“I just totally fell in love”: the only person that would let Stevie Nicks join Fleetwood Mac
While personnel changes were never far around the corner in any incarnation of Fleetwood Mac, the new additions that arrived in 1974 were perhaps two of the most important introductions that the band ever had.
The English rock group brought in American additions in Lindsey Buckingham on guitar and Stevie Nicks on vocals to accompany the already present pairing of John and Christine McVie alongside drummer Mick Fleetwood around this time, and while they’d had a reasonable degree of success up until this point with their brand of blues-driven soft rock, things were about to significantly change with this new incarnation.
They had had many other important members over the years in Peter Green, Danny Kirwan and Bob Welch, but it wasn’t to be with these members, and when Fleetwood and John McVie, the two sole consistent parts of the band, realised that they had to bring in additional strength in order to make up for the departures, they knew that they had to be making the right decision for the good of their career.
Of course, these additions were what pushed them into the mainstream and gave them their biggest album to date, and while Rumours was far more successful than anything else they’d ever done prior, they went on to become notorious in the years after as a result of the strength of their lineup in the mid-1970s.
After Rumours came records like Tusk and Tango in the Night, and the self-titled album in 1975, which was the first to feature Buckingham and Nicks, was also a major success in comparison to the rest of the material they’d previously released. Albums like English Rose and Then Play On had been minor successes in the 1960s, but nowhere near the same level as what this period provided.
However, in terms of how these two members were recruited, Fleetwood had been a fan of what Buckingham Nicks had done as a duo prior, despite the lack of commercial success that they had with their self-titled album. Despite this, he was more interested in just recruiting Buckingham and left it down to one member to make the final decision as to whether Nicks was allowed to be a part of it, as her then-partner had insisted ought to be the case.
According to an interview with Nicks, published in Q Magazine in 2008, she said that the decision was put largely down to Christine McVie, and that neither of the other members seemed to be that concerned as to whether she joined or not. While a considerable amount of this was down to them wanting to assess whether the two female vocalists could work together, it was ultimately placed in the hands of McVie to make the crucial decision.
“Mick and John told me it was absolutely left up to Chris,” Nicks recalled. “They told her, ‘This is a team, so we can’t just have Lindsey, so you need to meet this girl. If you like her and think you could work with her, and you like Lindsey, you can make the decision.’ We all met up at this Mexican restaurant, and I just totally fell in love with Christine.”
Perhaps the biggest and most important decision she ever made, McVie’s instant connection with Nicks led to the band completing the lineup that brought them the most success as a group, and while they could have arguably existed without Nicks, they’d have missed out on countless hits that came courtesy of her input.
