The Lindsey Buckingham solo hit that Mick Fleetwood wanted for Fleetwood Mac: “He hoped”
By the start of the 2000s, there was a lot of water under the bridge for Fleetwood Mac, and plenty of bad blood in there too. After decades of ups and downs, it seemed that possibly things were beginning to settle as Lindsey Buckingham and Mick Fleetwood found themselves in the studio.
For context, Buckingham was long gone. The guitarist initially joined the lineup in 1975 with his then-girlfriend, Stevie Nicks, but as their relationship collapsed into emotional chaos, so too did the band. Fast forward through arguments, affairs and pointed lyrics, and it all became too hard to handle.
First, they tried to handle it just by taking extended hiatuses, but every time they reunited, something seemed to blow up. So, in 1987, Buckingham quit, stating honestly, “I needed to get some separation from Stevie especially because I don’t think I’d ever quite gotten closure on our relationship.” He went solo, and the band continued on without him – that was the story for years.
However, his name kept popping up. Even as early as the start of the 1990s, Buckingham would appear on album credits having played guitar on certain tracks or helped produce songs. He appeared live with them on a few special occasions, as it seemed that a reconciliation was slowly but surely happening behind the scenes.
It would eventually turn out that, really, they had remained working with Buckingham the entire time. They’d called him in for solo work or for support on soundtrack songs, so even when the guitarist was out of the band, the band were still constantly in each other’s orbit. As Buckingham was working on his solo stuff, gathering up tracks that would eventually make up Gift Of Screws, Mick Fleetwood was around a lot, hearing early versions of the songs and wanting them for the group.
“On the title track, I think Mick just felt completely liberated to do what he loves to do best and doesn’t always get to do in the context of Fleetwood Mac, which is to present a complete male energy out there, and to not worry about whether it holds a line in terms of taste or anything else,” Buckingham said as he got the drummer to go wild on ‘Gift Of Screws’. It was a song that the drummer clearly loved playing and wanted to do more, but for that to happen, he really needed it to be a Fleetwood Mac song.
“I think he hoped ‘A Gift of Screws’ ended up on a Fleetwood Mac album so that he could have gotten to play it,” Buckingham said, but at that point, when it was recorded sometime in the late 1990s, he wasn’t quite ready to re-enter fully like that. So instead, he said, “We just had a ball in the studio – it was great fun.”
Overwhelmingly though, the studio space always drew them together, and the issues were never really to do with Buckingham and Fleetwood, but the wider history of the whole group. “If you focus on Mick, we’ve always had a camaraderie of spirit; we’ve always shared that sense of pushing the envelope,” Buckingham said as no matter what, they all still remained a perfect musical fit.
