Uncut Magazine
July 2024

Back in 2014, STEVIE NICKS calls Uncut on her way to a Fleetwood Mac rehearsal to tell us about the newly reformed Rumours lineup of the band – and her own new collection of lost songs, “the greatest hits that never came out”.

In this great, recently unearthed interview, we learn about her fear of computers, her gold dust problems, the quality of Mick Fleetwood’s jewellery, and what it’s like getting a serious talking-to from Tom Petty. “Tom can be a scary character.” Piers Martin hears. “You wouldn’t want to run into Tom in an alley…

STEVIE NICKS is cruising eastbound on the Santa Monica freeway towards Sony’s Culver City studios in Los Angeles for a rehearsal with the other members of Fleetwood Mac.

All five of them are together for the first time since 1998, now that Christine McVie is back in the fold.

Accompanying Nicks, 66, in the back seat of her ride is Shulamith, her beloved pooch, a 16-year-old Chinese crested Yorkshire terrier mix and the singer’s constant companion. “She’s on top of my shoulder trying to see out the window,” says Nicks over the phone. “She’s the weirdest dog.” The Mac’s latest world tour, On With The Show – the group’s fourth since they reformed in 2003 – kicks off in the US in October and arrives in the UK in May. The presence of McVie in the lineup – she joined the band onstage at the O2 in London last September for a surprise rendition of “Don’t Stop” and, indeed, hasn’t stopped – is key. It’s helping to shift tickets, Nicks says, with fans who might otherwise have hesitated before paying top dollar to see the band twice in two years.

The hope is they’ll be keen to witness the classic Rumours five-piece run through the hits, especially now they can draw on McVie’s repertoire of “Little Lies”, “Everywhere”, “Songbird” and so on. “The second people saw she was coming back, the tickets just sold. I tell her, ‘You know, Chris, it’s all about you – everyone wants to see you.’ And we’re thrilled. It’s kinda fun to see it through her eyes, her being gone for so long, she’s so excited.” Nicks has also been busy getting her own affairs in order. This October sees the release of her eighth solo album, 24 Karat Gold – Songs From The Vault.

As if she hasn’t done enough soul-searching in her 40-year career, for this record she immersed herself in her past, gathering 15 of her long-lost songs together like errant children and dressing them in traditional costume – the billowing robes and gypsy shawl – before sending them out, fully Nicksed, into the world. She was assisted by longtime associates Waddy Wachtel (he first played with her on 1973’s Buckingham Nicks) and Dave Stewart, producer of Nicks’ last solo set, 2011’s In Your Dreams, plus a band of hired hands in Nashville who knocked out new versions of Nicks’ old songs in 15 days in May this year.

The songs in question stem from demos Nicks wrote at various stages in her career between 1969 and 1995, intended for her solo or Fleetwood Mac albums. Many of these songs will be familiar to Mac devotees, having appeared online and on bootlegs or boxsets in one form or another. It seems Nicks’ main incentive for the project was to record definitive versions of those unauthorised tracks floating around online that her assistant had drawn to her attention. Nicks hates computers and was once so worried about internet piracy that she didn’t release a solo record between 2001 and 2011, so this principled stance represents some sort of progress.

“Just because I don’t like computers and I don’t like the internet, I can’t expect everyone to throw their computers away,” she says. “So I have to look at it from a different vantage point.”

UNCUT: How does it feel to have Christine back in the band?

STEVIE NICKS: It’s been a lot of fun ‘cos she’s raucously funny, so she brings a sense of humour into the band that my serious singing partner and me don’t have. She brings it and then the other two English people pick up the gauntlet and the whole thing becomes much more easy-going. Lindsey and l and John and Mick, we’ve spent 15 years making the band work without her and then she decided to come back. We were on the European tour [in 2013] and she said, “What would you say if I came back to the band?”, and we were dumbfounded. ‘Cos it’d been over 15 years and we never considered it. We didn’t really believe it. But she was very serious. She moved over here and got a house with Mick in LA and she’s hired a trainer, so she really went for it. She and Mick started working out and Mick lost 40 pounds, amazing. She’s in great shape. I look over at her onstage and she looks exactly the same as she did when she left. When she counts in the songs, she goes, “A-one, a-two, a-three” in her English accent and she sounds exactly the same.

Is she working on new songs with the band?

