Stevie Nicks reveals how Lindsey Buckingham turned her life into a ‘nightmare’

Imagine having to silence your own essence, suppress your natural laugh and turn into a shadow of yourself just to live with someone who was once the love of your life. This was the painful reality that Stevie Nicks lived alongside Lindsey Buckingham After the end of the relationship that forever marked the history of rock. The unmistakable voice behind classics like “Dreams” and “Rhiannon” It carries with it not only timeless melodies, but also deep scars of a relationship that has become something toxic and suffocating.

Two months after the start of the recordings of Rumourswhen Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham They decided to end their love relationship, no one could imagine that this rupture would generate both a musical masterpiece and personal hell. “When we ended, two years after entering the Fleetwood Macit was like a living nightmare, ”he confessed Nicks In an interview with Rolling Stone. “Everything about me seemed to piss him off. My laugh, the way I could handle many difficult things, all that made him want to shrink.”

The psychological pressure was such that the Stevie NicksOne of the most powerful voices of rock was forced to cancel itself completely. “Then I moved when I was close to him. I became shy like a rat and would never dare to offer a suggestion,” he revealed with a sharp honesty. How many bright ideas were lost in this forced silence? How many musical contributions have been trapped in the throat of one of the greatest composers of their generation? The hardness of the post-Termin relationship was such that, in 1990, Nicks He even compared them with “a boa and a rat.” Years later, in 1994, she would be even more direct: “He feels that I broke our team. So, so, in his mind, I should be tortured for days and then killed.”

The problems were not born with the end of the relationship, only intensified brutally. Since high school in Los Angeles, when they still dreamed of conquering the world of music as a double, Buckingham already showed signs of possessiveness. “Rich and famous or hungry and poor, we go through the same problems,” he recalled Nicks. “He always wanted me just for him, but someone had to go out and make some money. When I came home, I always got a cold treatment. He didn’t completely trust me about where I had been.”

Control even extended to the most intimate issues of the relationship. Buckingham even used the band’s own songs as a psychological weapon against Nicks. The iconic “Go Your Own Way” contained a line about her “to love” with other men, something that Nicks He denyed vehemently. “Every time these words came on stage, I wanted to go there and kill him,” she confessed to Rolling Stone in 1997. “He knew that, so I really pressed my buttons through that. It was like,” I will make you suffer for leaving me. “And I suffered. For years.” Each strip pulsates with the raw energy of shattered hearts and a coexistence that has become a daily exercise of emotional survival.

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• Fleetwood Mac

• Lindsey Buckingham

• Stevie Nicks