The signs Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham are getting back together

Telegraph

3 days ago

Rumours have always been the lifeblood of Fleetwood Mac, from the name of their 40-million selling album in 1977 to the mind-boggling web of intimate relationships between bandmates.
Key members Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham may be 77 and 75 respectively, but the former lovers have sent the rumour mill into overdrive yet again with a series of cryptic social media posts. Almost six decades after the original iteration of the band formed, the psychodrama continues. And it feels strangely reassuring.
Here's what happened. On Thursday afternoon, Nicks posted five words in squiggly writing followed by an ellipsis on her Instagram account: 'And if you go forward…' A hardcore contingent of her 2.2 million followers went bananas, recognising the words as lyrics from a 1973 song called Frozen Love, which appeared on Buckingham Nicks, her sole album with Buckingham before the pair joined Fleetwood Mac the following year.
An hour later, excitement hit Defcon 1. Buckingham, with whom Nicks has always had an intense and tortured relationship, put a similarly squiggly-written post on his own Instagram account. 'I'll meet you there,' he wrote – the second half of the line that Nicks had posted shortly before.
Cue a landslide of excitement and speculation. 'Buckingham Nicks in 2025 was not on my bingo card,' wrote one fan. '60-year situationship is crazy,' wrote another. A third fan, assuming that a joint tour was being suggested, wrote: 'Stop it! I will liquidate my assets for front row tickets RIGHT NOW.'
So what's going on? Just as the pair no doubt intended, we're all in the dark. A contact of mine put me in touch with Buckingham's manager, but he was keeping shtum. There are four possibilities. One is that, as the asset liquidator assumes, the pair are going to hit the road together. Nicks, who drew a vast crowd at London's BST Hyde Park last summer, already has a massive US tour starting next month and Buckingham has nothing planned. It's entirely feasible.
The second possibility is that a wider Fleetwood Mac reunion is on the cards. Frozen Love was the song that led drummer Mick Fleetwood to ask Buckingham to join the band back in 1974 (he said yes, on the condition that his musical partner and girlfriend Nicks could join too). It was actually Fleetwood who kicked the whole thing off on Wednesday when he posted a video snippet of himself listening to Frozen Love on Instagram. 'Magic then, magic now,' Fleetwood wrote.
Fleetwood Mac last toured in 2019, with Crowded House's Neil Finn replacing Buckingham, who was fired after a reported disagreement with the band over tour dates. However the death of Christine McVie in 2022 might have put paid to this: Nicks told Mojo magazine last year that there's 'no chance' of the band getting back together without McVie. The third possibility is that nothing is going on. It's just a truce between old lovers.
The fourth reason, and the most likely, is the re-release and digitisation of the Buckingham Nicks album. With its sleeve featuring a topless photo of the hirsute sweethearts, the record bombed on its release and has never even been available on streaming platforms. There would be huge demand for it.
More than Kurt and Courtney or Mick and Marianne, Nicks and Buckingham are rock's most famous couple. Theirs was a story of backstabbing and bed-hopping. They met at high school in California, joined a band called Fritz and became lovers. Their passionate and stormy relationship lasted until 1976 before it brutally collapsed, just as Fleetwood Mac were writing Rumours. Both were too proud to walk away from the band. Nicks later had a brief affair with Fleetwood – hardly the recipe for smooth band relationships.
Nicks and Buckingham's tempestuous relationship yielded some of pop's greatest songs. Buckingham wrote the self-explanatory Go Your Own Way and Never Going Back Again about Nicks. She wrote Dreams about Buckingham ('You say you want your freedom… But listen carefully to the sound of your loneliness'). As Nicks later described it: 'He's looking at it from a very unpleasant, angry way, and I'm saying, in my more airy-fairy way, 'We're gonna be alright. We'll get through this.''
To a point, Stevie. Her most intense song about Buckingham was Silver Springs, which was intended for Rumours but ended up as a B-side to Go Your Own Way (the yin and yang of a relationship right there on one seven-inch disc). The lyrics to Silver Springs are excoriating. 'I know I could have loved you / But you would not let me,' Nicks sang, before going on: 'You'll never get away from the sound of the woman that loved you.'
A live performance of Fleetwood Mac performing Silver Springs in 1997 is one of the most impassioned and powerful pieces of live music imaginable – explaining why it has more than 50 million views on YouTube. The intensity of the song is breath-taking. As Nicks sings, she constantly glances at Buckingham, to her left, until they both hold each other's stares and sing directly at each other. ' Never get away,' Nicks sings with fervid intensity, her anger – decades on ­­– never far from the surface.
I saw Fleetwood Mac play in Dublin in 2015 and the interplay between Nicks and Buckingham was still captivatingly intense. There was a sense of unfinished business there, of two former lovers whose issues with each other remained unresolved.
Whatever these cryptic new posts mean, it's a chapter that remains tantalisingly open. After all this time, they're still finishing each other's sentences.