Stevie Nicks - Beauty & The Beast Video

Recorded on July 26, 2007 at the California Mid-State fair in Paso Robles, California.


Online Videos by Veoh.com

The Mighty Mick Fleetwood

Lindsey Buckingham Video Q&A

Lindsey's website over this last year has been taking questions for Lindsey from fans with a promised video response by Lindsey... Here are the first two video answers.. The rest as they roll in every Wednesday are being posted on Lindsey's youtube page.

New 2008 Stevie Nicks Calendar

[from: nicksfix]
Herbert W. Worthington has released a new calendar which showcases more of his amazing photography of Stevie Nicks. The calendar contains 14 more previously-unavailable photographs of Stevie throughout her career. The calendar runs from Jan 1, 2008 through December 31, 2008. You can read more about the calendar and purchase one on Herbie's New Calendar Website.

Look for the special offer to purchase both calendars. You can see Herbie's other calendar on the Calendar1 Website.

Stevie Live Dates February, 2008

Two southern California show dates in February. Stevie will be in Indio, CA on February 1st at the Fantasy Springs Resort Casino. You can get your tickets here.


The second date on February 2, 2008 is at The Honda Center at California State University, Fullerton.

Edge of Seventeen Remix Update

Sorry it’s been forever and a day since posting back August that Steve Scalfati was on the short list of producers being sent tracks to refashion the classic Stevie Nicks song “Edge of Seventeen” from her 1981 album Bella Donna.

There have been a few blog watchers and Stevie fans checking in periodically to find out what is going on. After months of delays waiting for the vocals from the original album sessions to arrive, and other producers slated to do this remix dropping out for likely the same reasons,

Steven had this to say:
Thanks for checking in. I was very excited to have the opportunity to do this but the timing has just not worked out for me. It was taking a while to get the vocals and now I’m in the middle of a huge orchestral score which is essentially taking all of my time through mid December. I’m sure who ever ends up doing this will rock it!!! As a big Stevie fan myself, I’m also excited to hear what other re-mixers do for this one.

STEVIE NICKS - One of Pop's Great Survivors

Stevie Nicks: Rock Follies

The Independent
Published: 06 October 2007

Stevie Nicks, the singer-songwriter and other-worldly star of Fleetwood Mac, is one of pop’s great survivors. Now 59, she talks to Andrew Gumbel about her music, her famously turbulent love-life and the importance of not doing heroin.

Stevie Nicks is telling a story about the first time in her professional career that she felt completely out of control. Strangely, it is not a story about the complex web of fiery love affairs that, on several occasions, threatened to blow her and her Fleetwood Mac band members apart.

Nor is it about the cocaine she snorted her way through in the Seventies and early Eighties, or the painkillers that blackened her moods, bloated her body and killed her creativity for years at a stretch. Somehow, like the other lucky rockers of her generation who have lived to tell the tale, she managed to survive all that.

This is a story about something ultimately more central to both her work ethic and her enduring popularity as one of the most reliably thrilling live performers on the US music circuit – her determination to control her performance on stage down to the tiniest detail.

It was 1975, and Nicks was about to go on her first tour with Fleetwood Mac, which she had just joined with her then-boyfriend and fellow singer-songwriter, Lindsey Buckingham. Six months earlier she had been poverty-stricken, living with Buckingham in Aspen, Colorado, and wondering if it wasn't time to get out of the music business for good. (She captured the mood of that fraught moment in her much covered song "Landslide", which appeared on her first album with Fleetwood Mac.)

It never occurred to her to dream up a costume for that first tour. "In my head I was still totally poor. I just went to my closet and picked out my own stuff," she said. "Then, when I got out on stage, it was a nightmare. Every night we were on tour, I realised my stuff was not going to cut it."

Musically, the tour was a success, but Nicks was miserable. And she vowed she would never again let an oversight like this creep into her work. So she invented a whole look for herself: the "English Dickensian waif in a shabby, raggedy black chiffony skirt and heavy boots". "I thought, if I'm going to take this really seriously I'm going to plan this all out," she said. "I had my hair a certain way, my make-up a certain way. I wanted it to be a complete package."

