Crowded House’s Neil Finn joined Fleetwood Mac in 2018, along with Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell, after the band fired Lindsey Buckingham. But Finn admits it wasn’t necessarily easy taking his place.
It seems that while Buckingham was gone, Stevie Nicks didn’t want much else to change.
In a new interview with MOJO, Finn describes Mick Fleetwood as “the heart and soul of the band,” but notes that Stevie is very much the leader of the group, “because Stevie wants it the way Stevie wants it and that’s the way it’ll be.”
And it seems she wanted it to sound just like Lindsey.
“She couldn’t bear to be in a band with Lindsey anymore, but she still wanted to do it exactly the way he would have,” Finn says. “She was really happy with the way it sounded between me and her, but she put a lot of pressure on Mike to be more like Lindsey.”
He adds, “Sometimes Mike’s solos would go on and Stevie would get exhausted playing tambourine. She’d be, ‘F****** hell, Lindsey only did 12 bars!'”
As for Lindsey, Finn says he’s never met him, but would like to have dinner with him one day.
“There’s a lot of ill-will, but I don’t think he bears any towards me and I do think he had prior appreciation of the music I’d made,” he says. “Hopefully, once he got over the massive disappointment, he’d have thought, ‘At least someone with something going for them is singing my songs.’”
Finn is getting ready to release a new album with Crowded House. Gravity Stairs, the band’s eighth studio album and the first since 2021’s Dreamers Are Waiting, comes out May 31. It is available for preorder now.
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