Lindsey Buckingham breaks his silence on being fired from Fleetwood Mac

Lindsey Buckingham’s split from Fleetwood Mac wasn’t a “choice,” the rocker finally confirmed.

The band announced in April that it would be touring with two new members – Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Neil Finn of Crowded House – and without Buckingham, who joined the group in 1974 with then-girlfriend Stevie Nicks.

But while rumors of an ugly breakup swirled, Buckingham stayed quiet until a performance at a fund-raiser for Democratic California congressional candidate Mike Levin.

“I think what you would say is that there were factions within the band that had lost their perspective,” Buckingham, 68, said.

“The point is that they’d lost their perspective. What that did was to harm – and this is the only thing I’m really sad about, the rest of it becomes an opportunity – it harmed the 43-year legacy that we had worked so hard to build, and that legacy was really about rising above difficulties in order to fulfill one’s higher truth and one’s higher destiny.”

Founding member Mick Fleetwood recently told Rolling Stone that the band had “arrived at the impasse of hitting a brick wall” and decided to move on without Buckingham, but refused to say the singer had been fired.

The band, meanwhile, will kick off its Buckingham-less North American tour on Oct. 3 in Tulsa, Okla., and hit St. Louis, Portland, Ore., Denver, Tampa, Boston and New York along the way.