“He threw me against a car”: The fight that broke up Fleetwood Mac
Considering the tumultuous history of Fleetwood Mac, fans should count themselves lucky they got as many albums as they did.
Although the band created magic whenever they worked off each other in the studio, it was only matched by the soap opera bombast that was going on whenever the tape stopped rolling. While the music typically came before anything else, it was only a matter of time before things got physical.
Before even joining ‘The Mac’, songwriters Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks were initially part of a duo together, hoping to snag a record deal. Although they could put out one album independently, drummer Mick Fleetwood would convince Buckingham to join the band, only to be told that Nicks would have to join as well.
While it looked like everything would be perfect once the band started to gain attention for songs like ‘Rhiannon’, things began falling apart during the making of Rumours. As Buckingham and Nicks fell out emotionally, Christine and John McVie were also going through a divorce, leading to each songwriter writing tracks informed by their shattered love lives.
Although the band went through hell to create the album, Rumours would become one of the biggest albums of all time, featuring songs used as weapons like ‘Go Your Own Way’ and ‘The Chain’. Now that they had a hit record, it was time for the band to experiment with what they could do in the studio.
That success only seemed to amplify the tensions already simmering beneath the surface. With Rumours turning them into global superstars, the pressure to follow it up with something equally groundbreaking weighed heavily on the band. At the same time, their personal relationships were in no better shape, meaning every creative decision carried an added emotional charge.
For Buckingham in particular, that next step became an opportunity to assert greater control over the band’s direction. Rather than repeating the formula that had made them famous, he pushed for a more experimental approach, which inevitably clashed with the expectations of both the group and their audience. It set the stage for a period where artistic ambition and personal conflict became almost impossible to separate.
With Buckingham taking over the studio for the album Tusk, every member started to get forced to the sidelines. Not wanting to keep her voice stifled, Nicks would eventually move on to a solo career, having hits like ‘The Edge of Seventeen’ while returning to the band off and on for albums like Tango In the Night.
Although the band had developed an elastic formation throughout the 1980s, the last straw occurred towards the decade’s end. After discussing the release of singles like ‘Big Love’ from their latest album, the plans for touring exploded into violence when the group reached Christine’s house.
After being unable to settle their differences, Nicks started to attack Buckingham, which caused him to explode into anger. Chasing Nicks through the house, Buckingham eventually slammed her against the side of his car, which made Nicks scared for her well-being.
As Nicks recalled to Louder, “He threw me against a car, and I screamed horrible obscenities at him. I thought he was going to kill me, and I think he thought he was probably going to kill me too. And I said: ‘If the rest of the people in the band don’t get you, my family will – my dad and my brother will kill you”.
While Fleetwood desperately tried to keep everything together, Buckingham left the band, not returning until their comeback live album, The Dance, in the late 1990s. Although the band may have turned their greatest emotional struggles into art, nothing would be the same once that hostility translated to violence.
