The Times (UK)
Will Hodgkinson
September 17 2021

Last week the singer revealed he had been fired from the group by Nicks. The reason? She’s probably still in love with him, he tells Will Hodgkinson

The soap opera continues. Last week Lindsey Buckingham announced that he was fired in 2018 from Fleetwood Mac because Stevie Nicks made an ultimatum: it was either him or her. They chose her. It was, says the guitarist who joined the band in 1975 with Nicks, then his girlfriend, the result of long-simmering tensions. They reached boiling point after Nicks refused to delay a tour so Buckingham could promote his solo album, and because of a perceived slight during her speech at the MusiCares charity event in New York, when she felt he was smirking behind her back. Nicks responded by stating: “I did not have him fired, I did not ask for him to be fired, I did not demand he be fired. Frankly, I fired myself.”

Rather than fuel the he-said-she-said back and forth, I’m interested to know where all this antipathy came from in the first place. Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 masterpiece, Rumours, was dominated by songs about the pair’s romantic tussles. She wrote Dreams about him, he wrote Go Your Own Way, Second Hand News and Never Going Back Again about her, and since then they have dealt with cocaine addiction, alcohol abuse, solo careers, Nicks going through rehab, Buckingham getting married to the interior designer Kristen Messner, and countless worldwide tours. If they could survive all of that, why should it fall apart in 2018 over a tour delay and a snigger?

“There were a number of years where I wasn’t over her,” says Buckingham, 71, the lustrous afro of old replaced by a shock of grey frizz. He is at his house in Brentwood, a celebrity-clogged Los Angeles neighbourhood not far from Nicks’s beachfront home in Santa Monica. “It is possible that she has never been completely over me either.”

Buckingham’s suggestion — essentially that he got kicked out of the band because Nicks, 73, is still in love with him — connects with a not-so-romantic tale that goes all the way back to Rumours. Made in the wake of the couple’s split, the album’s subsequent generation-defining success meant Buckingham and Nicks not only had no time to process their feelings, but also were stuck together whether they liked it or not.

“The way we had to get through Rumours is part of the legacy and heroics of the whole thing,” Buckingham says. “We didn’t have time to heal or move on in the traditional sense. I think — and she was the one who moved away from me back then — that we both had to compartmentalise our feelings. That is not a healthy thing to do because those little compartments can remain sealed up for years, until things start seeping out when you don’t realise.”

It didn’t help, Buckingham suggests, that he built a family and his former lover didn’t. “I met the love of my life late and that gave me a whole other take on the world. Stevie did not have children. She went down a different route and has placed more importance on her professional life. How that played out in the last three, four, five years . . . It’s hard for me to know what her mentality is towards me, but I know what mine is to her because I’ve been married for 21 years and I have three children and it’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Buckingham lays the blame for his final expulsion on “some people” (Nicks) being inflexible about the tour delay. “I was only asking for three months,” he protests. “Three months! Everyone does that all the time. In this case it was something certain people were not willing to be generous about. I mean, c’mon. Fleetwood Mac is built on this.”

How about Buckingham sniggering at MusiCares? “What’s really ironic about it is that it had become a running gag in the band about how Stevie would talk on stage for a really long time, and if I recall properly Christine and Mick started dancing behind her. If I happened to be smirking — and I’m not saying I was — it’s very selective of her to take me to task for that and not the others for what they were doing.”

Buckingham’s firing from Fleetwood Mac, to be replaced by Tom Petty’s former guitarist Mike Campbell and Neil Finn of Crowded House, marked the beginning of the most tumultuous period in his life. In 2019 he had a heart attack and had to undergo triple bypass surgery. The surgery involved the insertion of a breathing tube that damaged his vocal cords, leaving him unsure if he could ever sing again. In March 2020 came the pandemic, and in June this year Kristen, his wife of 21 years, filed for divorce.

“What I didn’t know at the time is that a lot of people file but they never follow through,” Buckingham says. “Since then she’s been softening, so we’re trying to work things out. I’m trying to be supportive and give her as much time as she needs, and I have optimism now. She’s coming round.”

Buckingham says he has learnt a lot from the experience. “I’m a bit of a loner. I’m very self-sufficient in my creative life. Now everything that has happened, from the bypass to Fleetwood Mac to the challenges with Kristen, has forced me to look around a little more. Many people in the entertainment industry are self-absorbed, and sometimes you have to be to get the work done, but there is a balance.”

The bizarre aspect of all this is that a number of the songs on Buckingham’s self-titled solo album offer an eerie foretelling of the way his life panned out. On the Wrong Side, written before he left Fleetwood Mac, is a Rumours-like drive-time classic about being stuck on the road when he’d rather be at home, working on new music. Power Down, Swan Song and Blind Love all address relationships and families falling apart. The pretty, lamenting Santa Rosa even features the line: “We built our house with heart and soul.” This is Buckingham at his best; ten perfectly crafted pop-rock songs, brimming with a sense of Californian good cheer, but also a lingering melancholy.

