Stevie Nicks Said Fleetwood Mac Was Like an ‘Incestuous’ and ‘Scandalous’ Soap Opera
Stevie Nicks opened up about what it was really like to be the lead singer of a classic rock band like Fleetwood Mac. Here’s what the singer said about the affairs and scandals that followed the legendary band for years.
Fleetwood Mac had several affairs within the band and with other musicians
Relationship drama plagued Fleetwood Mac for years, especially when the band was in its heyday.
Arguably the group’s most famous couple was Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. They 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 said that being in Fleetwood Mac was like being in a ‘soap opera’
The Fleetwood Mac band members are aware of the band’s scandalous reputation. Nicks opened up about it in a 1990 interview with Us Magazine, in which she compared the group to a “soap opera.”
“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.”
Stevie Nicks also compared the band to ‘Big Brother’
Besides saying Fleetwood Mac is like a soap opera, Stevie Nicks also compared the group to a specific reality competition show – Big Brother.
“It’s like the TV show Big Brother. If we could vote each other out, we’d all be fine!” she told Rolling Stone in 2002 of the band’s studio sessions. “My vote would come up ‘Lindsey.’ Lindsey’s would say ‘Stevie.’”
She recognized that their egos often caused arguments, but Fleetwood Mac always came back together in the end. “You know, we have a lot of the same problems that we’ve always had, which is our egos,” Nicks said. “And we’ve had a lot of fights. But we spend hours talking – we’re like a bunch of girls sometimes. We’ll be putting a guitar part on, and all of a sudden we’ll be talking about something that happened on the Tusk tour, and two hours later we’re still talking about it.”