I think she started that last year. That’s probably why she started to think, ‘Why the hell am I out here in this castle, 40 miles outside of London, gardening? And cooking. So I think she just got up one day and thought, ‘This is crazy. I’m going back to work. She’s an amazing writer and she’s probably got 16 years of pent-up poetry. I’m just glad she’s back. I’ve missed her very much.

How did 24 Karat Gold take shape?

Well. I’ve always been proud of these songs and I’ve wanted to record them for a long time. In April, my assistant and I sat down and said, “We’ve got three months off. Let’s get all those demos that the fans would love to hear recorded for real. The last album I did was with Dave Stewart and we did it in my house and it took a year – but we let it take a year because we were having so much fun and didn’t want it to end.

I called him and said, “Look, Dave, I know we spent a year doing In Your Dreams, but how can we do a record in two months?” And he said. “Go to Nashville. Those guys are on the clock.” So you go to Nashville and hire six or seven of the best players in the world and give them your 16 demos and they give you 15 days. You do two songs a day, which is unheard of in the way that we usually record, but they are union people so they get there at gam, they chart the song, I’d be there at 1pm – this is early for me, you know – at 2pm we start, we record one song, we take a dinner break, and while we’re dinner-breaking the guy charts the second song. They play it for 30 minutes by themselves, I go out in the vocal booth and we cut it live. That’s how we did the whole record.

We finished 17 songs in 10 days, then came back to Los Angeles and did the background vocals and overdubs and guitar overdubs. with Dave Stewart, Waddy Wachtel and Michael Campbell. Benmont Trench came in and did some Hammond organ and piano.

It must have been an emotional couple of months for you, tracing your life through these old songs.

It was like reliving it, like going back in time and looking at yourself. We were also going through my old Polaroids that started in ’75 when I got my first Polaroid. With the Polaroids, which we used for the album artwork. I knew exactly when they were all taken: that Polaroid was taken at a house on Sunset Plaza in 1985. And “Mabel Normand” was written in that house in 1985. She was a silent movie star in the 1920s who had a rough life and was on her way to huge fame and fortune but became a drug addict and got involved in the seedy side of fame. I was dancing with the devil at that point myself, so it scared me and I wrote that song.

Right now, with all the drugs – I lost a godson almost three years ago to an overdose at a fraternity party, just insane – this was going on in 1985, in the 1920s, and it’s going on today. I thought, maybe this song might save someone’s life. It’s the most important song on the record for me.

Is there any trace of the original recordings in these new versions?

No, they were done completely new. They were done exactly like the demos, but better. That’s what Dave said: “You give the Nashville guys a song, a demo – they know you love it and they know that’s what you want.” They don’t say to you: “I don’t like the end of it, can

we change it a little bit?” They play it exactly as they hear it. They chart it exactly as it is on the demo. So when you go out to sing it, your mind is completely blown because for the first time in your life you’re actually hearing your demo played exactly as you wanted it to be. Now, if you go in with Fleetwood Mac, the first thing that’s gonna happen when you play a demo is someone’s gonna go, “Oh, why don’t we change that chorus around a little bit” or, “You’ve got four verses in there, let’s take one of the verses out.” But that’s what happens when you’re with a band.

What’s the oldest song you’ve re-recorded?

“Cathouse Blues”, which was written in 1969 before Lindsey and I moved to Los Angeles. I asked Lindsey the other day, “Don’t you think ‘Cathouse Blues’ was written before we moved to LA?” and he said it was, because he played on the original demo.

And the most recent ones?

“Hard Advice” and a song called “Twisted” that I wrote for the 1996] movie Twister, about people who go out to find tornadoes. Lindsey and I did a produced version of it for the movie, and you know, when songs go into movies you might as well just dump them out the window because they never get heard. One second of them gets heard and you’re all in the middle of a twister coming to attack you and you don’t even hear it. I had a different version of it that I did when I first wrote it and I thought people should hear this version.

What’s “Hard Advice” about?

“Hard Advice” was a lecture Tom Petty gave me on his way through Phoenix one night. I was having a little problematic moment in my life and he gave me one of his seriously hard advice lectures. He sits me down and tells me, in his Southern swamp Floridian accent, “You need to get over this, you need to move on.” He looks you straight in the eyes with those big clear blue eyes and says, “This pain’s gone on too long, go and write some real songs.” I’d asked him to help me write some songs, that’s where it all came from. And he said, “No, I’m not helping you write a song – you’re one of our premier songwriters. Go home to your piano, light up your incense and your candles and write a song.”

