Steve Nicks has reflected on her tumultuous relationship with ex-husband and former bandmate Lindsey Buckingham, who she gave “300 million chances” in Fleetwood Mac.
Buckingham first joined the band in 1974 and remained a member until 1987. He then reunited with the group in 1996 but was then fired in 2018 after his working relationship with Nicks broke down. He was replaced by Mike Campbell of the Heartbreakers and Neil Finn of Crowded House.
The singer recently gave a rare interview to Rolling Stone, in which she said she last had contact with Buckingham in 2023 at their late bandmate Christine McVie‘s funeral.
“Christine threw down a hurricane on top of Nobu, which is where we had it,” Nicks said of the celebration. “Almost blew the whole place away, honest to God. Tore down the entire deck that was all decorated and everything. So it was kind of crazy. We all felt like she was there, because it was really intense.
“The only time I’ve spoken to Lindsey was there, for about three minutes. I dealt with Lindsey for as long as I could. You could not say that I did not give him more than 300 million chances.”
Nicks added that she felt at peace with how she cut professional ties with Buckingham. “I think that all just happened the way it should have,” she said. “It happened one night, not planned, at a MusiCares [benefit concert]. I didn’t even tell anybody it had happened in my head until the whole ceremony was over. I took with me that night a song that I had done with LeAnn Rimes called ‘Borrowed.’ I took it with me to play for him because I thought we could do this song beautifully.
“That’s when he wasn’t very nice to anybody; he wasn’t very nice to Harry Styles,” she continued. “I could hear my mom saying, ‘Are you really going to spend the next 15 years of your life with this man?’ I could hear my very pragmatic father — and by the way, my mom and dad liked Lindsey a lot — saying, ‘It’s time for you guys to get a divorce.’ Between those two, I said, ‘I’m done.’”
Nicks, however, still wishes Buckingham well. “I hope he lives a long life and continues to go into a studio and work with other people,” she said. “He’s also an icon, and he can teach people. He’s not stopped in his tracks. He can still make music and have fun.”
Despite this, Buckingham said earlier this year that he would rejoin the line-up “in a heartbeat” and Mick Fleetwood voiced his hope for a “healing” between Nicks and Buckingham, even if there wasn’t a tour in the works to make that happen.
In early 2023, the sticksman said he still planned to perform, but “not as Fleetwood Mac”, adding: “I’d say we’re done, but then we’ve all said that before. It’s sort of unthinkable right now.”
Nonetheless, Nicks reiterated elsewhere in the interview that following McVie’s passing, there was zero chance of any further activity from Fleetwood Mac, despite excitement among fans recently about a wave of recent activity from the band online. She made a comparison with the end of Crosby Stills Nash & Young after Graham Nash said he wished they’d done more as a band before David Crosby died in early 2023.
“Well, and that’s true, but they never played near as much as we did,” Nicks said. “We had lots and lots of time, and lots and lots of tours that could have been the reconciliation tour and ‘now we’re going to quit’ tour. So, I just felt that Christine and I had done everything we could do to make it a happy place. And it wasn’t a happy place anymore.”
In other news, Nicks made her first appearance on Saturday Night Live in 41 years, where she performed her new single ‘The Lighthouse’ and her classic solo track ‘Edge Of Seventeen’.
