How Lindsey Buckingham enhanced Fleetwood Mac, according to Christine McVie: “The wrong way around”
The story of Fleetwood Mac is often condensed to the story of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. Elsewhere, we see sparks of other partnerships, but this one is usually the ones that define most of their achievements, like the fire that burned at the centre of Rumours. One of the more underrated, however, was the unsuspecting camaraderie that brewed between Christine McVie and Buckingham.
When Nicks and Buckingham first joined the band, they did so mainly due to the latter’s established know-how and the former’s ability to warm up to McVie. In the beginning, especially during the first stages of figuring out if their involvement would work, it was all about how Nicks fit in alongside McVie, and if she managed it, the rest would follow.
But Buckingham wasn’t initially as endeared to the idea, something that probably impacted his first few experiences in the band when he struggled to work alongside John McVie. “I came in as the new kid on the block, but I was also the kid with the ideas, and so John and I used to butt heads quite a bit,” he once told Uncut.
And as Buckingham and Nicks navigated their own perils during the recording process, so did Christine and John. But most of these moments were less about weathering the storm than using their frustrations for good, channelling these fires into songs that would carry through the ages. The details of McVie and Buckingham’s unsuspecting partnership fell by the wayside, but only because it seemed natural in the moment, so much that McVie barely remembers parts of it.
Or at least that was the story of Tango in the Night‘s ‘Mystified’, the song co-written by the pair that she had little memory of making. “I can’t remember how that happened,” McVie explained to Uncut. “It morphed somehow between us. We just happened to be doing stuff in the studio at the same time, so the co-write was fair dues.” But the things McVie did remember about working alongside Buckingham were how differently he worked to everybody else, often at the expense of Nicks’ sanity, but in a way that he pulled it off, no question.
Speaking to Larry Katz as part of The Katz Tapes in 1987, McVie praised Buckingham’s unconventional approach: “The songs are usually pretty complete when I give them to them in terms of melody and lyrics and chords and all that kind of thing. Stevie is pretty much the same way. And Lindsey sort of works the wrong way around, is my way of looking at it. It always works. He builds up the track and then decides what he’s going to sing on it later.”
The pair would reconvene much later for Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVie, evidencing the beauty of this kind of mismatch with music that sounded even better than they probably could have imagined. Often, McVie took songs or ideas to Buckingham for him to build around, an approach that no doubt contributed to her later rediscovering her fire for songwriting when it became harder to maintain her own internal spark.
And for Fleetwood Mac, this brought a fresher perspective that often worked with the arrangements and instrumentals in mind first, bringing variety to the records that showcased all of their individual talents, even if the stories themselves revealed all the different facets of their (broken) relationships. In the end, these fragmented components only made everything feel even more real and more delicate, because that’s exactly what it was.
