Lawsuit that lays bare the longest feud in rock
Lines of cocaine totalling seven miles. Eruptions of violence. Bed-hopping galore. Now, 100m albums later, simmering tensions in Fleetwood Mac are about to explode in court
The Rolling Stones may have taken more drugs, The Who may have trashed more hotel rooms. however, when it comes to sheer rock’n’roll soap opera, no one holds a candle to Fleetwood Mac.
The band made mutual enmity into an art form with a string of bittersweet hits about their various failed relationships with each other, hardly helped by their industrial drug and alcohol consumption.
Indeed, many thought it was all this continual feuding and fury that made them the enduring success that they have become, 51 years and 100 million album sales later.
But now the British-American group, which started out as a blues band playing in a London pub, has finally imploded as one of its key members is suing the others for sacking him.
Lindsey Buckingham — singer, songwriter and lead guitarist on and off since 1975 — is seeking millions of dollars in compensation from band mates Mick Fleetwood, Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie and John McVie.
The mercurial musician, who wrote and sang the 1977 mega-hit Go Your Own Way, has made it clear he is not happy to go his own way. In a 28-page lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court and a recent interview, Buckingham has laid bare the astonishing extent to which he has fallen out with his former band mates — particularly singer Stevie Nicks, his ex-lover.
The case also reveals quite how lucratively popular the band remains. Tickets to see them last Saturday in St Louis, Missouri, on their new tour cost up to $899 (£686). Meanwhile, the most expensive tickets to see Buckingham’s current solo tour are less than a tenth that price.
ACCORdING to Buckingham’s lawsuit, each of the band’s five members was to earn around $13 million from playing 60 shows over two years in a deal with a concert producer, Live Nation. he accuses his former band members of breaching their fiduciary duty, breach of oral contract and ‘international interference with prospective economic advantage’.
Stripping away the legalese, the guitarist is demanding his share of the tour income because he still wants to perform. Other Fleetwood Mac members say he was sacked because he wouldn’t fit in with their touring plans and they met a ‘brick wall’ in negotiations.
Buckingham, 69, admits he initially requested the tour be delayed for three months so he could concentrate on his solo album. however, he insists he later relented and agreed to the original timing.
Two days after Fleetwood Mac performed at a charity do in New York in January, he says he was told the tour was off. But three days later he discovered the band was going without him.
his band mates had ‘secretly and unceremoniously moved on without him’, even hiring two musicians to sing and play in his place, his lawsuit complains. ‘After 43 years of camaraderie and friendship, not a single member of the band called Buckingham to break the news to him,’ it goes on.
Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac in 1975, left in 1987 to pursue a solo career and rejoined in 1997. In his lawsuit, he doesn’t spare the feelings of other Fleetwood Mac members in making clear that the band — first formed in 1967 — was only really successful when he was part of it. After his departure in 1987, ‘the band’s popularity declined precipitously’, says the lawsuit, adding that his return revitalised their fortunes.
Fleetwood Mac says it ‘strongly disputes’ Buckingham’s claims. In a statement last week, a spokesman said: ‘Fleetwood Mac looks forward to their day in court.’
The Buckingham lawsuit doesn’t spell out exactly why he believes he was sacked, apart from insisting it could have had nothing to do with him messing them around over the tour.
however, he pointed the finger of blame clearly at Stevie Nicks in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine published just a day after the suit was filed.
he recalled Fleetwood Mac’s manager, Irving Azoff, phoning him two nights after his final appearance with the band in January to say: ‘Stevie never wants to be on stage with you again.’
According to Buckingham, Azoff told him that Nicks was upset by his angry response to the decision to play a recording of the hit song Rhiannon, which she wrote, while they took the stage.
She also accused him of ‘smirking’ as she made a slightly long-winded thank-you speech. Buckingham insisted it was a ‘standing joke that Stevie, when she talks, goes on a long time’.
he says Azoff told him Nicks, now 70, had given the rest of the band ‘an ultimatum: either you go or she’s gonna go’.
he hasn’t spoken to any of the other band members since January and says their freezing him out is all the more remarkable given that John McVie lives just 300 yards from him in Los Angeles.
