It increasingly looks like Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham are teasing a reissue of their pre-Fleetwood Mac album, Buckingham Nicks.
You may recall that last week the pair posted lyrics from Frozen Love, from that album. Nicks wrote ‘And if you go forward’ on her Instagram page, which Buckingham answered with ‘I’ll meet you there’, thus completing a line from the song.
Even before that, Mick Fleetwood posted a video of himself listening to the song and commenting: “It’s magic then, it’s magic now. What a thrill, what a thrill.”
Inevitably, all this raised hopes among some fans that Stevie and Lindsey had buried the hatchet and Fleetwood Mac might be on the verge of reuniting one final time.
Now a billboard has appeared on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles that steers the story away from those, er, rumours. It depicts the original Buckingham Nicks artwork and the date, 19 September – a Friday this year, and thus a new release day. The location of the billboard, close to Sound City Studios where the 1973 album was originally recorded, also feels like a deliberate nod to its origins.
Neither Buckingham nor Nicks have yet confirmed that the album is about to get a reissue. It’s certainly due one, though - the LP has been out of print since the 1970s and has never been reissued on CD or vinyl. It was the pair’s only album together before they hitched their stars to the Fleetwood Mac wagon in December 1974.
As for a Mac reunion, fans can keep on dreaming. Last year Nicks appeared to dismiss any idea that could happen without Christine McVie. “There’s no chance of putting Fleetwood Mac back together in any way without her,” she told Rolling Stone last year, adding that the last time she spoke to Buckingham was at McVie's memorial service “for about three minutes... I dealt with Lindsey for as long as I could. You could not say that I did not give him more than 300 million chances.”