Her single-mindedness paid huge dividends. It wasn't just that she was thinking up a stage costume. She was dreaming up an image for herself that she intended to last until she was old enough to draw a pension. "Right then I thought – since I plan to do this when I'm 60, I want to make sure that what I wear now I can still wear when I'm 60."

It was, in many ways, the birth of Stevie Nicks as the world has come to know her, the moment when the dreamy, mystical, other-worldly quality she brought to her songwriting became incarnated in her on-stage image. She had become, in her own words, "the airy-fairy person" of the group.

The others developed their own stage personas, of course. "The idea was that we would all sort of be going to the same party," Nicks said. "Sometimes we were, sometimes we weren't." Christine McVie, who wrote "Don't Stop" and "You Make Loving Fun", gave herself a tailored look with velvet jackets and mini skirts and high boots. Mick Fleetwood, the British drummer who was part of the group's original line-up as far back as 1967, developed a fondness for waistcoats with fob watches.

But it was Nicks who appeared truly to inhabit her imaginary world of witches and night birds and gypsies and gold-dust women – prompting rumours down the years that she was herself some kind of witch. In real life, she couldn't be more different. For all the craziness she has experienced, she is a remarkably prosaic, grounded person – with a healthy dose of self-deprecating humour – who knows what she wants and pursues it with unswerving single-mindedness. Her stage costumes, which she developed with the help of a Californian designer called Margi Kent, were inspired not by black magic so much as rugged practicality.

"What I went with was simple, precise, like a uniform," she says. "I kitted myself out like a ballerina, with a leotard, a skirt, boots and various throws ... It's made my life so easy."

Nicks is now 59 – just one year shy of that distant, twilight year she imagined all those decades ago – and she's still very much in the business of managing every aspect of her public image. When I met her at her large, improbably traditional house up a canyon overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Los Angeles, she'd been up two nights running to scrutinise a new batch of publicity photographs. She could have invited press photographers to do the job – snapping her among her blood-red velvet wingback armchairs, perhaps, or on her back terrace with a view over Santa Monica towards the ocean – but she preferred to hire the photographer herself and endure a 17-hour shoot to obtain the exact effects she wanted.

Now, though, she wasn't happy, complaining that she couldn't properly judge the texture and tone of the digital pictures. "I don't know why this isn't in focus," she told her manager. "I can't tell if I'm smiling or not smiling."

Nicks wasn't catty or unreasonable about it, just very exacting. "When you get to be my age," she says, "you get protective of your image. I can either be involved or there will be no picture at all."

It's an attitude that has only hardened as Fleetwood Mac, and Nicks herself, have waned as recording artists and come to rely increasingly on their live shows to keep going. She's been alternating solo tours and band tours for the past quarter-century, along with special double-act gigs with the likes of Don Henley of the Eagles – a musical partner and ex-boyfriend – and Chris Isaak.

And she is very, very good at it. The key to everything is her voice, which is still as rich, textured and rough-edged as ever. When she tours alone, she also has a topnotch band – 10 players, usually, although she has been known to perform with a full symphony orchestra.

Together, they never fail to breathe energy and life into her old hits – "Rhiannon", "Landslide", "Dreams", "Gold Dust Woman", "Edge of Seventeen" and many more. When she appeared at an outdoor arena in the LA suburbs recently, Nicks showed her age in the way she moved: her leg kicks showed unmistakable signs of stiffness, and she dashed off stage at one point for an unscheduled costume change. But she looked great with her capes and her black stovepipe hats framing her flowing blonde hair. And her voice was dynamite.

"New artists can't do what we do – they don't get the support from their record companies," she says, to explain it all. "We just stayed on the road. We've done it so long we could be half dead and still do a great show with one day of rehearsal."