Nicks publicly insists Buckingham was ousted because he wanted to put off their tour for more than a year.
however, she admitted her relationship with him ‘has always been volatile’, adding: ‘This is sad, but I want the next ten years of my life to be fun and happy.’
Fleetwood Mac has a history of axing erring members. Guitarist danny Kirwan was sacked in 1972 for alcoholism and violent behaviour. A year later, his replacement, Bob Weston, was ousted after he had an affair with Mick Fleetwood’s then wife.
Buckingham has suggested the reasons for Nicks’s him-or-me ultimatum were trivial — but that would ignore the considerable water that has already flowed under the bridge in their ill-starred relationship.
The full extent of Buckingham’s ugly treatment of Nicks was detailed in a biography of her.
NAMed Gold dust Woman after one of the band’s songs, and published two months before Buckingham was sacked, its writer, Stephen davis, portrays Nicks as having fought a relentless battle to assert herself against a jealously competitive Buckingham, his controlling ways sometimes veering into violence.
Buckingham and Nicks met in 1965 as teenagers at a church-run gathering for young musicians. Three years later, they became lovers, bonding over their love of cocaine and ambition to make it in the music business.
After launching their career as a couple in 1971, they posed two years later for the cover of their first album, Buckingham Nicks. The record company had asked it look ‘sexy’, but the shy Nicks was uncomfortable when the photographer asked her to pose topless.
When she refused, Buckingham lost his temper. ‘don’t be a f***ing child,’ he snapped. ‘This is art!’ he got his way. They were recruited in 1975 by Mick Fleetwood, the glamorous American couple bringing some
showbusiness sparkle to what was originally a pure British blues band.
‘When they first joined the band, lindsey had control [over nicks],’ recalled Mick Fleetwood. ‘And, very slowly, he began to lose control. And he really didn’t like it.’
the couple split in 1976 while the band was recording rumours, their most famous album. Dreams (which she wrote) and go your Own Way (which he wrote) were blunt broadsides at each other.
According to gold Dust Woman, nicks told her mother she left Buckingham after a row in which he had ‘thrown her to the floor’. it was a period Mick Fleetwood has admitted ‘almost killed us’, as the band drowned in drink and drugs.
not only had nicks and Buckingham broken up acri-moniously, but the McVies had ended their seven-year mar-riage and spoke only to discuss music. Fleetwood, who later had a two-year affair with nicks, tried to keep everyone happy by supplying them with drugs. He has estimated that if every line of cocaine he has snorted was laid end to end, it would stretch seven miles.
the nicks-Buckingham feud was on full display, says Davis, during a tour to promote their 1980 album tusk. At a concert before 60,000 fans in Wellington, new Zealand, Buckingham — who had drunk a bottle of whisky — tried to trip up nicks on stage and began mimicking her moves and dances.
in August 1987, the warring members convened in Chris-tine McVie’s home in England after Buckingham had just called off a ten-week tour, saying he wasn’t prepared to play any of nicks’s solo work.
A furious row broke out between the two ex-lovers that continued as Buckingham went out to his car. According to Davis: ‘lindsey slapped her face, and bent her backwards over the bonnet of his car. He put his fingers around her neck and started to choke her.’
Davis quoted nicks as saying: ‘i thought he was going to kill me. i think he probably thought he was gonna kill me, too.’
the guitarist has been married for 22 years to Kristen — a former photographer whom he met on a shoot — and they have three children. nicks has no children. in 1983, she married the widower of a close friend, but they divorced after only three months.
nicks previously said she and Buckingham finally made up in 2013 when she insisted he promised to behave decently toward her.
However, they’ve never resolved their artistic differ-ences. While Buckingham wanted Fleetwood Mac to produce new songs, nicks has been happy to just keep playing the old ones.
nicks has vowed that Fleet-wood Mac will keep touring ‘until we drop dead’ and will never have a ‘farewell tour’. great news for Mac fans, but sadly the next reunion of the ‘classic’ band line-up looks set to happen in a courtroom.