When Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac, they helped propel the band to a commercial and creative pinnacle.
For the couple, though, joining the band was the beginning of the end of their love story.
Nicks and Buckingham’s infamously tumultuous relationship, which began in the early 1970s, ended just two years into their tenure in Fleetwood Mac.
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Though they’ve been broken up for nearly 50 years, their mutual antipathy remains as legendary as their musical output.
“I met her when I was about 16,” Buckingham said in a 2009 BBC documentary about the band.
“It’s been most of my life. Sadly, for the lion’s share of those years, there has been distance and animosity of some kind, mixed in with everything else, too. It’s never been just one thing.”
And yet, after decades of performing love songs onstage while ripping into each other backstage, Nicks and Buckingham seem to have paused their ongoing feud to rerelease the only album they made as a duo, 1973’s Buckingham Nicks.
Whether the pair will do more to promote the album than share cryptic corresponding Instagram posts remains to be seen.
Their acrimony fueled enduring, influential music, but any reunion between the two likely won’t be as effortless as their sound.
1966-1973: Classmates to bandmates to lovers
Nicks and Buckingham met in 1966 as high school students in California’s Bay Area.
Though they played guitar a bit together, it wasn’t until they were both attending San Jose State University that they officially teamed up musically, when Buckingham invited Nicks to join his first band, the psychedelic-folk rock group Fritz.
The pair resisted romance until after Fritz broke up in the early ’70s.
“I think there was always something between me and Lindsey, but nobody in that band really wanted me as their girlfriend because I was just too ambitious for them,” Nicks told Cameron Crowe in a 1977 interview for Rolling Stone.
The pair fell for each other while writing Buckingham Nicks, a folk-rock record released in 1973.
Despite the talent evident on the album (not to mention its cover art, in which Nicks and Buckingham appear nude), Buckingham Nicks flopped almost everywhere – except Birmingham, Alabama, where local DJs regularly played the record and developed the duo a small but devoted fanbase.
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(It’s also where the pair played their final show before joining Fleetwood Mac.)
“That album holds up pretty well,” Buckingham told Dan Rather in 2015.
“It did not do well commercially, but it certainly was noticed. More importantly, it was noticed by Mick Fleetwood.”
The Fleetwood Mac co-founder discovered Buckingham Nicks at a pivotal time for the band, which was hemorrhaging guitarists and vocalists, including founding member Peter Green.
Fleetwood was seeking a new recording space when he met an engineer who played him a record he had produced. It was Buckingham Nicks.
A few weeks after hearing the album, and shortly after losing yet another band member, Fleetwood asked Buckingham to join the band without having heard him play live.
Buckingham remembered saying he wouldn’t go without Nicks.
“Didn’t think about Stevie one way or the other, ’cause I was looking for a guitar player,” Fleetwood said in the BBC documentary.
“And very quickly we realised they were totally joined at the hip.”
1975: Buckingham Nicks joins Fleetwood Mac
Fleetwood Mac’s 1975 eponymous album was the first to feature Buckingham and Nicks – and the group’s first No. 1 album in the US.
Many of the album’s enduring hits were written by Nicks, including the heartbreaking ballad Landslide and Rhiannon, a haunting song about a Welsh witch.
(Witchiness would soon become integral to Nicks’ onstage persona.)
While Nicks and Buckingham were still dating when they joined the group, their relationship was already deteriorating under the weight of working together so closely, Nicks said in 2009.
“I think we kind of all made a little silent vow – let’s fix these relationships for right now,” she said.
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1977: ‘Rumours’ soars amid breakups
Nicks and Buckingham’s relationship was on the brink of collapse throughout the recording of what would become Fleetwood Mac’s most successful record, Rumours.
Nicks wrote Dreams, the group’s first and only No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 single, about the imminent demise of her relationship, she said.
But her take on heartbreak was mellow, if melancholy: “Say women, they will come and they will go,” she sings. “When the rain washes you clean, you’ll know.”
“In other words, we’re all gonna come out of this,” she said in 2009. “And Lindsey, you and I will come out of this, and we’ll be friends, and it’ll be okay.”
Buckingham’s rebuttal, the upbeat Go Your Own Way, was “angry and nasty,” Nicks said.
“Loving you isn’t the right thing to do,” Buckingham sings. “How can I ever change things that I feel?”
