Category Archives: Stevie Nicks

Solo Activity, Stevie Nicks, Tour Info

Stevie Nicks on Her Fleetwood Mac ‘Team,’ Solo Joys and the 2016 Election | New York Times

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New York Times
By Phoebe Reilly
Sept. 6, 2016

Stevie Nicks says that one of her favorite things to do is light a candle, sit at the desk in her Los Angeles home and write poetry. Ms. Nicks, the rock ’n’ roll mystic who constitutes one-fifth of Fleetwood Mac’s classic lineup and wrote several of its most beloved hits (including “Dreams” and “Rhiannon”), is so prolific that six years after joining that multiplatinum California band in 1975, she embarked on a solo career with “Bella Donna,” which featured the memorable centerpiece “Edge of Seventeen.”

Stevie Nicks is struggling to whittle down her long song list in preparation for a 28-city tour. (Credit Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images)
Stevie Nicks is struggling to whittle down her long song list in preparation for a 28-city tour. (Credit Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images)

“In the beginning, I actually sat down and said, listen, I am doing this because I have way too many songs,” Ms. Nicks said. “I get frustrated because one of you walks by me every time I sit at the piano and says: ‘Oh my God, there she goes writing another song. We only need three or four from you.’ So what am I supposed to do?”

Eight solo albums later, Ms. Nicks, 68, is preparing to go on the road in support of her most recent releases, “In Your Dreams,” from 2011, and the 2014 album “24 Karat Gold: Songs From the Vault,” a collection of tracks written mainly between 1969 and 1987. A 28-city tour with the Pretenders as special guests begins on Oct. 25 in Phoenix. “I just woke up one morning and said I have two years off before Fleetwood Mac comes knocking on my door [for another tour],” she said. “Why would I want to sit around and do nothing?”

Fleetwood Mac has endured despite drug addictions and multiple intra-band relationships (and breakups) during the late ’70s, and recently completed a two-and-a-half-year, 122-date tour. (“I don’t twirl nearly as much as I used to,” said Ms. Nicks, whose past relationship with the guitarist Lindsey Buckingham provided a dose of drama.) When reached by phone, she was struggling to whittle down her set list. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

What’s the difference between touring behind your solo work and touring with Fleetwood Mac?

Fleetwood Mac is a team, and when you’re on a team everybody has the same vote — except in this particular team Lindsey has a little bit of a stronger vote than anybody else. I love being part of a team. We argue all the time, but we always have. In my band, there is no arguing. I am the boss. My solo career is probably the reason Fleetwood Mac is still together in 2016, because I was always happy to leave Fleetwood Mac, and I was always happy to come back, too. Continue reading Stevie Nicks on Her Fleetwood Mac ‘Team,’ Solo Joys and the 2016 Election | New York Times →

Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks, UK Articles

Fleetwood Mac: The story behind Rhiannon | Classic Rock

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04 Sep 2015 / by Bill DeMain

How a chance encounter with a fantasy novel inspired Stevie Nicks’ witchy hit and resurrected Fleetwood Mac

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It makes sense that what has become Stevie Nicks’s signature song was inspired by a kind of ancient magic. Bibliomancy, a mystical practice dating back to the 1700s, holds that if a book is picked up and opened to a page at random, the first word or sentence one sees will reveal some kind of epiphany. But the book that Nicks picked up in 1974 – one that would eventually help launch her into superstardom – didn’t exactly seem full of divine promise.

“It was just a stupid little paperback that I found somewhere at somebody’s house, lying on the couch,” Nicks says more than 40 years on. “It was called Triad [written by Mary Leader] and it was all about this girl who becomes possessed by a spirit named Rhiannon. I read the book, but I was so taken with that name that I thought: ‘I’ve got to write something about this.’ So I sat down at the piano and started this song about a woman that was all involved with these birds and magic.

