He might not be recreating viral dances or making lip-sync videos, but Lindsey Buckingham is no social media naïf.
Having semi-broken the internet last week when he hinted that he might be collaborating with Stevie Nicks again, he’s now returned, alongside son Will, to cast his learned eye over some of the many TikTok covers of the Fleetwood Mac classic Never Going Back Again.
This is, as Will points out, “a very hard song to play,” so perhaps Lindsey was fearing the worst when he agreed to do this. However, as he’s shown Harmony Calata’s cover, he’s immediately bowled over.
Asked by Will what he thinks, Buckingham senior replies: “She’s doing a good job. I think she’s doing better than I do. She's singing it really well, too… she's got the whole thing down beautifully.”
High praise indeed, and Buckingham also spots one particular detail that impresses him. “Oh wow… see, that’s something I only do on stage,” he says when he hears one particular guitar flourish. “That’s not a part of the record.”
Unsurprisingly, it’s a “perfect” 10/10 score for Harmony, and Lindsey is pretty impressed by Kade Wolff’s effort, too. There’s no singing on this one, but the playing is pretty on point, though Buckingham does have one comment to make on the instrument being used.
“I'm not sure of the choice of guitar,” he says. “It looks like a Dobo or something, which may not be as suited to the song, but that was lovely.”
It’s a 9/10 for Kade, then – still a very respectable score – and Buckingham seems genuinely chuffed to see so many people playing a song that he recorded almost 40 years ago for Fleetwood Mac’s 1997 album, Rumours.
“I'm touched and encouraged that these people are caring enough to want to learn these things to begin with and that they're articulating it so well,” he says.
Finally, we come to Adam Simons, who jokes on the caption for his TikTok that it’s “day 16375832 of trying to play this song correctly.”
“He's not as far along in the learning curve as the other two were,” says Buckingham, diplomatically. “That's fair enough. That doesn't mean he’s not going to get it because he obviously had the first part down very well.”
And that’s that, other than a final thank you to the TikTok community “for caring enough” to take Never Going Back Again to their hearts.
Will we ever see Lindsey Buckingham playing it on stage with Fleetwood Mac again, though? Time will tell.