In other words, they just don't make super-groups like they used to. Fleetwood Mac are not quite unique in the fact that the key members are all still alive and still – give or take a defection or two – playing together. The Eagles, a group not a million miles away in style or audience appeal, share the same distinction. And that's quite an achievement given the mountains of cocaine both groups sniffed their way through, along with the millions of dollars they burned, when they each made their own puffed-up, self-important, top-heavy would-be masterpieces at the end of the 1970s. (In Fleetwood Mac's case, it was the double album Tusk; for the Eagles, it was The Long Run.)

Nicks had as rough a time of it as anyone. She took enough drugs to be forced into rehab, complained of chronic fatigue syndrome, became addicted to the painkiller Klonopin, had a miserable time weaning herself off it after her weight ballooned to almost 11 stone, and suffered horrific after-effects from a boob job she later reversed and always deeply regretted.

Her love life was no less turbulent. When she came into Fleetwood Mac, she was going out with Lindsey Buckingham, with whom she always had an explosive relationship. She subsequently had affairs with Mick Fleetwood and two members of the Eagles, Joe Walsh and Henley.

Somehow, though, everyone held it together – musically, and medically. And she still looks back fondly on those heyday years in the late 1970s and early 1980s. "It was fun, it was a party," she insisted. "Everyone was partying. It was dangerous, but it was fun. They were fantastic, tragic times."

The secret to their survival was simple: "None of us ever did heroin. Right there, that's why we are alive. We were careful – we didn't die. But we could have."

She was lucky, too, that among her tendencies to addiction was a propensity to overwork. That too, she now thinks, was a life-saver. "We worked so hard, and toured constantly. We'd unpack from one tour and go right to work on the next record... We all worked at a very high level of excellence, always strove to be the best we could be – always ....

"So there were scary moments, but they were followed by sensible moments. If all else failed, we'd get back on the road and clean things up."

It seems miraculous, given the tentacular knot of love affairs and broken relationships, that there wasn't more obvious tension within the group. There were blow-ups – most notably over the group's failure to include the Nicks song "Silver Springs" on the Rumours album, a bone of contention and source of ownership disputes for decades to come. The nastiest moment came in 1987 when Buckingham announced he was leaving – apparently because he couldn't stand working with Nicks any longer – chased her through the house, threw her against a car and almost strangled her. But, somehow, all was later forgiven and Buckingham returned to Fleetwood Mac a decade later.

Nicks attributes the group's endurance to two things. One is the primacy of the work. When she got frustrated at the backlog of her unused songs in the late 1970s, she broke out with a solo record called Bella Donna which made her a star in her own right – at least in the United States. From that moment on, Fleetwood Mac was more or less at her mercy – waiting for her to finish her own albums, or her own tours, before returning to the fold. "The rest of Fleetwood Mac got a vacation while I did my albums," she said. "They were always waiting." She almost ran herself into the ground in the process, but musically, at least, it worked.

The other thing, for want of a better term, was the feminine touch. She and Christine McVie brought a gender balance uncommon in major rock bands at the time. They were also major players because they wrote songs as well as performed them. If they clubbed together, they could exercise a veto over the rest of the band – and they did, frequently. "We became the mums," they said. "There were times when we literally said, 'OK, we're going to have to fix this situation'. We did it many times. What can I say? Women are the caretakers. We can see a mess coming before they [the men] can."

Unlike the Eagles, who had a notorious knockdown fight at a political fundraiser concert in California in 1980, and who then vowed never to play again "until hell freezes over" – actually, about 14 years – Fleetwood Mac kept even the worst of their disputes private so the band could play on. As Nicks put it: "How important is having a stupid-ass fight on stage next to breaking up a band?"

Nicks remains a huge figure in the United States, in ways that are hard to appreciate in Europe. Sure, we all can hum the tunes from Rumours – thanks in part to Bill Clinton, who used "Don't Stop" as his campaign song in 1992 – but on our side of the Atlantic, Nicks's solo career has gone largely unnoticed. That, said her manager, Sheryl Louis, was in large part because of the very tight promotional schedule for the hugely successful debut solo album Bella Donna, which includes a great duet with Tom Petty, "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around", and her meditation on the death of John Lennon, "Edge of Seventeen", now the show-stopping closer to all her live shows. The album went multi-platinum in the United States, but barely registered in Britain. It was a similar story with her follow-up hits, "Stand Back" and "Rooms on Fire", which don't stand the test of time nearly as well because they are infused with an almost risibly dated Eighties vibe.