Fleetwood Mac in 1975 (photo: Getty)
Fleetwood Mac in 1975 (photo: Getty)

“I still have the cassette tape of when I was first writing it,” she continues. “Lindsey [Buckingham, Nicks’s musical and then romantic partner] came in and I said: ‘We have to go to a park and record the sound of birds rising.’ And he looked at me like I was crazy. And I said: ‘Don’t you think Rhiannon is a beautiful name?’ And he said: ‘Yeah, it is a beautiful name.’” Continue reading Fleetwood Mac: The story behind Rhiannon | Classic Rock →

Solo Activity, Stevie Nicks

Stevie Nicks Shocks ‘School of Rock’ Audience With Surprise Performance | ABC News

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Stevie Nicks is taking over Broadway.

On Tuesday night, Nicks appeared on stage after a “School of Rock” show at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York to perform her hit “Rhiannon” with the actors.

The 67-year-old singer praised the young musicians for their incredible talent and their ability to rock and roll as well as veteran musicians.

“To be in the presence of these kids that are so amazing that honestly sometimes I close my eyes and I’m not sure that it’s not Fleetwood Mac,” Nicks said. “It’s very trippy. They are so good.”

Matthew Eisman (Getty Images) - Stevie Nicks of the band Fleetwood Mac performs live on stage with the cast of "School of Rock - The Musical" at the Winter Garden Theatre on April 26, 2016 in New York City
Matthew Eisman (Getty Images) – Stevie Nicks of the band Fleetwood Mac performs live on stage with the cast of “School of Rock – The Musical” at the Winter Garden Theatre on April 26, 2016 in New York City
Matthew Eisman (Getty Images) - Stevie Nicks of the band Fleetwood Mac performs live on stage with the cast of "School of Rock - The Musical" at the Winter Garden Theatre on April 26, 2016 in New York City
Matthew Eisman (Getty Images) – Stevie Nicks of the band Fleetwood Mac performs live on stage with the cast of “School of Rock – The Musical” at the Winter Garden Theatre on April 26, 2016 in New York City

“School of Rock” is the stage adaptation of the 2003 Jack Black film, and some of Nicks’ songs are featured in both the movie and the Broadway production. Continue reading Stevie Nicks Shocks ‘School of Rock’ Audience With Surprise Performance | ABC News →

Solo Activity, Stevie Nicks

Stevie Nicks Refused To Record Tom Petty’s Brilliant Song | Contact Music

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Stevie Nicks Passed On Recording Tom Petty And Dave Stewart’s Tune Don’t Come Around Here No More, Because She Didn’t Think She Could Sing It Better Than The I Won’t Back Down Rocker.

 

The Fleetwood Mac star has opened up about the first time she heard the song, which became a massive hit for Petty and his band The Heartbreakers in 1985, in Warren Zaynes’ new book Petty: The Biography, revealing the track was recorded during an early morning studio session.

“Tom had come down, and he liked what we (Dave Stewart and I) were working on,” explains Nicks. “I was writing madly. I had my little book, and I was just writing, writing, writing.

“Tom, (producer) Jimmy (Iovine) and Dave were sort of talking, but it was five in the morning, and I was really tired, so I said, ‘I’m going to go. I’m leaving you guys, and I’ll be back tomorrow’.

“I left, and when I got back the next day, at something like 3pm, the whole song was written. And not only was it written, it was spectacular. Dave was standing there saying to me, ‘Well, there it is! It’s really, really good’.

“They go to me, ‘Well, it’s terrific, and now you can go out… and you can sing it’. Tom had done a great vocal… and I just looked at them and said, ‘I’m going to top that? Really?’ I got up, thanked Dave, thanked Tom, fired Jimmy and left.”

Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, John McVie, Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, Peter Green, Stevie Nicks, UK Articles

Introducing… Fleetwood Mac: The Ultimate Music Guide – Uncut

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“There’s blood and guts and disagreements still to this day…”

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Early 1969. California has been hit by a series of destructive floods, so bad that the international telephone operator is sceptical a connection can be made between London and Los Angeles. When the call goes through, however, the NME’s Nick Logan has a few demanding questions for the first leader of Fleetwood Mac, Peter Green. One is how Green’s band will sustain their reputation as blues purists in the wake of a big hit single, the expansive “Albatross”. Will their next single be another change from what their fans have come to expect?

“I don’t really care,” says Green, yawning. “I never have done really. We’ve never done what was expected of Fleetwood Mac – we’ve always done the opposite. We just do what we want to do.”

Thus begins the remarkable story of Fleetwood Mac – a saga unparalleled in rock, as our new Uncut Ultimate Music Guide dedicated to the band makes clear (on sale in the UK on Thursday Sept 10, but available to order now at our online shop). Over the next four and a half decades, the band’s history has often read like an infinite series of surprise plot twists, where radical upheavals arrive with every new album. Key members come and go, lost to religious cults and mental breakdowns, victims of multiple romantic traumas. Musical directions and locations change as frequently as the lineup: the blues evolve into the apotheosis of sophisticated pop; and a remote Hampshire commune is swapped for the LA highlife.

As the revealing features collected in this Ultimate Music Guide prove, the journalists of Uncut, NME and Melody Maker have been alongside Fleetwood Mac every step of the way. They documented the rise and fall of Peter Green’s band, the emergence of Christine McVie, the transitional lineups of the early ’70s, the dramatic arrival of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, and the glory and devastation that soon followed. “Being in Fleetwood Mac is more like being in group therapy,” noted the mostly redoubtable Mick Fleetwood in 1977, as he contemplated the seismic impact of “Rumours” and laid bare – not for the last time – the private lives of its key players

Continue reading Introducing… Fleetwood Mac: The Ultimate Music Guide – Uncut →

Stevie Nicks, UK Articles

Going Her Own Way: Stevie Nicks | Saga Magazine

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Saga Magazine, June 2015
Words: Brian Hiatt

As the rock goddess returns to the UK, touring as part of Fleetwood Mac’s classic line-up for the first time in 16 years, she dares to dream of life beyond the band

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Stevie Nicks got to sleep at home last night for once, her skinny, half-blind, half-hairless 16-year-old dog, Sulamith, snuggling at her feet, in a four-poster bed too tall for either of them. ‘I have to take, like, a running jump to get up there,’ says Nicks, who, for all the potency of her presence, is five feet one without heels. She lives in an Oceanside condo in Santa Monica, a ‘space pad’ with floor-to-ceiling views of half of Los Angeles County. Her bedroom decor is spare: a Buddha statue on the polished hardwood floor, a vintage globe on a stand, a modest flatscreen, a rack of stage clothes in the corner the only reminder that she’s actually still on tour.

Nicks got back from a Fleetwood Mac show at the Forum around 4am, managing six and a half hours of sleep. She has another concert tonight, with no day off in between. Her back hurts. ‘We’re tired,’ Nicks says, brightly, ‘because we’re very old.’

Today’s show is in an Anaheim arena, an hour away. Nicks, her long blonde hair wrapped in plastic curlers, has flopped onto a well-worn black leather massage chair, feet up. We’ re in her backstage dressing room. In a couple of hours Nicks has to be back onstage in her black corset and skirt, harmonising once more on The Chain with a guy she dumped when Gerald Ford was US president. Continue reading Going Her Own Way: Stevie Nicks | Saga Magazine →

Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks, UK Articles

Top ten Fleetwood Mac tracks from the Stevie Nicks era | Saga Magazine

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By Andy Stevens,
Wednesday 20 May 2015

From Rhiannon to Silver Springs, our round-up of the top ten Fleetwood Mac tracks from the Stevie Nicks era. Plus, read our in-depth Stevie Nicks interview in Saga Magazine.

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Fleetwood Mac became – and remain – giants of transatlantic adult-orientated rock. In fact, if that genre was patented, they could confidently lay claim to owning the term. But the band are defined by two distinct, successful eras.

