Before I meet Stevie Nicks, I hear her. She is downstairs somewhere in the house she's renting on the beach in Malibu – a short drive, traffic allowing, up the Californian coastline from the two homes she owns in LA – and looking for her dark glasses. It's early evening in December and has long since turned dark outside, but if you're the ultimate rock goddess – NME's recent description, testament to an ongoing revaluation of interest in Fleetwood Mac among the younger generation – wearing shades at night goes with the territory.
Scented candles are spaced throughout the room and there's a well-thumbed copy of the first book in The Twilight Saga on a side table – signs that suggest that the 64-year-old singer is comfortably in residence. Plus there's her Yorkshire terrier, getting stuck continuously under my feet. But, as Nicks says, when all five feet one-and-a-half inches of her does emerge at the top of the stairs, she can't seem to settle.
In fact she shouldn't be here at all (and wasn't planning any interviews), but on holiday in the Florida Keys she was getting bitten to death by bugs and, besides, felt bored. Going home to either of her places in the city wasn't an option because right now she's "making a molecular change": parking her solo career, which saw her tour the world with her solo album In Your Dreams for the past two years, and getting ready for the return of the Mac.
Instead she asked to see if this place, which she'd rented previously, was available. "I'm trying to rest and it's really hard to rest because in either one of my own houses I feel like I should be working," she explains. "I've been coming here off and on for nearly 10 years and there's absolutely nothing for me to do except draw or sit and write poetry or bring the electric piano down." Problem is, "I've been here since Tuesday and I haven't managed yet to actually come up here at three in the afternoon and go sit on that miserable couch and draw for a few hours – because that's when I know I've made a change."
Despite the homely touches, the house looks perfectly nondescript from the outside, and it's modestly apportioned by the standards of LA rock aristocracy. But then Nicks doesn't play the diva either – kooky fan of fantasy, yes (her fondness for the oeuvre of Stephenie Meyer and liking for US fantasy TV series Game of Thrones fits right into that), but not the figure who insisted during Fleetwood Mac's Tusk tour that every hotel room she stayed in be painted pink and must house a white piano.
It is now 40 years since her first album, Buckingham Nicks – the fruit of her relationship, both musical and romantic, with Lindsey Buckingham – and life is coming full circle. Later this month, the most classic of all Fleetwood Mac albums, Rumours, gets the full reissue treatment, and the band will hit the road again for a US tour that will also likely come to Europe. (Of the rumours that they'll headline Glastonbury, Nicks is noncommittal, though she does say she'd love to do it.)
There is also the likelihood of the first new Fleetwood Mac record in 10 years – and even the prospect of a second Buckingham-Nicks album. For fans, this news is as exciting as it might sound improbable. Nicks once said herself that "to be in Fleetwood Mac is to live in a soap opera. And it has been pretty scandalous and incestuous…" And of all relationships, it's been that between her and Buckingham that has provided the richest story lines of all.
.png)
.png)
.jpg)
