By Craig McLean
The Daily Telegraph (Features section)
September 19, 2025
When penniless, high-school sweethearts Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham released Buckingham Nicks in September 1973, 16 months before they joined Fleetwood Mac, it flopped. Then it went out of print.
But its gauzy, West Coast-folk, hippie-romance-heavy 10 tracks – not to mention its cover image of the hirsute pair, topless and cosied up – were a soft-launch distillation of the songwriting, singing, harmonising and emotional heft that the couple would bring to the floundering Britons. When band founder and drummer Mick Fleetwood heard the record playing in Los Angeles recording studio Sound City, he moved quickly to recruit the young Californians to the ranks of his band.
It became a great “lost album” – it never appeared on CD and certainly wasn’t available to stream (legally, anyway). It was a mythical premonition of the golden music-making that would appear on the Stevie-and-Lindsey-powered Fleetwood Mac (1975) and Rumours (1977) albums. But now, finally, 52 years on, Buckingham Nicks has been remastered and reissued for the first time.
But how was it lost? I asked Stevie Nicks the question one summer evening in Santa Monica in July 2013, when interviewing her for this newspaper. She was sitting in her seafront condo by the Pacific, taking a short break from Fleetwood Mac’s world tour before it came to the UK.
She explained to me that the rights to it were split between her, Buckingham and Keith Olsen, producer of the album. “It’s like sharing ownership of an old car,” she said. “But the stars never seem to exactly align.”
In 2011, also in Los Angeles, I asked Buckingham the same question: why wasn’t their album available on CD?
“I don’t know!” the guitarist shot back. “One of Stevie’s managers has the masters in her house. Why? Well, because somebody’s got to have them somewhere. I don’t know, don’t ask me… The politics of Fleetwood Mac are strange.”
He mused on whether “somebody” within their network of individual managers was waiting for an “appropriate” moment for a CD release. “Which is really stupid! Like, a time when Stevie and I will be able to make some sort of event or tour or do something to make it more marketable? But you know: better hurry up! That’s all I can say.”
It only took another 12 years. After being teased in cryptic social media posts in July, Buckingham Nicks is out today, its 52-year-old high-fidelity ensured by the album being “sourced from the original analogue master tapes for its long-awaited return to vinyl, as well as hi-res digital files for its CD and digital release”.
It is, too, the sound of a long-ago but deep-seated professional and personal love–in–one that clearly transcends Buckingham having been fired from Fleetwood Mac in 2018, reportedly in a dispute over tour dates. Peace, or at least détente – or just septuagenarian pragmatism – has clearly broken out between the former lovers, whose once turbulent relationship inspired both Dreams (written by Nicks) and Go Your Own Way (Buckingham). Tensions were reportedly so high during the making of Rumours that Nicks took cocaine “just to get through it”, ending up with an addiction that led her to rehab.
In 1987, Buckingham refused to join the band on tour, and Fleetwood Mac recorded the 1990 album Behind the Mask without him. Nicks left the band shortly after, when Fleetwood refused to let her release Silver Springs, a B-side she wrote about Buckingham, on a box set of Nicks’s solo work. By 1997, however, they had reconnected enough to go on a 20th anniversary tour together, and in 2003 released one last album: Say You Will. Ahead of their 2018 reunion tour, however, Buckingham left the band, having apparently had an “outburst”.
He told Rolling Stone: “Our relationship has always been volatile. We were never married, but we might as well have been. Some couples get divorced after 40 years. They break their kids’ hearts and destroy everyone around them because it’s just hard.”
Nicks, meanwhile, told Rolling Stone last year: “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.”
And yet, they have come together to excavate the lost album. “[We] knew what we had as a duo, two songwriters that sang really well together. And it was a very natural thing, from the beginning,” Nicks, 77, says in the reissue’s sleeve notes. “It stands up in a way you hope it would,” adds Buckingham, 76 next month, “by these two kids who were pretty young to be doing that work.”
Those kids had met in 1966 at Menlo-Atherton High School in suburban San Francisco. He was the high-school swimming champ and a prodigal guitarist. She was the girl from Arizona, relocated to the San Francisco area thanks to her father’s corporate executive job.
In late 1971, the couple moved south to Los Angeles. Buckingham worked at his songwriting while Nicks supported them with waitressing and cleaning jobs. “I didn’t want to be a waitress,” she said in a 1997 interview, “but I believed that Lindsey didn’t have to work, that he should just lay on the floor and practise his guitar and become more brilliant every day. “I was totally devoted to making it happen for him,” she went on. “I never worried about not being successful. I wanted to make it possible for him to be successful.”
