“I would love to see a healing between them”: Mick Fleetwood hopes Buckingham and Nicks can still patch things up
Mick Fleetwood has been talking about his hope for a ‘healing’ between Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham and the possibility that there could still be a happy ending to his band’s long and meandering story.
In an interview, the drummer spoke about Fleetwood Mac’s current stasis. “It’s no secret, it’s no title-tattle that there is a brick wall there emotionally,” Fleetwood told Mojo magazine of the current impasse between Buckingham and Nicks, both of whom he stays in contact with. “Stevie’s able to speak clearly about how she feels and doesn’t feel, as does Lindsey. But I’ll say, personally, I would love to see a healing between them - and that doesn’t have to take the shape of a tour, necessarily.”
This comes after Nicks said in last month’s edition of the same magazine that she saw no future for the band. “Without Christine, no can do,” she told Bob Mehr. “There is no chance of putting Fleetwood Mac back together in any way. Without her, it just wouldn’t work.”
“Even if I thought I could work with Lindsey again, he’s had some health problems,” she said in a reference to Buckingham’s open heart surgery in 2019. “It’s not for me to say, but I’m not sure if Lindsey could do the kind of touring that Fleetwood Mac does, where you go out for a year and half. It’s so demanding.”
At present it looks like the group’s 2018-19 Evening With Fleetwood Mac tour which saw Neil Finn take the place of Buckingham will have to make do as their farewell.
“There was a full intention, without waiting too long, that we’d go and pick things back up,” Fleetwood said. “That we’d play stadiums, big shows and festivals...and then at that point it was heading towards us saying goodbye.”
The veteran drummer has not had an easy time of it since the pandemic. In the same interview he discussed Christine McVie’s death in 2022 and the wildfires that devastated his adopted home in Maui, Hawaii, last year.
In the meantime he’s been spending the summer in the UK, and staying busy. Last month he guested with Crowded House at their Shepherd’s Bush Empire date and he told Mojo that he intended to attend Stevie Nicks’ Hyde Park gig tomorrow (July 12): “I’m going to get myself a vicarious fix. For once I get to be a punter in the audience and see them do all the work.”
