The photoshoot that sparked a Fleetwood Mac affair: “I have no regrets and neither does she”
The life of Fleetwood Mac in the late 1970s was akin to an outlandish storyline from a Spinal Tap soap opera. They were an incestuous group who lived in a soft rock bubble that left their personal lives in turmoil but gifted the world with one of the finest albums of all time, Rumours. While their relationships were fraught with tension, the members always managed to persevere to enjoy a glittering career. Over the years, it has come to not only represent the band as a whole but acted as a reminder that through hard work and commitment, difficult situations can provide mesmeric results.
At the time of recording the seminal 1977 LP, the band couldn’t have been further apart in their personal relationships. The two couples of the group, John and Christine McVie, were on the brink of divorce and no longer on speaking terms, while Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, former high school sweethearts, could barely look each other in the eyes. It had almost ruined the group entirely before they had truly got to grips with the latter new additions.
The band’s heartbeat, Mick Fleetwood, was hardly having better luck with love as he found himself battling through a divorce of his own. It was a problematic moment personally, but perhaps their crowning achievement professionally—a duality that makes the Fleetwood Mac story unstoppably intoxicating. In the studio, the group would go between writing painful songs about one another to snorting mountains of cocaine and acting out on their issues. If Stevie Nicks wasn’t singing a barbed comment about one member of the band written by another, then it wasn’t a complete day.
Somehow, they managed to deliver one of the most widely appreciated albums ever created and a mainstay of any best albums list. Still, the record’s promotion wasn’t any easier than making Rumours itself, and one photoshoot would spark an affair between two members of the group that would ripple through their careers.
Annie Leibovitz was the photographer for Rolling Stone that day and later recalled to the publication: “In those days, for photoshoots, you just brought cocaine. I took it out, and they looked a little freaked out at first, but then consumed it in, like, 30 seconds.” Considering the reputation the group had, this must have come as a shock to the photographer. “Then I learned they’d all recently been to rehab. So they were all a little jittery and tense.”
Nicks remembers the photoshoot well and the nervous energy that was in the room before the things began. The singer recalled to the magazine, “When Annie said she wanted us to lie down together on a big bed, it was like, ‘Hmm, hope you have a backup idea.’ But she said, ‘No, you’re going to look great, this will be fun, have a glass of champagne.'”
Leibovitz’s initial creative vision was to capture the two couples embracing. However, this was a no-go for Buckingham and Nicks. “For Stevie and me, the wounds and animosities were still very fresh,” Buckingham noted. “So, the idea for the photo wasn’t all that funny.”
Rather than spend time in the presence of Buckingham, with whom time spent had now become tortuous, to say the least, Nicks had another idea. She recalled: “I said, ‘OK, but I can’t be in bed next to Lindsey.’ So I curl up next to Mick for the next three hours while Annie is suspended over us on a platform. And Christine really didn’t want to be next to John because they were just divorced.”
Fleetwood later wrote about how the shoot made him realise that he and Nicks had “definitely known each other in previous lives”. Nicks also admitted that the day’s events had “planted the seed for Mick and me, which happened a year later”. Nicks’ relationship with Fleetwood was never a conventional one. The pairing came when the Fleetwood Mac singer found herself painfully lonely despite dating Don Henley.
While on the surface, Nicks and Henley may have appeared as the perfect rock couple, their busy schedules meant that they weren’t much of a couple at all. The situation led to Nicks starting a cocaine-fueled affair with her bandmate. She later opened up to Oprah about the “doomed” romance, saying they were the “last two people at a party” and that “It was a doomed thing [that] caused pain for everybody.”
Fleetwood. meanwhile, would later profoundly remark: “We just love each other in the true sense of the word, which transcends passion.” The two artists have spent so much time with one another that it is no wonder they felt a kinship misconstrued for passionate love. Instead, they will remain as the closest of friends: “I will take my love for her as a person to my grave, because Stevie Nicks is the kind of woman who inspires that devotion. I have no regrets and neither does she, but we do giggle together sometimes and wonder what might have transpired if we’d given that passion the space and time to blossom into something more.”
Both parties can see that their relationship was built on sand, and while they have a love for one another, it wasn’t true romantic love. Their passionate relationship resulted from their close friendship coupled with crippling loneliness and the spark of rock star living rather than love. Even though it was a short-lived romantic relationship, they’ve been bedrocks in each other’s lives for over 45 years.
Sometimes, love affairs should be left alone, and sometimes, or maybe all the time, when those love affairs end, you shouldn’t spend time in bed with one another for several hours.
