The Tour That Made Them Superstars Almost Tore Them Apart: 'We Were Lucky to Get Out Alive'
In 1977, Fleetwood Mac was riding higher than ever.
The band's landmark album Rumours had become a phenomenon, eventually spending 31 non-consecutive weeks atop the Billboard 200 and selling millions of copies worldwide. But while the music was conquering the charts, the group's personal lives were unraveling behind the scenes.
A new retrospective from BBC Music Magazine looks back at Fleetwood Mac's legendary Rumours tour, which ran from February 1977 through August 1978 and transformed the band from rock stars into one of the biggest acts in the world. According to the report, it nearly destroyed them in the process.
The tensions that fueled Rumours were already well known. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks had ended their romantic relationship, while Christine and John McVie had divorced during the making of the album. Yet the band continued performing songs inspired by those breakups night after night in front of thousands of fans.
BBC Music Magazine notes that songs like Buckingham's "Go Your Own Way" and Nicks' "Dreams" became even more emotionally charged on stage. Nicks later described them to Mojo magazine as "twin songs."
"'Dreams' and 'Go Your Own Way' are what I call the 'twin songs.' They're the same song written by two different people about the same relationship," said Nicks.
The emotional stakes weren't lost on the band's bandmates. In the Mojo interview, drummer Mick Fleetwood reflected on Buckingham and Nicks turning their breakup into music, saying they were "writing those songs about and to each other, and then singing them on the same mike."
Fleetwood added, "I don't know how they did it." The tension was so intense that even Warner Bros. executives worried the group might not survive, repeatedly calling Fleetwood to ask, "Do we still have a band, Mick?" Mojo summed up the era as one defined by "betrayal, obsession and narcotic excess," while Fleetwood offered an even starker assessment: "We were lucky to get out alive."
As the album's success exploded, so did the excess surrounding the band. Bassist John McVie later recalled that when the royalty checks finally started arriving, "we all went berserk and went out and bought Porsches and Rolls-Royces."
The stories became increasingly extravagant. Christine McVie admitted that grand pianos were sometimes craned into hotel rooms during the tour, while drummer Fleetwood joked about the expense of finding hotels willing to accommodate Nicks' decorating preferences.
But the most serious complication came when Nicks and Fleetwood began an affair, creating even more strain within an already fractured group.
Looking back years later, Nicks admitted the relationship was doomed from the start.
"Never in a million years could you have told me that would happen. That was the biggest surprise. But Mick is definitely one of my great, great loves," Nicks told Uncut in a 2003 interview. "But that really wasn't good for anybody. Everybody was angry, because Mick was married to a wonderful girl and had two wonderful children. I was horrified. I loved these people. I loved his family. So it couldn't possibly work out. And it didn't. It just couldn't."
Despite the chaos, Fleetwood Mac survived the Rumours era and continued together through Tusk, Mirage and Tango in the Night. Still, members of the band have acknowledged that the experience changed them forever.
Reflecting on that period, Fleetwood later told The Independent, "There's a picture of the five of us back in the day taken by [rock photographer] Neil Preston, and I always look at it and we're laughing away, and we didn't have any idea what was going to happen. No one could have imagined the success and the hardship and the torment."
Nearly 50 years later, the Rumours tour remains one of rock's greatest success stories, and one of its most unlikely survival tales.
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This story was originally published June 19, 2026 at 12:46 PM.