I’ve known Tom Petty since 1979. He gave me “Stop Dragging My Heart Around”, my first single. Had it not been for Tom Petty and that song, I may never have had a solo career – that’s what Jimmy lovine told me. He said if you don’t put “Stop…” on this record, it could tank. And I went, “Oh well. Okay.” Tom can be a scary character. You wouldn’t want to run into him in an alley and think you’re going to mug him, because he’d kill you, I’m telling you.

Speaking of the Heartbreakers, you’ve always had a close relationship with Mike Campbell.

Yes, and we were laughing because on one song called “Starshine”, it was the Heartbreakers who did the demo, from 1982 maybe. There was a solo in the middle of it that Mike did, but in the demo there’s a blip in the middle of the solo and it was all messed up. So then what happened is Mike tried to do the solo, then Waddy Wachtel, my lead guitarist and producer of this record, he tried to do it, but you know who won? The guy from Nashville. The guy from Nashville and his band of players, they play together almost every day – they were more like the Heartbreakers.

Bella Donna propelled you to solo fame in 1981 – are there any songs from that period on this record?

“If You Were” and “Belle Fleur” were supposed to go on Bella Donna but there were already 18 songs by the time we got it done. It was my first solo record and at some point, Jimmy lovine said: “You have one too many ballads and one too many midtempo songs.” That’s why songs get kicked off records. It’s like “Silver Springs” got kicked off the first Fleetwood Mac record because it was too long, not ‘cos it wasn’t better than the other songs on the record but because it was just too darn long and I wasn’t going to edit it.

How did you title the album?

The reason I called the record 24 Karat Gold is because when I first met Mick Fleetwood he wore this beautiful jewellery made out of 24-carat gold, this yellow gold that’s very heavy and beautiful. Lindsey and I had never seen anything made out of that in our life and I was so taken by this jewellery that I immediately started my own collection, right when I joined Fleetwood Mac. So when I look at all these songs, I felt they were my 24-carat gold songs. They were my golden songs.

In a way, you could look at this album as an alternative greatest hits.

A greatest hits that never came out – exactly. But I’m not trying to make a hit record here, I’m trying to make a great record. I don’t care about making a hit record. Hit records don’t even sell anymore anyway. Records don’t sell any more.

How exactly do you mean?

People my age, we’re never gonna sell three million albums in six months like Bella Donna. Unless you’re under 20 and you have that one magical Carly Rae Jepson song and a million people buy it, or you’re Taylor Swift and all the little girls of the world say, “Mom, I want that CD and the glitter and the pictures.” There are so few reasons why people buy records now. I did worry about it for a long time – I didn’t make a record between 2001, when I finished Trouble in Shangri-La, and 2011 for that reason.

You were discouraged?

Everyone told me, my manager told me, “Just don’t bother, records don’t sell.” And it was heartbreaking. Finally, Iwrote a song in 2010 about the Twilight movies and I thought, you know what, I’m now gonna have to make a record to back up this one song, called “Moonlight”. I can’t just put one song out, now lactually have to make a record so I can put out this one song that I actually love. So that’s why I made In Your Dreams, to back up this one song.

And then I thought, ‘I’m just going to have to accept the fact that this is the way it is, there’s nothing I can do. My advice today is: make your record, if you can afford to do it, and put it out and the people that want it will buy it, and the people that want it that don’t want to buy it will steal it. But at least it will go out into the world.

Can you hear the music that you were listening to at the time in these songs, or have you always written in your own style?

Well, I was always listening to the great music of the ’70s. I was listening to Led Zeppelin, to the Eagles, to Traffic, to Chicago, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, and to Buffalo Springfield and to Poco and… I was listening to everything.

However, I started writing songs when I was 15 and a half. Waddy Wachtel will say: “In her own way, Stevie just writes one big, long song. Because she only knows five chords on the guitar and her piano playing is quite amazing since she knows nothing on the piano but manages to play quite complex songs. So as long as she doesn’t have rules and doesn’t know it, she’s a free bird.” There’s a part of me that writes straight from my heart and isn’t influenced by anybody. And then there’s the other part that will hear a song – like, I was dancing around to Haim today and that influences me because I love how they use hip-hop beats against a very Fleetwood Mac sound, and I’m thrilled by this. But when I’m really writing, I don’t listen to anything ‘cos I don’t want to be influenced. I don’t wanna be writing some song that’s already been written. I don’t even listen to my own stuff. I don’t listen to the last record I did. If I listened to my old records, I’d find that I’m writing “Edge Of Seventeen” all over again. So I stay away from all that.