In the States, Nicks has never gone out of fashion, and never failed to sell out a tour. She is, in fact, by some distance the most successful solo artist ever to break out from a major band – outselling Mick Jagger, Robert Plant, Don Henley and even Phil Collins, who comes closest to matching her.

Her live shows are deservedly celebrated. Just the opening guitar riff from "Edge of Seventeen" is enough to set any audience alight – its effect enhanced, the night I saw her, by an extended drum solo leading into the chaka-chaka-chaka-chaka rhythm on the bass guitar. Nicks deserves considerable credit, too, for refusing to get bored by her own material after all these years.

She and Fleetwood Mac have thought about reworking their old numbers, but it has never worked. "We've tried," she said. "We've gone into rehearsal for three months to rework our old songs, but it goes over like a lead balloon. You know the audience isn't happy. You always start with the record. You can make the middle longer, and you can extend the end – add an orchestral section, or something. But you can't change the skeleton. You can't change something that people love."

It's been a while since Nicks wrote songs with anything like the energy that she once had. Even her well regarded 2001 album, Trouble In Shangri-La, relied heavily on unused material from the 1970s, including a terrific song called "Sorcerer", pairing her up with Sheryl Crow.

Rather, she has taken her determination in new directions. For the past three years – ever since she accepted a generic invitation during a tour stopover in Washington – she has been visiting wounded soldiers at the Bethesda Naval Hospital and the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. What began as a hesitant enterprise – "I cry really easily and I hate hospitals" – has turned into a mission and a charity foundation, entitled Stevie Nicks' Band of Soldiers.

Her brilliant idea is to give every soldier she meets an iPod filled with her favourite music – a big mix of slow jazz, rap, R&B and music closer to her own style. It started out, in fact, as her 16-year-old niece's iPod list, and has now grown to a selection of 937 songs.

"I realised I wanted to do something, but what can you do?" she said. "A little tiny iPod is perfect. They are too ill to be downloading music. What better can I give them than music?"

She makes sure she gets to Washington every few months – in between touring and moving house, her other big project at the moment. She's in the process of selling up the home she has owned for years in Paradise Valley, outside Phoenix, Arizona. And she has decided to get rid of her implausibly traditional house in LA, too.

She knew from the moment she moved in two-and-a-half years ago that she didn't belong there, because she was just too far away from the ocean to hear the waves at night. "I will get old and bored here," she said. "It's too big for me – a family should live here instead."

She and her goddaughter, who lives in a separate house on her property, feel they'd be more at home in a beach-front penthouse, the sort musicians are supposed to live in. And that's what they will do – just as soon as Nicks can find a good home to store her grand pianos, including a 9ft Steinway grand once played by Billy Preston and Leon Russell. On the edge of 60, Stevie Nicks still feels rebellious, and restless, and ready to rock and roll.

'Crystal Visions ... The Very Best of Stevie Nicks' is out now

Lindsey Buckingham Live At The Bass Performing Hall

Some pretty exciting news...

Beginning Sunday October 14th (with repeat broadcasts on October 15th and October 21st) HD.Net will be broadcasting the world premier of Lindsey Buckinghams forth coming DVD "Live At The Bass Performing Hall". A one half hour interview presedes the show with Matt Pinfield's "Sound Off". This should be an excellent concert... For those that have seen Lindsey on his recent "Under The Skin" tour - you know what the man is capable of on guitar...

This is going to be sweet... The DVD release of this show has yet to be announced officially, although word is that it's supposed to be out by the end of this year.

Sound Off with Matt Pinfield - Premiere
Lindsey Buckingham - This week Matt chats with Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member Lindsey Buckingham. Topics include his time with Fleetwood Mac, his successful solo career, and his latest album entitled Under The Skin.

