The real story behind THAT Silver Springs performance by Fleetwood Mac – as Gen Z discover Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham’s messy break up for the first time

Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham‘s tumultuous romance fuelled the creation of some of music’s biggest hits.

Despite the couple splitting in 1976, it was a relationship so thorny that it’s causing a storm on TikTok today, with Gen Z only just learning about their messy break up through Fleetwood Mac‘s emotionally charged 1997 performance of Silver Springs in Burbank, California.

Nicks wrote the song about her breakup with the guitarist, saying she got the title after driving by a sign for Silver Springs, Maryland, and admiring the magical name, which led her reflect on what her relationship with Lindsey could have been.

Despite not making the album Rumours, the band performed the song live in 1997 in Burbank, and Nicks left nothing to the imagination – directing every inch of emotion behind the lyrics to directly to Lindsey, now 75.

Today, the performance is still causing a storm, with one Gen Z viewer writing on TikTok: ‘Don’t just write a song about your ex, make him play lead guitar and sing it to his face’. Another dubbed it the ‘ultimate power move’ on Stevie’s behalf.

Here, Femail explores the highs and lows of Stevie and Lindsey’s romance, from the formation of Buckingham Nicks to the Fleetwood Mac glory days and the bombshell post-break up claims.

The pair met at Menlo-Atherton High School in California, when Nicks was a senior and Buckingham a junior. 

It was during a Christian youth music group when Buckingham strummed California Dreamin’ and Nicks harmonized that they realised their potential together. 

The duo first joined a band called Fritz before settling on forming their own rock duo in 1971, called Buckingham Nicks.

Nicks waited tables and cleaned houses to support them while Buckingham lounged all day with his friends, including Warren Zevon, she has said. ‘I was making $50 a week cleaning,’ Nicks once recalled to Rolling Stone. 

‘I’d come in every day and have to step over these bodies. Me, I’ve just been cleaning. I’m tired. I’m pickin’ up their legs and cleaning under them and emptying out the ashtrays,’ she recalled.

The rock and roll couple were posing for the cover art on their self-titled first album in 1975 when a photographer told her to take off her blouse, according to Stephen Davis’ biography of Nicks, Gold Dust Woman.

She didn’t want to do it, and Buckingham lost it, shouting: ‘Don’t be a f**king child, this is art!’

Despite initial differences, the pair got an opportunity in 1975 when drummer Mick Fleetwood recruited the pair to join Fleetwood Mac.

The duo were both admitted and completed the band’s enduring line-up alongside Mick Fleetwood, Christine McVie and John McVie.

‘When they first joined the band, Lindsey had control [over Nicks],’ Mick Fleetwood told Davis in the biography. ‘And, very slowly, he began to lose control. And he really didn’t like it.’

With Nicks fronting the act, the band shot to stardom. But Buckingham was madly jealous that Nicks’ songs ‘Rhiannon’ and ‘Landslide,’ about their fading romance, were more popular than his own, the biography claimed.

Ahead of the band’s landmark album Rumours, which was released in 1977 and would later earn them a Grammy, the couple ended their love affair.

‘I don’t even remember what the issues were; I just know that it got to the point where I wanted to be by myself,’ Nicks told Rolling Stone of the split.

‘It just wasn’t good anymore, wasn’t fun anymore, wasn’t good for either of us anymore. I’m just the one who stopped it.’

The ill-feeling between the on-off couple acted as a catalyst for songs such as Second Hand News and Never Going Back, which saw Buckingham write some very spiky lyrics, seemingly directed at his former love.

The most controversial was seemingly his Go Your Own Way, which states: ‘Tell me why everything turned around, packing up, shacking up is all you want to do.’

And Nicks felt aggrieved at the sentiment. She told the publication: ‘I very, very much resented him telling the world that ‘packing up, shacking up’ with different men was all I wanted to do.

‘He knew it wasn’t true. It was just an angry thing that he said. Every time those words would come out onstage, I wanted to go over and kill him.

When recording the band’s 1977 album, ‘Rumours,’ he demeaned Nicks’ songwriting and told her she needed him to make her songs sound halfway decent.

She said he was ‘hijacking’ her music and told her mother that Buckingham had had ‘thrown her down to the floor’ when the two were arguing.

‘He knew it, so he really pushed my buttons through that. It was like, ”I’ll make you suffer for leaving me.” And did. For years.’

The singer said that she ‘never brought men around’ in case it added fuel to the fire, but that Buckingham ‘immediately got girlfriends.’

But toward the end of the band’s Rumours tour, Nicks seemingly looked closer to home for her next tryst after having an affair with married bandmate Mick Fleetwood.

The singer said that the pair would never had hooked up, had they not been intoxicated on a cocktail of drugs and alcohol.

Nicks said that the band were spending ‘gazillions’ on drugs during the ’70s and admitted that used to carry a gram of cocaine in her boot at all times.