Beyond music, what’s on your mind at the moment?

I will say right now I am very, very upset about what’s happening in Iraq and Syria, and the American journalist being beheaded. I am watching the news channels and I’m horrified. On In Your Dreams I wrote a song called “Soldier’s Angel”, which is about the soldiers I visited over a five-year period during the Iraq war. So Iam influenced by what’s going on in the world. Three months ago, I started writing a song called “President Says No Boots On The Ground”. It’s a protest song, but you won’t hear it for a while because that’s what’s dancing in my head right now.

GOLD DUST – Five hidden Stevie gems

CRYSTAL (1998)
24 Karat Gold rounds up 14 strays from Nicks’ sprawling catalogue but there are plenty of lessor known gems out there – like “Crystal”. Originally a Lindsey-fronted number on 1973’s Buckingham Nicks, then fleshed out on Fleetwood Mac. Nicks took the lead on her own version, which appears on the Sandra Bullock witchcraft romcom Practical Magic and features vocals from Sheryl Crow.

SLEEPING ANGEL (1982)
A sparkling Bella Donna offcut that surfaced a year later on the soundtrack to Fast Times At Ridgemont High, “Sleeping Angel” is about her boyfriend at the time, business manager Paul Fishkin, with whom she’d start her label Modern Records. “I need you because you let me breathe”, she sings, tender and true.

FREE FALLIN’ (1996)
Nicks’ heartfelt take on her soulmate Tom Petty’s drivetime classic is hidden away on the soundtrack for ’90s US family drama Party Of Five, tucked between Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and Howard Jones. She drafted in the Heartbreakers’ Mike Campbell, bassist Howie Epstein and Benmont Tench on keys to make this bittersweet heartland antnem her own

THOUSAND DAYS (1994)
This synth’n’sax B-side to Street Angel’s opener “Blue Denim” recounts a disappointing all-night recording session Nicks spent with Prince in Minneapolis in the ’80s during a Fleetwood Mac tour, which ended with Nicks smoking all her pot and sleeping on his kitchen floor. “I like him, but we were just so different there was no possible meeting ground,” she said.

BLUE LAMP (1981)
Inspired by a Tiffany glass lamp her mother gave her when she joined Fleetwood Mac, the goth pop of Blue Lamp is one of the first songs Nicks wrote for Bella Donna but didn’t make the cut. Instead. it ended up on the soundtrack to the erotic sci-fi animated adult film Heavy Metal, a grindhouse romp that might’ve handled it with more care.

BROTHERS (AND SISTERS) OF THE MOON – Five key Stevie players

DAVE STEWART
Nicks first encountered (or rather. cornered Stewart after a Eurythmics show in LA in 1984 and invited him back to her mansion for a fling. Many years later, Stewart produced Nicks’ 2011 comeback album In Your Dreams, an experience she enjoyed so much that she spent 14 months on it, and then asked him to help out on 2014’s 24 Karat Gold.

MIKE CAMPBELL
The Heartbreakers gultarist nas played on every one of Nicks’ solo records and co-wrote. with Tom Petty, her first major solo single, “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around”, for Bella Donna in 1981. For 24 Karat Gold, which Campbell plays across, Nicks unearthed his demo of”I Don’t Care” and brought it back to life.

WADDY WACHTEL
A session legenc who’s worked with the likes of the Stones and Linda Ronstadt, Wachtel is another long-time Nicks foil who’s played on each of her solo albums (and even contributed guitar to 1975’s Fleetwood Mac). One of Nick’s closest friends, he co-produced 24 Karat Gold alongside Stewart and Nicks.

LORI NICKS
Another close friend, Lori Nicks (née Perry) has been Stevie’s backing singer since Bella Donna. She married Stevie’s brother Christopher in the late ’80s and the couple had one child, Jessica, in 1991. They’ve since divorced but Nicks refers to Lori as “my sister”, and 24 Karat Gold wouldn’t be a Nicks record without Lori on it.

TOM PETTY
Nicks’ spiritual guide of 35 years who dispensed the wisdom that led to “Hard Advice”, it’s no secret that Tom Petty once served as a role model for the singer. When Nicks first went solo, she told Jimmy lovine she wanted to do a girl version of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, and even considered quitting the Mac to join Petty’s band.

Stevie Nicks tours the UK in July, including American Express presents BST Hyde Park onJuly 12