Relationship drama plagued Fleetwood Mac for years, especially when the band was in its heyday. In the lead up to the release of Rumours, John and Christine McVie divorced and Nicks and Buckingham broke up after years together.
“If Stevie and I, and John and Chris had remained as couples, the stability of the band would not have been very good,” he said, per the book Fleetwood Mac on Fleetwood Mac. “It was like that was a necessary thing to go through to eliminate all those weird vibes. And, we respect each other a lot more now.”
Nicks and Buckingham joined the band as a team and helped launch Fleetwood Mac to new heights of success with the group’s 1975 self-titled album and 1977’s Rumours. Many of the songs from that era were about Buckingham and Nicks’ relationship and bitter breakup.
Before the couple joined the band, drummer Mick Fleetwood’s wife, Jenny Boyd, had an affair with lead guitarist Bob Weston. Fleetwood was heartbroken over the infidelity, leading to Weston’s exit from the group.
After Nicks and Buckingham broke up, the singer had an affair with Fleetwood. Nicks was dating the Eagles’ Don Henley at the time, while the drummer was working things out with Boyd.
And John and Christine McVie, the only married couple within the band, went through a difficult divorce while working together.
Stevie Nicks tried to be ‘sweet’ to Lindsey Buckingham for the sake of Fleetwood Mac
she tried to keep the peace to make sure that the group wasn’t ruined.
Stevie told The New Yorker magazine: “You just have to throw yourself into your song. 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.
Mick Fleetwood first marriage was to Jenny Boyd, the model-turned-author who is also the sister of Pattie Boyd, The Beatles’ George Harrison’s first wife.
They went on to have a tumultuous relationship, with the pair both dealing with addiction to cocaine, with Jenny even having an affair with Fleetwood Mac’s guitarist Bob Weston.
Ultimately, they divorced in 1976, but that wasn’t the end of their relationship. They eventually reconciled in 1977 and remarried during a tour around Ireland, until Mick revealed his own affair.
Barely out of her teens, Carol Ann Harris met Lindsey Buckingham in 1977. As his live-in girlfriend for the next seven years, she'd accompany him and the band all over the world on tours, in the studio, on exotic vacations and to gala events and parties. Than Lindsey married Kristen Messner, who's been together to the Fleetwood Mac guitarist/singer for 21 years, filed legal docs recently in L.A. County to dissolve their marriage. It's unclear at this point if she and Lindsey have discussed any terms yet of the split.
Nicks: “Oh, I’ve been close to leaving Fleetwood Mac since I joined Fleetwood Mac. But so has everybody else,” she said. “To be in Fleetwood Mac is to live in a soap opera. And it has been pretty scandalous and pretty incestuous, and pretty wonderful in a lot of ways.”
Nicks also said she would never break up the band. “I threaten to quit all the time. I threaten to quit once a month. But I’m never gonna be the one to break up Fleetwood Mac,” she said. “Somebody else will break it up, not me. And it’s hard for me to imagine Fleetwood Mac ever breaking up. It’s kind of like, you know, it’s just an entity that just seems to go on and on and on. I figure Fleetwood Mac will go on until it doesn’t want to go on anymore.”
In the 90s, Christine McVie took a break from Fleetwood Mac, during which time she said she was “by no means a nun.”
After recommitting to the band, McVie worked extensively with guitarist Lindsey Buckingham on new music. The keyboardist told 'Elle' that when she got stuck on a lyric, Buckingham advised her to “just write about sex.”
When asked if her time in the country inspired any of those sexual songs, McVie joked, “You mean the nunnery?” before adding, “I was by no means a nun.”
She was then asked if there was a lot of action in the countryside. “Well, not much action,” McVie shared. “But some.”
During the production of Rumours she had an affair with Fleetwood Mac's lighting engineer, Curry Grant, which inspired the song "You Make Loving Fun". From 1979 to 1982, she dated Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys. McVie married Portuguese keyboardist and songwriter Eddy Quintela on 18 October 1986.
According to “Gold Dust Woman” (St. Martin’s Press,) — a new biography by Stephen Davis did it all despite Buckingham’s bullying and abuse.
In light of the recent lawsuit between Lindsay Buckingham and the Fleetwood, where the guitarist accuses Stevie Nicks, all the feud takes place after the publication of the book Gold Dust Woman, where Stevie Nicks accuses heavily Buckingham.