Click here for Showtimes

Lindsey Buckingham - Live At The Bass Performing Hall - Premiere
Multi-platinum artist and lead vocalist and lyricist of Fleetwood Mac, Lindsay Buckingham delights the privileged sold-out audience at the Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth, Texas, with a memorable performance. Spectators are treated with a soulful acoustic tribute that samples from the wealth of Buckingham's musical career including the classic songs "Tusk", "Go Your Own Way" and "Holiday Road."

Click here for Showtimes

"Runnin' Down A Dream" World Premiere

World Premiere Of "Runnin' Down A Dream"BURBANK, CA - OCTOBER 02: Musician Stevie Nicks attends the world premiere of 'Runnin' Down A Dream' at the Steven J. Ross Theater at Warner Bros. Studios on October 2, 2007 in Burbank, California. Directed by Peter Bogdanovich, the documentary 'Runnin' Down A Dream' tells the story of rock and roll band Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers.

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - Runnin' Down A Dream (DVD / CD)
Releases 16 Oct/07. This movie contains hours of never before seen footage and interviews with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers plus music from the storied rock band's entire career. The movie features interviews with George Harrison, Eddie Vedder, Stevie Nicks, Dave Grohl, Jeff Lynne, Rick Rubin, Johnny Depp, Jackson Browne and more. Also 1 DVD of the celebrated 30th Anniversary Concert in Heartbreaker hometown, Gainesville Florida.

Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham Sound City Sessions

Setting The Record Straight

Back in March, 2007 Sonic Past Music posted on their website that they had secured the rights to release early recordings (1974) by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks - thought to be tracks intended for a second BuckinghamNicks album.

"We will be releasing Stevie Nicks & Lindsey Buckingham, produced by Keith Olsen for Carman Productions/Sound City Studios. You will not believe how good these tracks are, and what’s more, 9 of these titles have never been released. This CD was recorded after the Buckingham & Nicks album and before they joined Fleetwood Mac".

In April, 2007 Sonic Past Music posted an update to what they were working on.

"We are remastering the Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham Early Sound City Sessions from 1974. It’s said that some of these tracks were intended for a second Buckingham/Nicks album, however they made a well-known career change to Fleetwood Mac and the rest, as they say, is history".

Jump ahead to October, 2007 for another update. This one official, although we had heard about this in the early summer - that it was a no go on the release of these early tracks.

"It's time to set the record straight about one of our upcoming releases that we've received a lot of questions about - the Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham Sound City Sessions. We licensed their unreleased recordings from Carman Productions, Inc. about a year ago, and it seemed that all the paperwork was in order to give us the go-ahead to release it. Unfortunately, it appears that this was not the case, and that this CD will not see the light of day. Maybe someday we'll see… "

Apparently, after finding out this was going to be released, the session musicians that play on the tracks contacted Sonic Past Music about royalty payments for their work on the songs. Because it couldn't be determined who played what and on what songs, an agreement couldn't be reached, and therefore, the project shelved.

TOM PETTY AND THE HEARTBREAKERS

TOM PETTY AND THE HEARTBREAKERS:

Runnin' Down A Dream - A Film by Peter Bogdanovich

On October 16, a special 4-disc box set of the film will be released for sale only at Best Buy. 
At the heart of the package is the 2-DVD, 4 hour Bogdanovich film. 


This movie contains hours of never before seen footage and interviews with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers plus music from the storied rock band's entire career. The movie features interviews with George Harrison, Eddie Vedder, Stevie Nicks, Dave Grohl, Jeff Lynne, Rick Rubin, Johnny Depp, Jackson Browne and more. The 3rd DVD is of the celebrated 30th Anniversary Concert in Heartbreaker hometown, Gainesville Florida. Stevie also makes an appearance at this show singing Stop Draggin My Heart Around, I Need To Know and Insider.

