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Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham were dating before they joined rock supergroup Fleetwood Mac. Nicks recently said that she stayed with the guitarist to keep the band together. Here’s what the singer said about her relationship with Buckingham, and the long, twisted journey of the former couple. 

Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham sit and pose together at an event.
Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham | Kevin Mazur/WireImage

Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham were dating before they joined Fleetwood Mac

Fleetwood Mac stars Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks have had a long, complicated relationship that started before the couple joined the wildly famous rock supergroup. They have alternated between being friends, musical collaborators, lovers, rivals, and enemies for nearly their entire lives. 

Nicks and Buckingham met in high school, and the guitarist quickly asked the singer to join his psychedelic rock band, Fritz. The band later opened for Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.

They became a couple and formed their own group, Buckingham Nicks, and released an eponymous album. Mick Fleetwood heard Buckingham playing on the track “Frozen Love” from the Buckingham Nicks album and invited the guitarist to join Fleetwood Mac. Buckingham agreed on one condition: Nicks had to be in the band, too. 

Stevie Nicks said she was ‘sweet’ and ‘nice’ to Lindsey Buckingham to keep Fleetwood Mac together

Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks ended their romance less than two years into joining Fleetwood Mac. The “Dreams” singer said they stayed together longer than they might have because they didn’t want to break up the band. 

“I mean, I broke up with Lindsey in 1976. We’d only been in Fleetwood Mac for a year and a half, and we were breaking up when we joined Fleetwood Mac,” she told The New Yorker in February. “So we just put our relationship kind of back together, because I was smart enough to know that, if we had broken up the second month of being in Fleetwood Mac, it would have blown the whole thing.”

Nicks said she tried her best to make the relationship go smoothly. “I just bided my time, and tried to make everything as easy as possible, tried to be as sweet and as nice to Lindsey as I could be,” she said. “He wasn’t happy, either.”

But by the time they broke up for good, the band was going strong. “Then something happened that was, you know, ‘We’re done.’ And he knew it. It was time,” Nicks described. “And the band was solid, by that time, so I could walk away knowing that he was safe. And that the band was safe. And that we could work it out.”

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Lindsey Buckingham Says It’s ‘Possible’ Stevie Nicks Never ‘Completely Got Over’ Him

The dark side of the guitarist and the ‘Dreams’ singer’s relationship

Nicks and Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac on New Year’s Eve in 1974. During their first two years in the group, the band made the albums Fleetwood Mac and Rumours. These two records achieved massive success and catapulted the group to new heights of fame.

Meanwhile, Nicks and Buckingham’s relationship was spiraling out of control. The “Trouble in Shangri-La” singer claimed, even years after they broke up, that the guitarist would sometimes get so angry that he became violent.

In a Jan. 2015 interview with Rolling Stone, Nicks said Buckingham would mock her on stage. And while the band was in New Zealand doing a show for the 1980 “Tusk” tour, Nicks claimed that Buckingham threw a Les Paul guitar at her head. Her bandmate Christine McVie also remembers the incident that way, but Buckingham said, “I’m not sure that happened.”

Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham’s tumultuous relationship came to a head in 2018 when Fleetwood Mac fired the guitarist. Buckingham has opined in multiple interviews that his former girlfriend was responsible for his dismissal. “It would be like a scenario where Mick Jagger says, ‘Either Keith [Richards] goes or I go,’” the guitarist told the L.A. Times in 2019. “But I guess the singer has to stay. The figurehead has to stay.”

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