By Sylvie Simmons
Q Magazine (UK)
May 1, 2008

Stevie Nicks is the epitome of Californian rock excess. While in Fleetwood Mac she sold millions and snorted half of Colombia. Solo, she sold millions and got addicted to painkillers. Unsurprisingly, she has advice for Amy Winehouse.

She still looks like a heroine from romantic fiction—long blonde hair, pale skin, big, dark, peculiarly innocent eyes staring out from under a fringe. She’s wearing a flowing chiffon top, black, fake snakeskin pants and ballet pumps. Except for the lack of heels, the look is classic Stevie Nicks, small enough for a gust of wind to blow over.

Fortunately we’re not at her Southern California home perched on a breezy spot above the Pacific Ocean, what she calls her “little one-bedroom, rock ‘n’ roll crazy palace”—but her other house, 10 minutes’ drive inland. A house so big you hardly notice the grand piano under the curved staircase in the chandeliered entrance hall. Too big, she says; she’s going to sell it.

Stacked by the front door is a large set of travel bags. Nicks is leaving in the morning for a show in Chicago, before heading on to Nashville, where they’re making a Stevie Nicks TV special. Which doesn’t stop her talking to Q until well past midnight. “I do talk a lot,” she says, and as always, she is telling the truth. In conversation, Nicks is frank, funny, guileless and had perfect recall of a 40-year career—amazing when you considered she was addicted to cocaine or tranquillisers for half that time.

Notoriety aside, Nicks is celebrated for her role in helping Fleetwood Mac become one of the world’s most enduring bands. Before Nicks and then-boyfriend, guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, joined in 1974, Fleetwood Mac were a fading British blues rock act, treading water. Within three years they would produce one of the best-selling albums of all time, Rumours, while Nicks’s tracks such as Gold Dust Woman, Rhiannon and Sara became a key strand of the band’s woozy, Calfornian mystique. Solo success would follow in he ‘80s, with Nicks subsequently hailed as an influence by successive generations of musicians, including Courtney Love and Sheryl Crow.

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