To view the trailer, CLICK HERE

Pre-order through bestbuy.com or Bestbuy.ca

Stevie Nicks (Living Scotsman.com Interview) 9/30/07

Sun 30 Sep 2007

'Joe Walsh and I were doing so much cocaine we were sure we were going to die'
CHRISSY ILEY

STEVIE NICKS lives in a huge house in Pacific Palisades. As you'd expect, it favours the same kind of gothic, velvet fabric she wears on stage and has sported in publicity shoots over the years - lush and seductive, from the more-is-more school of decoration.

I wait with her dogs in the kitchen, where her assistant has prepared snacks. One Yorkshire terrier has the same blonde hair as Nicks, and it falls into a 1970s-style fringe. The dog growls at me, baring tiny, sharp teeth. Another is wearing a coat. Nicks's assistant tells me that the singer spent thousands of dollars on the pet, believing the dog was stressed and had alopecia. It turned out that the pooch is a Chinese Yorkie, the mother having got lucky with a Chinese crested canine - bald of body and hairy of face - at the breeders. The dogs weave in and out of Nicks's heels as she brings me into the living-room.

You get the impression that Nicks loves to be interviewed. She can always delve into her drug-addled past for a good story. Her life with Fleetwood Mac was one big, bad soap opera: unmissable, lucrative, tragic, addictive. She has had many rock-star lovers, including Don Henley and Joe Walsh of The Eagles, and two members of Fleetwood Mac - Mick Fleetwood, with whom she's still very friendly, and Lindsey Buckingham, with whom she's not. Buckingham was the love and hate of her life. The unravelling of him made for some pretty good songs, such as 'Landslide'.

Nicks's solo career has outshone that of Buckingham or the rest of Fleetwood Mac. Her greatest hits album, Crystal Visions, features a haunting version of 'Landslide' - deeper, growlier, sadder, especially when she sings the words "I'm getting older". She's 59 and you might expect her to look a little tragic. In fact, she looks much like a slightly less airbrushed version of her publicity photos: the eyes big and brooding; the skin peachy soft; and the long hair vibrant and lustrous. She's wearing her trademark chiffon top with multiple layers.

You might imagine that she's hypersensitive, histrionic, sad, ravaged, bitter - there are many things that have gone wrong with her life - but she's not. She is feisty. She is the kind of woman who has always said yes and never regretted it.

And through it all, she wrote an amazing collection of songs, including Fleetwood Mac's 'Rhiannon', and 'Edge of Seventeen' from her solo album Bella Donna. This year, she has been playing mostly in Vegas and before that she was on tour with some of the other former members of Fleetwood Mac.

Before Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac, she was in a band with Buckingham, called Buckingham Nicks. They became lovers, and it seems that no matter whom they subsequently fell in love with, they could never fully get over that relationship.

"He wasn't ever able to revel in any kind of joy for my success for Bella Donna," recalls Nicks. "He would always start an argument - 'We're really not here to discuss your solo records, Stevie,'" she mimics - despite the fact that Bella Donna was laced with lines about him. "Oh, there's tons about him on that album," she says. "Even now I'm still writing about Lindsey. I always write about Lindsey - a line or two in every song. I pull him, the drama queen, back in whenever I need a dramatic moment. To this day, he provides me with so much stuff to write about. I thank him for that. Do you know, I gave him a signed copy of Bella Donna. He left it leaning against the recording studio wall for a month. I took it back, crossed his name out, and gave it to somebody else."

Bella Donna came out in 1981, but she recounts the slight as if it were yesterday. She says that she and Buckingham did 105 shows together two years ago and she felt she was walking on eggshells through every one of them. "Nothing ever changes," she says, almost relishing the irritation. "The way we are is similar to the way it was 30 years ago. Really, Lindsey never got over us breaking up in 1976, even though he is now married to a very nice woman and has stunning children. He has lots of issues and he blames Fleetwood Mac for us breaking up and he blames Fleetwood Mac for not letting him play the kind of music he wanted to play."

Nicks, though, doesn't seem to blame anyone, and explains why some former lovers can become friends and others can't. "I think Lindsey could never enjoy who I am because I've been that same person since he met me. Compare that to Tom Petty, who could invite me to go on the road and I ended up doing 27 shows for him. It was wonderful. I did not get paid - Tom paid my extremely expensive expenses instead. I went because I wanted to be with Tom and for the love of what we were doing. Tom would say, 'Here's Stevie Nicks, isn't she great?' We've always been very good friends because Tom is confident; Tom is not threatened by me."

