This pandemic is stealing my last youthful years... I don’t have 10yrs to hang around
HER voice is just as haunting as in those long-ago days when her songs seemed to be on every radio in the Western world.
Stevie Nicks helped to catapult the band Fleetwood Mac to huge success on their self-titled album in 1975 and the 45million- selling Rumours two years later.
Incredibly, that 43-year-old record was Britain’s bestselling album on vinyl during this year’s lockdown.
And next week Stevie’s epic solo tour film, 24 Karat Gold, will be released in cinemas. But the 72-year-old singer says she believes Covid-19 and lockdown are robbing her of vital musical moments while she’s still in her prime.
She said: “This pandemic is more than just a pandemic for me. This is stealing what I consider to be my last youthful years.
“I don’t have just 10 years to hang around and wait for this thing to go away. I have places to go, people to sing for, another album to make. With every day that goes by, it’s like taking this time away from me. That I think is the hardest thing. Will it be safe next year for us to walk into Madison Square Garden in New York? I don’t know that it will.”
Stevie, worth an estimated £57million, was born Stephanie Nicks in Phoenix, Arizona. Her dad Jess, who was president of the famous Greyhound bus company, taught her to sing duets with him by the time she was four and she 45 YEARS
Her first band album was in 1975 wrote her first song with a guitar she received for her 16th birthday.
She met Lindsey Buckingham at high school and they went on to university together.
Stevie had planned to be an English teacher but she dropped out to pursue a music career with Lindsey, releasing the album Buckingham Nicks in 1973.
But it failed to set the world on fire and she had to take on odd jobs to keep their dream alive.
“I had nothing,” she recalls. “I was a waitress and a cleaning lady. I was the main breadwinner. It was a lot of fun but it was hard.”
Things perked up when Fleetwood Mac asked Buckingham to join as their singer-guitarist. He insisted that Steve join too, and that kick-started their incredible run.
After the collapse of the original line-up led by blues guitar genius Peter Green, the Mac had made a risky move from England to the US in search of fame and fortune.
They struck gold when Stevie and
boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham joined. Their very own Gold Dust Woman became an ethereal stage icon and the group carried on to score a string of hit albums.
But in the new movie Stevie tells how, for her, immense fame and fortune came with a price tag.
Every time she was picked up in a black limousine to go to work “I would never know when I would be back home”.
She began to miss her beaten- up old Toyota because it rooted her in a time when she was free to see family and friends.
For years the whole band rode a wave of drugfuelled excess.
Drummer and founder member Mick Fleetwood once worked out that all the cocaine he’d snorted would make a line seven miles long.
And Stevie, who beat her addiction after a spell in the Betty Ford rehab clinic in 1986, took so much coke she has a hole bigger than a 5p piece in her septum. Her complicated love life was also centre stage for all of that time. She and Lindsey split up just before Rumours was recorded and she then had a secret “crazy accidental” affair with Mick. “Never shoulda happened,” she said. “And we knew it from the beginning.
“If there’s anything I learned from that relationship it was, ‘Don’t go after other women’s husbands’ because it never works out. You are never gonna be the woman if you break up a marriage. You’re just the home-wrecker.”
Fleetwood Mac’s song Dreams – recently a hit again thanks to a viral skateboarding video on TikTok – was about Lindsey, and her 1983 solo song Beauty And The Beast was about Mick.
That same year she married Kim Anderson, widower of her best friend Robin Snyder. Robin’s baby
Matthew had been born two days before she died of leukaemia and, just three months later, Stevie and Anderson were married.
In a 2011 interview, she said: “It was insanity. Everybody was furious. It was a completely ridiculous thing. It was just because I had this crazy, insane thought that Robin would want me to take care of Matthew.
“But the fact is, Robin would not have wanted me to be married to a guy I didn’t love. And therefore accidentally break that guy’s heart, too. It lasted for three months.”
Stevie became a friend of the late music icon Prince in 1983 after he helped her record a song called Stand Back based on his own track Little Red Corvette.
She heard it on the car radio on the day she married Anderson and immediately started improvising her own melody and lyrics over the top.
They stayed in touch and Stevie says Prince always worried about her until his premature death aged 57 in 2016. “Now that he’s gone I know that he is standing right here and he is still worrying about me. Sometimes when I’m really nervous and I walk out on stage, I will say, ‘Prince walk out with me’. And he does.”
Stevie has said she has not been in love since the early 2000s and has no plans to “sit in a bar with a bunch of my friends and wait for some weirdo guys to come over and buy us drinks” once the pandemic ends.
She added: “Now, if I was even, like, 30 or 40 or 50, I would never use a dating app. I find that to be totally desperate. I watch all those crime shows. Are you setting yourself up with a murderer or something?”
Finding a new love is “not ever out of the realm of possibility – it’s just not very probable”.
Through all her troubles she has never stopped performing, beginning a parallel solo career in 1981 and being named one of the 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time by Rolling Stone magazine.
Appearing on more than 50 Top 40 hits and selling more than 120 million
records, she is the only woman to have been twice inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – first as a member of Fleetwood Mac in 1998 then as a solo artist in 2019.
And as parts of the world go into new lockdowns, fans can see her on the big screen.
She said: “As we started to understand that this Covid thing was not a joke, I started going to myself, ‘ You know what? This may be the closest to going to a big, big concert that’s actually not from 1977 that is new.’ It’s brand new and it’s fantastic.”
halina.watts@mirror.co.uk Stevie Nicks 24 Karat Gold – The Concert will be in cinemas from
Wednesday to
Sunday this week.
Find out where at stevienicksfilm. com. It will be out as a two-disc set and on streaming services on
October 30.
I did learn not to go after other women’s husbands
ON HER LESSONS FROM LIFE AND LOVE