ADVERTISEMENT A love not so frozen anymore.
Last week, Euronews Culture chronicled the frenzied online speculations about a possible Fleetwood Mac reunion, following cryptic social media posts by longtime members/exes Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham.
Unwilling to yield to collective mania and possibly wary of future disappointment, we concluded that the posts were probably “just bandmates having a laugh and patching things up.” How blissfully naive we were.
Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham have announced the reissue of ‘Buckingham Nicks’, more than 50 years after the initial release of their only studio album as a duo.
A remastered version will be on sale on 19 September, both digitally and on CD, with a limited number of 5,000 physical copies. The record’s opening track, ‘Crying in the Night’, was made available to stream on Wednesday.
‘Buckingham Nicks’ was originally released in 1973. It was a commercial failure but it caught the attention of Mick Fleetwood, who invited Buckingham to join Fleetwood Mac. The American singer insisted that Nicks join too.
The two, then a couple, became the central faces, voices and songwriters of the group for the four decades that followed. Their tumultuous relationship inspired several of the band’s most famous songs, including on the 1977 hit album ‘Rumours.’
‘Buckingham Nicks’ reached a cult classic status among Fleetwood Mac fans but became a rare sight in record stores. It was last issued on vinyl in 1981 and has remained absent from streaming platforms.
The duo foreshadowed the announcement in a series of Instagram posts last week.
Nicks shared a hand-written line from the pair’s 1973 song ‘Frozen Love’: “And if you go forward…”
“I’ll meet you there”, Buckingham responded on his own account, completing the lyric.
The interaction sent fans into a frenzy, leading many to believe that a Fleetwood Mac reunion was imminent, but the prospect seemed uncertain.
Nicks has said that without the late singer Christine McVie, who died on 30 November 2022 aged 79, “there’s no chance of putting Fleetwood Mac back together.”
Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham had long wanted to reedit their debut work.
In 2011, Buckingham told Uncut that he and Nicks had “every intention of putting that album back out.”
The reissued version of ‘Buckingham Nicks’ features the same album cover as the original, a photograph of the then-couple posing nude.
Buckingham and Nicks were in their early to mid-20s during the making of their album. “It stands up in a way you hope it would, by these two kids who were pretty young to be doing that work”, Buckingham said in the re-release’s liner notes..
“[We] knew what we had as a duo, two songwriters that sang really well together. And it was a very natural thing, from the beginning”, Nicks said.