She revealed: ‘It was the first thing I thought of when I woke up in the morning and the last thing I thought of before I went to bed.’

‘Mick and I would never have had an affair had we not had a party and all been completely drunk and messed up and coked out, and, you know, ended up being the last two people at the party,’ she told Oprah’s Master Class.

‘So guess what? It’s not hard to figure out what happened – and what happened wasn’t a good thing. It was doomed. It was a doomed thing, caused a lot of pain for everybody, led to nothing.’

But Buckingham did not appear to hold the affair against either of his bandmates. He later told The Independent: ‘I didn’t feel betrayed by Mick when he later had an affair with Stevie.

‘Quite honestly I’d have been surprised if it hadn’t happened. I remember he came over, sat me down and told me, and I went, ”Oh, okay.” Stevie and I had long since parted company and she’d had several boyfriends in between.’

Stevie made further accusations in Stephen Davis’ biography of her, which was published in 2017.

In one incident in 1987, the couple were arguing in front of the rest of the band when Buckingham ‘manhandled Stevie, slapped her face and bent her backward over the hood of his car,’ the book said.

‘He put his fingers around her neck and started to choke her,’ it read. The other bandmates intervened and told him not to lay a hand on her again. ‘I thought he was going to kill me,’ Nicks said.

Speaking to the book’s author, bandmate Mick Fleetwood seemed to corroborate the manipulative behavior.

After the confrontation in front of their bandmates in 1987, Buckingham reformed his ways and never laid hand on her again, according to the book.

Nicks and Buckingham often ‘shot eye daggers at each other in front of packed stadiums,’ according to the LA Times, but the band largely soldiered on.

And fans have found it hard to let go of the chemistry between Nicks and Buckingham.

Nicks hinted at it during an interview with MTV in 2009, in which she said: ‘That electric crazy attraction between Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks never dies, never will die, never will go away… Who Lindsey and I are to each other will never change.’

She continued: ‘It’s over. It doesn’t mean the great feeling isn’t there, it must mean that we’re beauty and the beast. 

‘It means that the love is always there but we’ll never be together, so that’s even more romantic.’

In an interview with The Guardian in 2011, Nicks reflected on the end of her relationship with Buckingham.

She told the publication that had Fleetwood Mac, fame and drugs not become part of their lives, she believes the couple would have stayed together.

‘We would have married and had children because we were headed that way. We didn’t really mess up till we moved to Los Angeles. And that was when the whole world just ripped us apart.’

But far from time being the best healer, the former couple continue to clash – even now they are both in their seventies.

As recently as 2022, Buckingham hit out at Nicks once again as he blamed her, as well as band manager Irving Azoff, for his abrupt removal from Fleetwood Mac in January 2018. 

Following his departure, Buckingham filed a $12million to $14million lawsuit against former bandmates: Nicks, Mick Fleetwood, Christie McVie and John McVie for lost wages that he would have earned from the 2018 tour. It was eventually settled in December of 2018. 

However, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 2021, Buckingham maintained that his firing was a result of Nicks giving the rest of Fleetwood Mac an ultimatum – either he goes or she goes – following his request that the band delay a tour by three months so he could promote his new solo album.

‘It would be like a scenario where Mick Jagger says, ‘Either Keith [Richards] goes or I go,” Buckingham recalled before adding, ‘No, neither one of you can go. But I guess the singer has to stay. The figurehead has to stay.’

He continued: ‘I think she saw the possibility of remaking the band more in the Stevie Nicks vein. More mellow and kind of down, giving her more chances to do the kind of talking she does onstage.’

Through her publicist at the time, Nicks told a far different ending to Buckingham’s time in the band, calling his version ‘revisionist history.’

‘His version of events is factually inaccurate and while I’ve never spoken publicly on the matter, certainly it feels the time has come to shine a light on the truth,’ Nicks said.

‘To be exceedingly clear, I did not have him fired, I did not ask for him to be fired, I did not demand he be fired. Frankly, I fired myself. 

‘I proactively removed myself from the band and a situation I considered to be toxic to my wellbeing. I was done. If the band went on without me, so be it. 

‘And after many lengthy group discussions, Fleetwood Mac, a band whose legacy is rooted in evolution and change, found a new path forward with two hugely talented new members.’

That move forward was made by firing Buckingham and adding new members – Mike Campbell from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Neil Finn of Crowded House. 

Buckingham went on to question Nicks’ creativity and energy level, in the time leading up to his firing.

‘I think that was hard for her, seeing me jump around in an age-inappropriate way,’ he said, before directing his comments on her personal life and the choices she made to remain in the band.

‘Also, she’s lonely. She’s alone. She has the people who work for her, and I’m sure she has friends, but you know.’

Nicks simply retorted: ‘Those are my decisions that I get to make for myself. I’m proud of the life choices I’ve made and it seems a shame for him to pass judgment on anyone who makes a choice to live their life on their own terms.’