First, there were the (arguably) hairier, hippier British blues-rock years of Fleetwood Mac’s late Sixties incarnation, led by Peter Green. Here, the band variously plugged-in, progged-up and blissed-out with hits including Albatross, Man Of The World, Oh Well and the memorably-titled The Green Manalishi (with the Two Prong Crown).

But Fleetwood Mac’s career banked high into the commercial stratosphere in the mid and late Seventies when American singer Stevie Nicks flounced onto the scene to transform the band into global stadium fillers, her voice at once ethereal and earthy while oozing western promise.

Fleetwood Mac’s gazillion-selling 1977 Rumours album remains a credible counterweight to the punk era in its biggest and noisiest year, and is recognised more so as years pass.

And here’s a thing: take a straw poll of first generation punks and we bet many would have had a copy of Rumours in their record collections at the time, a heavily-played guilty pleasure lurking behind The Clash and Sex Pistols’ first albums.

We’ve picked out ten of the best tracks from Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks era for your listening pleasure here. And we’ve done so with the shamelessly commercial premise in mind that some of the most popular and biggest-selling songs become both of those things for a reason. Continue reading Top ten Fleetwood Mac tracks from the Stevie Nicks era | Saga Magazine →

Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks, Tour Info, UK Articles

The return of Fleetwood Mac & Five Things You Need to Know | Yorkshire Post

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Tuesday, 30th June 2015
The Yorkshire Post

Fleetwood Mac, complete with returning member Christine McVie, are on tour and head to Leeds next week. Andy Threlfall reports

Fleetwood Mac rocking the Sheffield Arena
Fleetwood Mac rocking the Sheffield Arena

It’s been 15 years since Cumbrian-born Christine McVie retired from Fleetwood Mac, but now she is back, completing the classic Rumours-era line-up of the band on the current tour.

“I didn’t really know exactly what Christine McVie was up to in those missing years,” says a sprightly 65-year-old Lindsey Buckingham. “She pretty much took permanent leave of the performing world and moved back to England and lived somewhere out in the country.”

But now she’s back and that has meant the band’s live show is receiving unparalleled critical plaudits reinvigorated as it is by classics like You Make Loving Fun, Everywhere and Songbird (which closed the London 02 show I witnessed) penned and sung by Christine who turns 72 next month.

For a band famed for its musical chemistry and fabled failed relationships, to close it’s homecoming show with just one (the returning) member at the piano was startling. Art at its most naked. Stripped bare. The song. The voice.

Whichever way you want to decipher this moment after two and a half hours, the sheer brilliance remains intact of this band who can select a 25-song setlist matched only in gargantuan sales figures and magnificence by fellow Brits who still dominate American radio the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin & The Beatles.

If the return of McVie had been one cause for celebration, that of ex-husband John to the current tour is even more poignant. He very nearly didn’t make it. Continue reading The return of Fleetwood Mac & Five Things You Need to Know | Yorkshire Post →

Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, John McVie, Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, Stevie Nicks, Tour Info, UK Articles

We Want To Be Together | MOJO Magazine (Jul 2015)

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FLEETWOOD MAC REUNITIED
In Our Heads We Never Broke Up

Of all their stories rifts and reconciliations, Christine McVie’s return to FLEETWOOD MAC 17 years after her bewildered exit, may be the most extraordinary. And as they stand on the brink of enormous UK shows and (whisper it) an album, it’s the prompt for all five members to open up to MOJO. Cut: good times, bad times, “carnage and intrigue”, plus a massive rubber dildo called Harold. “There’s a lot of love, you know,” they tell JIM IRVIN

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It shouldn’t work, but it does: the drummer fractionally behind the beat and bass slightly ahead. For close to 50 years, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie have been locked in their distinctive groove, and upon it they have built and maintained the strange, enduring entity that bears their names.

