Fleetwood Mac Reveal Why Bandmate Lindsey Buckingham Was Kicked Out of the Group

While they have been performing as a band for more than 50 years, these days a question that Fleetwood Mac find themselves answering a lot is just what happened with former bandmate Lindsey Buckingham and why exactly he was given the boot, and recently they revealed the answer.

“We weren’t happy — [happy] sounds almost like too light of a word to use,” Mick Fleetwood, the group’s drummer, told the NY Post of Lindsay’s firing. “It just wasn’t a happy situation anymore, really for everyone.” The guitarist/singer ended up suing his former band, a lawsuit that was ultimately settled outside of court. And yet Mick, 71, says the whole situation wasn’t quite that easy.

“It was a huge event in terms of the dynamic that affected everyone,” he said. “He’s been a major part of the story, which did start for me and John [McVie] in 1967 . . . We’ve been doing Fleetwood Mac storytelling, as it were, with 18 different people in Fleetwood Mac since we started.”

Lindsey, 69, joined the group along with Stevie Nicks in 1974, but was given the boot in April 2018. The band would end up replacing him with two musicians: Neil Finn and Mike Campbell. As for his firing, Lindsey puts all of the blame on the “Edge of Seventeen” singer, 70.

“It appeared to me that she was looking for something to hang on me, in order to instigate some kind of coup,” Lindsey once explained while on CBS This Morning, adding that he learned that Stevie was upset at him from the band’s manager Irving Azoff. “Irving told me — a couple of days later — that she’d given the band an ultimatum, and either I had to go or she was going to go.”

He also revealed, “I actually have not spoken to any of the band. And it’s been almost a year now. Nobody. I have had, only in the last couple of weeks, I have gotten an email, which I expected to get, from Christine McVie [keyboardist].”

In bands, unfortunately, there will always be squabbles, it’s just tough to see a legend kicked out because of one. As for Fleetwood Mac today, they are still touring.

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