She continues: "Mick Fleetwood is my dear friend. We, too, had a bad break-up because Mick fell in love with my best friend Sara, hence the song 'Sara'. It was painful and terrible. Not only did I lose Mick but I lost my best friend. I forgave Sara three months later and forgave Mick six months later. They were married for 18 years and now I'm godmother to his two five-year-old girls from his current marriage."

After all this, though, she doesn't rule out another Fleetwood Mac reunion. "Everyone could use the money, especially Mick and John [McVie], as they don't write. They don't get the publishing royalties that Christine [McVie], Lindsey and I get. They are going to want to play until they drop dead. I'll decide later. And if Lindsey has an epiphany, where he changes into a completely different person and suddenly realises he has no reason to complain about anything, who knows? But I don't think people change. I don't think I've changed since I was about 15 years old."

Maybe knowing who she was has been the key to her survival. Fleetwood Mac were so famous in their day, you wonder if it was hard for her to adjust to no longer being quite so famous. You also get the impression that the band itself was not her entire world. Probably, she was more interested in writing her own songs, taking her own drugs and having her own rollercoaster love affairs.

Does she have a man in her life now? "No, I don't. I had a relationship three years ago with someone I'd gone out with a long time ago. It didn't work out then and it didn't work out now. It just proved my theory that you can never go back. Before that, in 1997, around the time of The Dance, I went out with somebody for a little over a year who was quite enamoured with me. I decided he was way too young for me, though. I was nearly 50 and he was nearly 30. We had a riot but I said that eventually he would make me feel extremely old, so I ended it. But I'm never not open to the possibility of romance."

She says that her last relationship ended, or rather never really took off, because she made a huge amount of money in a publishing deal, and she was thrilled and excited but she couldn't share it. "I was tickled, thrilled, and I made the mistake of telling somebody who was struggling in this business. As the words came out of my mouth, I could see that he didn't think it was funny. So I knew our relationship was never going to work because I can't be a person who is not going to share that moment."

In fact, she shares the moment with me: she found out she'd made 7 million from "that little song 'Landslide'". "I wrote it in 1973 and it was about whether I should continue my relationship with Lindsey - 'I took my love, I took it down'," she sings softly. "And that was like taking your ego down from the mantelpiece, trying to find out whether this love affair was about the music or what. Was I willing to be in a relationship that was going to be difficult? Was it worth throwing away? Would it get better? And I decided to give it another chance.

"So, anyway, now I need to find the kind of guy who finds my whole life hysterical. I need one who is richer and more powerful, who thinks it's all a hoot." Nicks says even her assistant, "who is beautiful, talented and 39", can't find a man. "And I'm 59 and think I'm pretty fantastic. So what's up? Where are all the boyfriends? But I believe that there is a God and He will fill my life with work. I am never lonely, but this is a big, old house to be in all by myself. I am selling it - it's too big for me and my little dogs."

She adds: "My relationships were consistent until about ten years ago. I had some beautiful men in my life. I was passionately in love with Joe Walsh, for example. He was very rich, very famous, a huge rock star. He would come to my house and my friends would be over, and he would say, 'I don't know these people, get them out.' So I would throw them all out. He just wanted to be with me. It was flattering and irritating in equal parts. I could never have been married to Joe, but we were all so high at that point. Joe and I were doing so much cocaine, we were sure we were going to die.

"Joe became sober first and then I went to the Betty Ford clinic. No one did coke around me after 1985. I thought the whole world had stopped doing it but it turns out they were just being respectful." She talks about getting over her mountainous drug addiction as if all she was doing was getting over a cold. Is it true she has a hole in her nose? "I do. If I wanted to put a huge, gold ring through it, I could. A gold ring with diamonds. Sometimes with my nieces and goddaughters, I just want to say, 'Do you want to take a cigarette and put it through my nose?', just to gross them out, to get across to them this shit can hurt you. Check it out, I've got a gaping hole." She thrusts her head back but I decline the invitation.