Nicks said in the 2009 documentary that she had thought Buckingham’s lyrics accusing a lover of “shacking up” were “extremely disrespectful.”
“It may be a rather truthful and blunt observation,” Buckingham countered. “But that’s the way you write songs.”
Their fraying relationship ended during the recording of Rumours, after months of playing on tracks that were not-so-secretly written about the other.
As Nicks recalled to the BBC, Nicks told Buckingham after one last fight that she would fly home without him.
The behind-the-scenes tumult only fed audience interest in Rumours, which became the band’s defining album, spending 31 weeks at No. 1.
“Everyone knew that these songs, the subject matter, was what we were living,” Buckingham said in 2015.
“And I think there was an investment in not just the music but in the people who made the music because of that.”
The album was fueled by heartbreak, rage and a massive “community bag of cocaine,” said album engineer Ken Caillat.
Nicks’ addiction to cocaine began during the recording of “Rumours,” she said, a habit she picked up “just to get through” the process.
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1980s: Nicks goes solo
Nicks started writing and recording solo material while making Tusk, the experimental follow-up to Rumours that Buckingham spearheaded.
In 1981, she released Bella Donna, which featured the hit Edge of Seventeen, the first of four solo albums she made in the ’80s.
In 1985, Nicks sought treatment at the Betty Ford Center for her cocaine addiction.
But when she left rehab, she was prescribed Klonopin, a tranquilliser she became dependent on.
As a result, she was often absent from recording sessions for the group’s 1987 album Tango in the Night.
“Being in Fleetwood Mac, even to this day, is very tense,” Nicks said in 2009. “In my solo career, I’m not tense, I’m not uptight.”
1987-1991: Buckingham and Nicks leave Fleetwood Mac
In 1987, the band met at member Christine McVie’s home to discuss their upcoming concerts in support of Tango in the Night. Buckingham refused to join the group on tour.
“When Lindsey said, ‘I’m not going,’ I think I got up and ran across the room and tried to strangle him,” Nicks remembered in the BBC documentary.
“And then he chased me out of the house through Christine’s driveway, and we had a huge fight. That was that. He was done.”
The group made one more album with Nicks and without Buckingham, 1990’s Behind the Mask, but Nicks left the group soon after, when Fleetwood refused to let her release Silver Springs, a B-side she wrote about Buckingham, on a box set of Nicks’ solo work.
1997: Fleetwood Mac reunites
Fleetwood Mac reformed with Nicks and Buckingham in 1997 for The Dance, a successful tour tied to the 20th anniversary of Rumours that also spawned a No. 1 live album.
And every night, Buckingham would join Nicks on guitar as she sang Silver Springs. She often ended the performance by resting her head on Buckingham’s back.
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The following year, the group was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and spent the next several years touring on and off, recording one last album, 2003’s Say You Will.
Despite spending extended periods of time on and offstage with each other, Nicks was loath to get close to Buckingham again.
“Lindsey and I will never be touchy feely friends,” she said in 2009. “Maybe later on down the line, all those wounds will heal.”
2018: Buckingham leaves Fleetwood Mac
In 2018, as the group was gearing up for yet another reunion tour, Fleetwood Mac started to splinter again.
Buckingham was ousted from the group that year, telling Rolling Stone that his manager said Nicks never wanted to perform onstage with him again.
Buckingham admitted to Rolling Stone that he’d had an “outburst” stemming from the choice to introduce the band onstage with Rhiannon, Nicks’ witchy hit.
Fleetwood said the group had reached an “impasse” with Buckingham on tour.
“Our relationship has always been volatile,” Buckingham said of Nicks to Rolling Stone.
“We were never married, but we might as well have been. Some couples get divorced after 40 years. They break their kids’ hearts and destroy everyone around them because it’s just hard.”
When Christine McVie died in 2022, Nicks said she doubted that Fleetwood Mac could reunite again without her.
At McVie’s memorial, Nicks spoke with Buckingham briefly after an extended period without contact.
“I dealt with Lindsey for as long as I could,” she told Rolling Stone in 2024. “You could not say that I did not give him more than 300 million chances.”
Less than a year after that interview, though, Nicks and Buckingham have seemingly patched things up to release Buckingham Nicks, which will be available to stream for the first time on September 19.
Aside from their Instagram posts, neither musician has commented on the rerelease of the only album made as a duo.
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