Lindsey Buckingham Spots His Guitar Influence in Sam Fender’s ‘People Watching’

When Lindsey Buckingham watched a live performance of Sam Fender’s “People Watching” with his son Will, the younger Buckingham immediately heard something familiar. The Fleetwood Mac guitarist agreed, noting a guitar part that could have been his own.

“It did occur to me that maybe the guitar part was very much something I would do,” Buckingham said in a video reaction that surfaced this week. The clip shows the pair watching footage from Fender’s show at London Stadium last year, where Will first pointed out the resemblance.

Buckingham found more than just a guitar line to recognize. He described how the song’s structure mirrored a Fleetwood Mac approach to holding a mood without forcing dynamics. “The general kind of limits that the song puts on itself is very much like what we would do,” he said. “It kind of holds a certain emotive space and never varies from there, you know, and he knows what that is and wants to hold on to it.”

That observation goes beyond imitation and into the mechanics of tension. Buckingham also commented on how Fender’s writing has sharpened since his earlier breakthrough. “He did ‘Seventeen Going Under’ and that was great, too, but this is more of a complete song to me.”

After seeing the size of the London crowd, Buckingham asked Will if Fender was drawing similar audiences in the United States. Told that he was, he replied: “Well, that’s good. He deserves it.” It’s a plainspoken endorsement from a writer who shaped an era’s idea of precision and release.