It’s known dizzying triumphs and weathered catastrophe and decline, and for the last 17 years it has had to cope without singer, keyboard player and hit-writer Christine McVie, MIA since the end of the 1998 tour which celebrated the reunion of the multiplatinum Rumours quintet. At home in England, she effectively shut herself off from her former life. But slowly she realised that she missed it. In 2014, she rejoined the fold.

Better still, she’s writing again – collaborating last year with Lindsey Buckingham and Mick Fleetwood as ex-husband John McVie recovered from a bout with colon cancer. Meanwhile, the quorate Mac have been traversing the U.S. with their On With The Show tour, demand for tickets exceeding all expectations. What began as 42 American shows became 80. This month that production arrives in Europe for a run that includes that six nights at London’s O2 and headline slot at the Isle of Wight festival.

In 1975, shortly after the release of the self-titled set the current line-up refer to as ‘the white album’, the quintet undertook its debut tour and a show at the Capitol Centre in Maryland was filmed. You can see it online. For anyone expecting the slickness and stardust they’ve been associated with, it’s a surprise. The sound is shaky, the stagecraft unfocused. Christine sings songs from the albums they made with Bob Welch, Lindsey tackles Oh Well and Green Manalishi from the Peter Green years. It’s curious but intriguing, the focal point keeps shifting with the musical styles, but that dude with the afro can sure play guitar, and check out the chick with the maracas flitting around the stage like a dragonfly… you can feel the audience being drawn in and won over. Within months this tentative unit will have intrigued its way to superstardom.

Forty years later, they elect to talk individually to MOJO – five stories that make up one. From blues roots and the Peter Green line-up’s doomed majesty, via catastrophe, exile and rebirth in the melodic riches of Rumours and beyond, riffs healed but scars still livid. In order of recruitment: Mick, John, Christine, Stevie and Lindsey. Fleetwood Mac. Continue reading We Want To Be Together | MOJO Magazine (Jul 2015) →

Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, John McVie, Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, Stevie Nicks, Tour Info, UK Articles

Pills and joints on Fleetwood Mac’s 18th world tour now all about arthritis | Daily Mirror

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BY HALINA WATTS
5th June 2015
Daily Mirror

Mick Fleetwood snorted seven MILES of cocaine while Stevie Nicks has a hole bigger than a 5p piece in her septum – but those hellraising days are behind them

Cleaning up: Stevie, Mick and Lindsey at O2 Arena last week
Cleaning up: Stevie, Mick and Lindsey at O2 Arena last week

Multi-million dollars of cocaine ordered in bulk, 14 black limousines on tours where pink-painted dressing rooms had to have a white piano installed, and, of course, alcohol. Lots of it.

For years Fleetwood Mac rode a wave of drug-fuelled excess. Drummer Mick Fleetwood last year revealed how he’d worked out that all the cocaine he’d snorted would make a line seven miles long. And singer Stevie Nicks took so much she has a hole bigger than a 5p piece in her septum.

They once hired Hitler’s private railway car to travel across Europe, allegedly to avoid drug searches. It even came with the same elderly attendant who served the Fuhrer.

1975: Mick, Stevie, Lindsey, Chrissie and John
1975: Mick, Stevie, Lindsey, Chrissie and John

But as we meet it’s clear their days of hell-raising are well and truly over. They’ve swapped cocaine and champagne for, er, ice baths and physio. Cornwall-born Mick says he has ice wraps in his dressing room to help combat arthritis. “I’m like an old race horse – it’s not like I’m ancient ancient, but these things are sort of worn out a bit,” says Mick, rubbing his shoulders. He’s has wristbands for his tendonitis too. “I’ve got a deep-freeze in my room in order to do what I’m doing… you take care of yourself.” He’s 70 this month but insists: “I’m not letting up any – I’m playing harder than I ever played, apparently.” Continue reading Pills and joints on Fleetwood Mac’s 18th world tour now all about arthritis | Daily Mirror →