“Upsets him”: Stevie Nicks on the move that made Lindsey Buckingham resent her
We all know that the relationships between the members of Fleetwood Mac were often fraught with difficulty, even at points when the band were enjoying the peaks of their success. With all members regularly having affairs with one another and only intensifying those relationships with a cocktail of drugs and alcohol, being part of the group might have been rewarding in a musical sense but a tricky thing to navigate in terms of the interpersonal dynamic.
Prior to both joining the band in 1975, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham had already been romantically involved with one another, and if there was anything that would prove to be a disaster for their relationship, it would be adding the element of other members to their work. The duo had previously worked together as a duo, Buckingham Nicks, but after Buckingham’s services were recruited into Fleetwood Mac, he convinced the other members to allow Nicks to join as well.
The band enjoyed their most commercially successful period following the addition of these two lovers, and while their fortunes appeared to be drastically improving with the new lineup, things on the inside were turning much more sour. Many songs on the group’s 1977 classic album Rumours are explicitly about the breakdown in their relationship, and things would also begin to break down in a collaborative sense as well.
While Buckingham and Nicks would both appear on the two subsequent albums, Tusk and Mirage, both would also begin to pursue their individual solo careers. In 1981, Nicks released Bella Donna, her first effort created without Buckingham. Buckingham had always been instrumental to the songs that Nicks contributed to Fleetwood Mac, often providing arrangements and helping her restructure songs, which is something that Nicks said was second nature to him.
In an interview with BAM Magazine around the release of Bella Donna, Nicks spoke about how she wanted to try and prove to herself that she was capable of working alone. “When you work with somebody who is that much in control, and who has always been that much in control,” she explained, “You forget that you’re even capable of doing something yourself. I’d write my song, and then Lindsey would take it, fix it, change it around, chop it up and then put it back together.”
Nicks did prove to herself and the world that she was able to work without her former partner, but later on in an interview with ABC Australia in 1986, she revealed that her having the capacity to write things effortlessly was something that infuriated Buckingham no end. Speaking about the difference between her methods of working against Buckingham’s, she said that things just came to them both in very different ways.
“I’d found an incredible guitar player who could play anything, who could sit and play you any song,” Nicks told ABC, referring to Buckingham. However, she was quick to say that her methods of working were far more intuitive and based around feel: “I could very easily sit down and with one note go “do, do, do, do do” and write a song, not knowing anything about the guitar which to this day upsets him and everybody else because something just says… OK… and I just sit down and I play.”
She may not have been as adept at playing guitar or other instruments, but she said that the skeletons that she would bring to the table always had enough there to be worked with and turned into a different song, and with her solo career, she proved that she was more than capable of writing songs without having her hand held.