For her, love trumped everything else – even if she would write about the challenges of being in a relationship with a mercurial artist in the Buckingham Nicks song Long Distance Winner (“love their lifestyle if you feel it / don’t try to change them, you never will”). And, after some months of abject penury, the songs they had written separately and together secured Buckingham and Nicks a record deal with Polydor.
They recorded their self-titled debut at Sound City Studios in 1973, with Olsen as producer. But after its release on September 5 that year, Buckingham Nicks was the victim of poor promotion and a largely indifferent response. The duo soldiered on, writing songs for a second album that they planned to record in 1974. One of those tracks, Without You, would eventually surface on Fleetwood Mac’s 2013 release Extended Play.
“We lost that song,” Nicks told me that July evening in 2013. “We got free time in Sound City, and we think Without You was the first or second song that we did when we started making demos for this new record. We would put everything that we did on cassette. And we think – well, we know – somebody stole it… [But] we never knew it had gone ’cause we had so many cassettes lying around our house. And then we joined Fleetwood Mac…”
That fateful day was New Year’s Eve 1974. Shortly before that, Mick Fleetwood had visited Sound City with a view to using the studio to record a new Fleetwood Mac album. Olsen played Buckingham Nicks' track Frozen Love to demonstrate the facility’s audio qualities. In the 2013 documentary Sound City, Buckingham recounted how, “I walked out of Studio B, and I heard our song Frozen Love coming from one studio over. And I see this gigantic man sitting in the chair with his eyes closed, just grooving, and I thought: ‘Who is that?’”
That was 6ft 6in Fleetwood. He was then also in search of a guitarist to replace Bob Welch, who had just quit. Impressed by the guitar solo on the final track on Buckingham Nicks, the drummer and band MD invited Buckingham to join Fleetwood Mac. Buckingham said yes, on one condition: that his girlfriend could join too.
Within three months, the new line-up had recorded Fleetwood Mac – an album that opens with Buckingham's composition Monday Morning, and that features timeless Nicks songs Rhiannon and Landslide.
The rebooted and rejuvenated Mac had liftoff. As Nicks recalled in another 1997 interview. “Before Lindsey and I joined [Fleetwood Mac], we’d have to steel ourselves not to go into stores. Six months later we were earning $400 a week each. I was totally famous. … You go through that with someone, and you don’t forget.
Still, as music history and the plot of the hit play Stereophoic tell us, rock ’n’ roll romances don’t often survive that kind of vertiginous success. By the time of the writing of Rumours, Buckingham and Nicks had split, with bassist John McVie and keyboard player Christine McVie also heading for the buffers. Ditto the marriage of Fleetwood and Jenny Boyd - they divorced in 1976 (although they would later remarry - and re-divorce).
Buckingham, though, told me he didn’t blame Fleetwood Mac for killing his and Nicks’s relationship - or the relationships of the others. Not wholly, anyway.
“I think the stage was set for all of us to be moving in that direction before we ever met each other as a band,” he said. “But I think the coming together of us as a band became a catalyst for speeding up a process which probably was inevitable. But who knows? Maybe Stevie and I would have worked out our stuff. But… probably not.”
When I interviewed Nicks in Miami in 2011 for The Guardian, I asked her for her take on what could have been the afterlife of Buckingham Nicks, as a musical duo and a couple. If the success of the first two Fleetwood Mac albums - and drugs - hadn’t entered the picture, would she and Buckingham have had a shot?
“Absolutely,” she replied. “If we’d have stayed in San Francisco and just done our music there and gotten a record deal there, we would have still been famous. I’m absolutely sure of that. And we would have married and had children, cause we were headed that way. We didn’t really mess up til we moved to Los Angeles. And that was when the whole world just ripped us apart.
Their relationship didn’t last, but Fleetwood Mac did, and then some 120 million album sales and one of the greatest careers in music history tell their own story. But now, finally, the long-lost album that started it all is finally having its day in the sun. And for all her thoughts on what might have been with Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks said she was happy that the Buckingham Nicks record did what it did. “I think that that was the only way it could have gone,” she told me. “I think that Fleetwood Mac was our destiny.”
Buckingham Nicks (Rhino) is released today.
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