“My daughter rides horses and my wife does too, so we built a barn in the Santa Rosa Valley,” Buckingham says of Santa Rosa’s inspiration. “Kristen wanted to build a house there and move the whole family to this fairly remote area.” Buckingham, however, spent much of the pandemic at his home in Brentwood with his 22-year-old son and 21 and 17-year-old daughters. “I didn’t think it was a well-founded idea to uproot our children from their whole world. In the end we didn’t move, but it is odd how so many of the songs seem more specific and truthful now than when they were written. With the band, with my relationships . . . they predicted things before they happened.”

Fleetwood Mac have had a revolving line-up ever since the late Peter Green put the band together in 1967. Their status as a million-selling, divorce-documenting soft rock sensation was cemented in 1975, after the drummer Mick Fleetwood, keyboardist/songwriter Christine McVie and bassist John McVie had moved out to Los Angeles and, recognising the duo’s songwriting sophistication and photogenic appeal, hooked up with Buckingham and Nicks. In 1975 Nicks brought to the band Landslide, an evergreen love song that she wrote about Buckingham while he was on tour with Don Everly and she was stuck on her own in Aspen, Colorado, “in a horrible room in a horrible apartment with a weird guy who lived upstairs”. The one-time lovers end performances of Landslide by coming together centre stage and holding hands. At least they did until 2018.

“Lindsey and I . . . we’re not the greatest of friends,” Nicks told me a year before Buckingham got the boot. “But we couldn’t hold hands during Landslide if it was fake. If you added up all the fights and break-ups we’ve had over the last 40 years you could still not take away the feeling we get when we return to that moment.”

One of the reasons that moment cannot be returned to, it seems, is not so much the old adage of creative differences as whether there’s a will to be creative at all. With her witchy glamour and her sexily weathered, stayed-up-till-seven singing voice, Nicks is the undoubted star of Fleetwood Mac, but Buckingham has been the one to push the envelope. He was the mastermind behind Tusk, the far more experimental follow-up to Rumours. One of the biggest problems of recent years, he claims, has been Nicks’s reluctance to work on new material.

“As far back as 2013 there was interest in making a new album, but we could not get Stevie engaged in that process,” Buckingham says. “Then Christine asked if she could come back in 2014, and we thought, ‘With the five of us, there is even more reason to do it.’ We got to the point of having enough material from me and Christine to form a new Fleetwood Mac album, but again Stevie would not be a part of it so it became [2017’s duets collection] Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVie. Meanwhile I was at a creative high point, working at home on the songs that would go on to this current album.”

Why didn’t Nicks want Fleetwood Mac to do a new album? “The reason she said was, ‘Albums don’t sell any more.’ But that doesn’t stop you from being creative. Christine had been gone a long time and we still established a wonderful dynamic, where I was able to take her raw material and fashion it into something more complete. I even said to Stevie, ‘It will probably make you happy if you allowed me to do that for you.’ It didn’t seem to hit home with her. Since the Fleetwood Mac tours of 2013 and 2014 I knew who I was creatively. It is possible that Stevie went the other way and lost touch with that part of herself.”

There is another possibility, of course: that Buckingham is completely impossible to work with. His former manager Irving Azoff suggested as much when he released a statement on his firing earlier this month. “The fact remains that his actions alone are responsible for what transpired,” Azoff wrote. Rumours that Buckingham refused to let the band do so much as an interview without his approval have been knocking around for years. As far back as Tusk he was exercising his influence to pull the band in the direction he wanted it to go. He also left after 1987’s 15 million-selling Tango in the Night, feeling he couldn’t face another tour with his increasingly dissolute bandmates.

“Tango in the Night was a triumph of willpower,” he says. “We cut it entirely at my house, and the band — I don’t include myself here — were hitting critical mass with alcohol and substance abuse. It took close to a year to make and in that time we only saw Stevie for a few weeks. Mick was living in a trailer in my front yard because he couldn’t drive home at night. And if it’s bad in the studio it will be ten times worse on tour, because the road enables that kind of behaviour, so I pulled out. Maybe my doing so acted as a catalyst because they cleaned up their act after that.”

On his return in 1997, Buckingham discovered that fatherhood gave him a whole new perspective on band dynamics. “It always bothered me that we didn’t have a new album to tour, but then I saw two or three generations in the audience, I saw that the body of work was getting through to them, and I realised we must be doing something right. Also, having a functional family at home allowed me to see Fleetwood Mac for the dysfunctional family it was. I could even appreciate the beauty of that dysfunction.”

Whether that beautiful dysfunction can be overcome sufficiently for Buckingham to return to the Fleetwood Mac fold remains to be seen. He hasn’t seen them in concert since the new line-up. “If you wanted to be not very kind about it,” he says, with something resembling diplomacy, “you could say that it looks like a cover band.” He has also posited that Mick Fleetwood and Christine McVie took Stevie Nicks’s side because she’s the main attraction and they need the money, although he says that since the deaths of Peter Green and Charlie Watts he has been back in touch with both Fleetwood and McVie.

“Mick and I will always be soulmates,” he says. “I love the guy. And I think he would love to see the five of us reconvene and do a tour that would actually honour our legacy. I love Christine a great deal too. Whether or not it would be possible politically is another question.”

What would it take to get Lindsey Buckingham back in Fleetwood Mac?

“It would be down to Stevie having that epiphany herself. And hey, stranger things have happened. This is Fleetwood Mac. Anything is possible.”

Lindsey Buckingham is out on Rhino