"The hole in my nose was due to the fact that I used to have such headaches," she continues. "I would dissolve an Aspirin in water, take an eye dropper and put the Aspirin up my nose to take the pain away - without knowing that Aspirin dissolves anything. My whole nose could have collapsed."

That's the great thing about Nicks - much of her could have collapsed, but it never did. "Despite the coke, at least I still had a brain - I came out of Betty Ford and I felt capable of fixing this situation. But nobody would leave me alone about it. They told me to go and see a shrink to talk about everything, that I needed to have follow-up treatment. I really wasn't missing the drugs, but I got the name of a doctor from somebody and went to see him. 'I'm here because the world doesn't think I can do it by myself,' I told him. And he put me on a drug called Klonopin, a complex and dangerous derivative of Valium.

"I went from two blue pills in the morning to four blue pills; then it was two white pills in the morning and at bedtime. He just kept upping my dose. If I went without it for two days, I would start to shake. I was shaking all the time - shaking so hard that people would look at me. I thought I had Parkinson's. I can honestly say I lost most of my 40s to this drug. It was eight years of my life gone. Your 40s are the last vestige of your youth and mine was ripped away from me by this jerk. One day, I got my assistant to take everything that I took, and I said I would sit with him in case he died. 'I want to see how this affects you,' I told him, 'because I think I'm dying.' So he took it all." She recounts this story as if it was the most normal thing in the world - like Cleopatra might have had her slave taste her food for poison.

"He was a very good friend," Nicks goes on. "He was in the middle of setting up my stereo system and he just passed out. So I decided I should get off Klonopin. The doctor said he didn't think it was a good idea. That's what he always said.

"I told him I was going into rehab and he said, 'No, I can cut your dose down,' but I had made my mind up. I was in there for 47 days and it made the detox from cocaine look like a walk in the park. My hair turned grey and my skin moulted. I couldn't get out of bed. I couldn't stand up in a shower. I thought I was going to die. But after 47 days I came out shining on the other side. I had a new lease of life. It's been easy for me to stay sober. I could still drink alcohol recreationally because I'm not an alcoholic, but for my menopause I take a drug called Neurontin. It handles the menopause brilliantly, but if you take so much as a nip of tequila it makes you very sick."

During her time on Klonopin, Nicks says she put on a lot of weight. "When I went to this doctor, I weighed nine stone and I ended up 12 stone. He watched me turn into a fat blob." She's not a fat blob now, I tell her. "That's because I'm wearing a good top. You should get one." She can't remember who made it, so she has me come round to the back of her and look inside for the label. And that's how the whole interview's been, really - she's let me look inside.

"My life is always open," she says. "I love my work. I have so many projects I want to do. I am going to have my children's story made into an animated movie. It's about a ladybug and a goldfish, and I've already cast Angelina Jolie as a goldfish. I feel that something really good is coming for me. It might be a person, it might be music, but something good is coming into my life."

Crystal Visions: The Very Best of Stevie Nicks is released by Warners

Go their own way
FLEETWOOD MAC were a highly influential and successful band, but were plagued by internal disputes and personnel changes.

They began as a British blues combo in the late 1960s and slowly evolved into a pop/rock act. In 1974, Stevie Nicks and then boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham joined the band "as a package", and took their positions alongside Mick Fleetwood and another couple, John and Christine McVie.

The band endured a host of changes throughout their career, but these five were considered the definitive line-up in 1975.

Unfortunately for them, the two couples in the band split not long after this. Fortunately for the public, this led to enormous creative and personal tensions, and spawned Fleetwood Mac's most successful album Rumours. Released in 1977, it is the tenth highest-selling album of all time. Its hit singles include 'The Chain', 'Go Your Own Way' and 'Don't Stop'.

In an interview last year, Buckingham hinted at a Fleetwood Mac reunion tour next year. But for now recording and touring plans are on hold.