Fleetwood Mac may be over, but Stevie Nicks spell will never wane

Stevie Nicks wins landslide of approval at BST Hyde Park, London

The singer smoothly mixed Fleetwood Mac hits with solo material and was boosted by an appearance from Harry Styles

★★★★☆

by David Smyth

Financial Times

Photo: Anthony Pham

As with the arrival of a city-crushing monster, you heard the screams before you saw him. Harry Styles wasn’t announced before he strolled on to the Hyde Park stage to join Stevie Nicks for her encore, but by the forest of rising phone screens and the voices raised in swooning abandon, it was immediately clear something big was afoot.

In hindsight, this stellar duet might have been expected. The 76-year-old face of Fleetwood Mac has called Styles “the son I never had”. He was chosen to induct her into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019, and that same year she joined him at one of his Los Angeles concerts to sing her tear-stained ballad “Landslide”. Here they shared vocals on the 1975 song again while photographs of Christine McVie flicked past on the big screens. The other female star of Fleetwood Mac, who died two years ago, would have celebrated her 81st birthday on the day of this show.

Styles also played the Tom Petty role on “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around”, a smouldering rocker and Nicks’s debut solo single from 1981. At no point did he take over, however, simply making a “We’re not worthy” gesture in her direction and saying “It’s coming home” as a brief footballing aside.

In April, Nicks popped up on physical copies of Taylor Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, as the author of a poem printed on the sleeve. Meanwhile, Fleetwood Mac’s most recent greatest hits collection has been in the UK top 20 almost constantly since its release in 2018. And, last autumn, Mattel unveiled a $55 Stevie Nicks Barbie doll. If she were any closer to the centre of popular culture, she would have been playing left back in Berlin on Sunday night.

Her influence was physically evident in the crowd, too, which included a huge number of women wearing layered, diaphanous skirts, palm-reader shawls and wide-brimmed hats — a female equivalent of the men who sculpt their hair into optimistic tributes to Paul Weller or Morrissey.

Nicks gave no indication that any aspect of her 2024 status came as a surprise. She seemed completely at home in front of this vast crowd, introducing songs with meandering anecdotes, as if at an intimate dinner party. Her singing voice, brittle and mystical, has lost little of its enchantress’s magic. She avoided the high notes in “Dreams”, but did so with a new arrangement that still suited the song.

With McVie gone and Lindsey Buckingham frozen out, it currently looks impossible for a line-up approximating peak Fleetwood Mac to appear on stage again. Solo, Nicks punctuated her set with many of her classic compositions for the band. The timeless melody of “Gypsy” still beguiled, and she threw everything into an epic “Gold Dust Woman”. But more space for her solo 1980s excursions was no bad thing. “If Anyone Falls”, “Stand Back” and the raucous “Edge of Seventeen” traded her haunting presence in Fleetwood Mac for delirious power-pop energy. The band may be over, but her individual spell looks like it will never wane.