Lindsey Buckingham Quits Fleetwood Mac

Lindsay Buckingham, singer and guitarist of legendary rock band Fleetwood Mac, has left the group.

This according to Variety, who reports that former Fleetwood Mac guitarist Billy Burnette tweeted and deleted a message that read, “Breaking news: Lindsey Buckingham is out but I’m not in. A little pissed off but I’ll get over it. It’s all in the book.”

At the time of this writing, there has not been official word from the band or Buckingham if Burnette’s claim is accurate.

If true, this is actually not the first time Buckingham has left the group, as he departed once before back 1987, eventually rejoining in the late 1990s.

His first split with the band came prior to a 10-week tour they were about to embark on. Buckingham reportedly called them all together to talk about how he felt that his creativity was being stifled and, he claims, his point-of-view was not well-received.

In his autobiography, Buckingham claims that after sharing his thoughts and feelings with the group he and fellow Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks got into a physical altercation.

He officially left the band the following day and that is when Burnette was first brought on board.

Buckingham eventually returned to the band around 1996, following a roughly two-year break they had been on, and has remained in Fleetwood Mac ever since.

Interestingly, Buckingham is not a founding member of the band, as Fleetwood Mac was formed in 1967 and Buckingham officially joined in 1974.

His second departure comes as quite a surprise, and an ironic one at that, as the 68-year-old just spoke in 2017 with The Guardian about how he was the one to convince Fleetwood Mac singer Christine McVie to return to the group.

“I had to have a conversation with Christine and say: ‘Well, we’d love you to come back, but you can’t leave again.’ She told me she’d been reconnecting with her creative muse and had some rough ideas she sent to me – I, of course, took great liberties with them in my studio.”

That conversation apparently led to McVie returning to the band, as well as to the pair recording an album of original music together, titled Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie.

“She was interested in these songs I’d been working on, and Mick and John thought it would be good to bring her over early and cut tracks on some of these things. It was unbelievable,” he added. “We only expected to do it for a couple of weeks but we stayed for a month. Nobody was saying it was a duet album – we didn’t care what it was!”