The first album that Fleetwood Mac made with Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham was a huge success – but as Buckingham would later reveal, he wasn’t sure at first that he was the right fit for the band.
Buckingham and Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac on New Year’s Eve 1974, and as the group’s new guitarist Buckingham was following in the footsteps of highly acclaimed players including the legendary Peter Green.
In previously unpublished extracts from a major interview in 2006, Buckingham talks about joining Fleetwood Mac, the classic albums Rumours and Tusk, and his love of little-known Rolling Stones songs.
Discussing his initial reservations about his role in Fleetwood Mac, he admits: “As a guitarist walking into a band with an established, identifiable sound, there wasn’t always the space to always do what I do best. You get to thinking, ‘Who are you shooting to? Who’s gonna appreciate it?’”
He recalls that he quickly learned to adapt to what bassist John McVie was playing.
“You know, John is a very melodic bass player,” he says. “He takes up a lot of space. So you just do what is the right thing to do – you do what works for the band.”
As it turned out, Buckingham need not have worried. Fleetwood Mac’s self-titled album from 1975 – the band’s first with Buckingham and Nicks – was a No 1 hit in the US, powered by the hit singles Over My Head, Rhiannon and Say You Love Me.
Over My Head and Say You Love Me were written by Christine McVie, but Rhiannon was Nicks’s song, as were the key album tracks Landslide and Crystal. Buckingham wrote the two songs that bookended the album – Monday Morning and I’m So Afraid.
What followed, of course, was Rumours – one of the greatest and biggest selling albums of all time, its hit songs inspired by the dramas playing out in the band members’ love lives.
Reflecting on Rumours and how that album changed the band, Buckingham states: “Looking back at those days, the irony of it was that the disappointment wasn’t about the couples breaking up, the whole soap opera – it was the realisation that we didn’t all want the same thing. We let go of an idealism when it didn’t match up with the bottom line.”
Rumours was a hard act to follow. Fleetwood Mac’s answer came in 1979 with Tusk, an adventurous double album in which the band’s signature soft rock was mixed with Buckingham’s new wave influences and experiments in sonics.
Speaking in 2006, Buckingham reveals: “We’d made this record that was so far to the left of Rumours. And when it didn’t sell 16 million copies, that was hard. There was a lot of anxiety among the people at [record label] Warners.”
He also admits: “I sure had a lot of anxiety after Tusk!”
That album cost a reported $1.4 million to record, and while it sold over four million copies by 1980 this was deemed a failure after Rumours had sold more than 10 million in its first year.
Famously, Fleetwood Mac’s 1987 album Tango In The Night began life as a Buckingham solo project. The album was another huge hit, but Buckingham refused to tour behind it and eventually quit the band due to conflicts between himself, Nicks and drummer Mick Fleetwood.
In the 2006 interview, Buckingham briefly addresses the turmoil within Fleetwood Mac in the late ’80s. “After I left, following Tango In The Night, the situation was nuts,” he says. “But it has since healed itself.”
He also explains how the band’s 2003 comeback album Say You Will had similar origins to Tango In The Night.
“Say You Will was supposed to be a solo album,” he says. “It just didn’t turn out that way. But nobody held a gun to my head, let’s put it that way.
“I started working with Mick [Fleetwood] with the idea of it being a solo record, and I guess there was a certain significance to that – which people picked up on. I hadn’t done a studio album with the band for more than ten years. Traditionally, I’ve always had to wait to put out solo records because I’m working around Fleetwood Mac. But my conclusion is that the material [on Say You Will] was always destined to be a Fleetwood Mac album.”
In conclusion, Buckingham talks about his solo versions of deep cuts by The Rolling Stones and folk singer Donovan.
“There’s a spate of obscure Stones songs that I’ve recorded,” he says. “It’s The Singer Not The Song, She Smiled Sweetly – all from that period 1965 to ’66. And with I Am Waiting, one of the objectives was to have a certain quantity of one style of guitar presentation: one guitar, guitar-driven. This song was an effective vehicle for that. And the Donovan song, Try For The Sun? It doesn’t sound much like the original!”
