The Fleetwood Mac show that turned into a fight: “He threw his guitar at me”
With a history so rife with drama, it’s no surprise that occasionally, Fleetwood Mac came to blows. No one would be shocked to hear that once or twice; all that pent-up emotion and interpersonal drama blew up into physical conflict. They just might be surprised about when it happened.
It’s easy to forget just how long-running Fleetwood Mac was, and really, for as long as the band have been around, there has been drama. Even back in England in the late 1960s, when Peter Green first launched the group, there were issues. Sure, they weren’t the passionate, romantic issues that would later fuel the music of the 1970s lineup, but still, there were fights as the leader struggled greatly with his mental health and eventually quit his own band, leaving the rest to figure it out.
Then comes the most well-known chapter when John and Christine McVie were divorcing, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham were breaking up, and all of that was captured in the recording of Rumours. It’s one of those periods in music history where it is truly criminal that no one has ever made a movie about it. Throwing a band of exes into the same studio and watching as they write songs about those breakups in real time – it’s not just a triumph that they didn’t kill each other, but it’s a complete miracle that not only was the album made, but it was a masterpiece.
However, people often forget that it simply kept getting more dramatic from then on. It’s easy to listen to Rumours and assume that after that, everything was put to bed as if they’d got it out of their systems. But if you were forced to continue working with your ex-partner, watching in close contact as they moved on with no ability to get space from them, how would you feel?
Many things made matters worse at the end of the 1970s. First, Stevie Nicks levelled up the drama by starting an affair with Mick Fleetwood, meaning that the one independent person in the band, who had previously acted as Switzerland, was now caught up in drama, too. Then, they started to make Tusk, an album where Buckingham seemed to completely lose his mind. Desperate for them to not fall into the pattern of making “Rumours 2 and Rumours 3” as he said, he became obsessed with experimentation, leading to another tense recording period.
That still wasn’t the end. After all of that, the band had to go on tour, and it was a long one. Beginning in October 1979, the group were on the road until September 1980 meaning that in all that time, there was no escaping. In typical Fleetwood Mac fashion, they made that worse for themselves, too, by going absolutely all in on hedonism.
“Somebody once said that with the money we spent on champagne on one night they could have made an entire album,” Christine McVie said of that tour where the members all seemed committed to drinking and snorting their way through it, which she said, as an understatement, “doesn’t make for a stable environment.”
With all that at play, the fact that it turned physical at points feels like an inevitability, and Nicks remembered the moment it finally blew up. “The big Fleetwood Mac fight. It has become a thing of mythology that night,” she said of their show on March 22nd in New Zealand. “I remember it quite well because Lindsey and I got into a fight at the end of the show when I was singing during one of his solos and he threw his guitar at me,” she said of the moment the frustration turned violent. Luckily, the guitar missed her, but she did storm off – “It was the only time in our whole existence we did not do an encore.”
It’s no wonder that at the end of that 1980 tour, all of them needed a break. They were still not healed from the tumult of Rumours, they were still wound up by Tusk, but mostly, they were sick of the sight of each other and needed a year-long hiatus to recover from that moment Buckingham threw the first guitar.
