Will Hodgkinson
January 21 2017, 12:01am,
The Times

The Fleetwood Mac singer talks about her past lovers, drugs hell — and why, at 68, she’s not too old to get married

If you have wondered how Stevie Nicks, at the age of 68, manages to tour the world with Fleetwood Mac, run her solo career and be an inspiration to young female stars including Adele and Florence Welch, here’s the answer. She’s scared that if she stops, she’ll shrink.

“A friend told me that when you retire, you get smaller,” says Nicks, who at 5ft 1in cannot afford to take that chance. “Small means old, so I fight it with a sword. I’ll be on stage, dancing around, thinking, ‘Now, let’s see . . . how old am I again? 110?’ And it blows my mind! But I would be so bored if I wasn’t doing this.”

It is one in the morning, and Nicks is sheltering from a rainstorm in her beachfront apartment in Santa Monica. Announcing that she rarely goes to sleep before the small hours because she is “the Cruella de Vil of the night”, she proves to be fighting the war against age valiantly. Her California gypsy fashion sense, first shared with the world on the cover of Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 divorce-era masterpiece, Rumours, remains unchanged. Her weathered voice, sexy in a stayed-up-till-7am way, is the same as it ever was. And this July she will be sharing a Hyde Park headline slot with Tom Petty, the man who kickstarted her solo career in 1981, when Fleetwood Mac were at their Lear Jethopping height and nobody wanted or expected Nicks to break out on her own.

“When I started work on [the debut solo album] Bella Donna I wanted it to be like a Tom Petty record, but by a girl. That led me to Tom’s producer, Jimmy Iovine, who did not drink, do drugs, anything,” says Nicks, who at the time was known for her cocaine-centric lifestyle; she even wrote a song, Gold Dust Woman, about it. Continue reading Stevie Nicks: ‘I was so sick — I couldn’t shower. I almost died’ | The Times →