, Rumours. Released in early 1977, three months before Star Wars opened in US cinemas, more than one subsequent magazine article about its songs and the star-crossed lovers who made them has headlined May Divorce Be With You.

Quick-fix shorthand aside, however, Buckingham’s is a musical CV distinguished by daring, by taking risks, by refusing to zig and relishing a zag. He may have been the co-architect of the perceived pinnacle of soft rock (with worldwide sales north of 40 million), but he was also the driving force behind the often wilfully radio-unfriendly Tusk.

When the boundaries of the Fleetwood Mac blueprint were no long a workable (or welcome) fit for his spirit of musical adventure, he embarked on a parallel solo career that, while retaining many of the melodic hallmarks of the band, allowed him to scratch a relentless itch for pushing envelopes. His 2021 self-titled collection is a continuation of the sonic explorations of its six predecessors, of a hunger to remix the paints on what he refers to in this interview as his “artistic palette”.

It’s an album we should have heard when it was completed in 2018, were it not for a sequence of events no one saw coming on the last day of its recording. A request to extend his sabbatical from the group in which he’d served for a total of 43 years was met with an unceremonious sacking, and while still licking his wounds from that bolt-out-of-the-blue news, Buckinghamham was rushed to hospital to undergo triple-bypass surgery.

While recuperating and redrafting plans to take the new record to market, his private life also went into a tailspin with headlines that the man whose name was synonymous with hign-profile breakups in the rock biz, was getting a divorce from Kristen Messner, his photographer and interior designer wife of 21 years. The ending of that particular chapter has yet to be written, and the now 72-year-old Buckingham is candidly philosophical about what the future might hold.

Today he has a European tour (including his first-ever solo shows in the UK) to promote, while looking back at the highs and lows of a life in music that started with playing acid rock bass at school in the San Francisco suburb of Atherton. Continue reading “Applaud my genius, Bemoan my failings” | The RC Interview with Lindsey Buckingham →