Review Stevie Nicks Live in Manchester - more than worth the wait.

Stevie Nicks' Co-op Live - icon treats Manchester to Fleetwood Mac hits

Stevie Nicks performed at Manchester's Co-op Live Tuesday July 16, 2024

By Craig Jones

Manchester Evening News

Photo Kenny Brown

Manchester enjoyed a wonderful evening when music royalty Stevie Nicks paid a visit to the city’s Co-op Live - even if it was a little later than expected.

Fleetwood Mac icon, Nicks, 76, had been due to perform in the city earlier this month before suffering an injury. Quickly rescheduled to Tuesday evening, the speedy turnaround didn’t prove to be a problem for her devotees with the venue packed out.

There was no mention of the postponement from Nicks but she did speak at length about her love of England with American Nicks joking she’d be keen to call it home. She said: “We like it here. We just might stay. You are probably asking yourselves ‘where is she going to live? She’s probably going to live in Harrods?’.

“Oh, that’s not even here in this town but you can visit me there. As I’ll probably just be in the jewellery department.”

Opening with Outside The Rain, howls followed when the easily-recognisable intro to Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams came second in the set. Nicks, dressed in her signature cape, wavy skirt and tassels, tenderly exuded those unforgettable lyrics. Having many thousand Mancunians as backing singers. After, there were numerous cries of ‘we love you, Stevie’.

The setlist consisted of Mac hits accompanied by songs from the Nicks solo back catalogue. The music pioneer also regularly engaged with her audience giving details about how some of the tracks came to be.

Touching on the unmatched if complicated (well, very complicated) dynamic between herself, Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, et al the masses discovered how Gypsy was created. The number soon followed and proved to be one of the evening’s highlights.

The Mac anecdotes were delivered with warmth and an understanding of how important those people and that band have been in Nicks’ life. On Tuesday, there were also dedications to the star’s contemporaries as many greats flashed on the big screens with Tom Petty getting his own moment when Nicks gave a rendition of Free Fallin’. Nicks spoke with much humility when discussing her influences.

The cape changes were plentiful with Bella Donna and Stand Back originals being presented on stage. The attire of many in attendance was clearly inspired by the landmark musical artist.

A mesmeric performance of Edge of Seventeen, featuring emphatic guitar work from Waddy Wachtel, concluded the main set. Stills of Prince flashed up before the humble Nicks thanked the Co-op crowd for their support.

A two-song encore came in the shape of Fleetwood Mac classics Rhiannon and Landslide. At the weekend, in London, the latter saw Harry Styles join Nicks on stage. In Manchester, it was Nicks and her stripped back band who brought the curtain down with the deeply impassioned song - dedicated to Mac bandmate Christine McVie who sadly died in 2022.

There were some tears and much adulation as Nicks took her bow. One thing is for certain, Stevie Nicks’ appearance in Manchester was more than worth the wait.

Setlist

• Outside the Rain
• Dreams
• If Anyone Falls
• Stop Draggin' My Heart Around
• Gypsy
• For What It's Worth
• Free Fallin'
• Bella Donna
• Stand Back
• Gold Dust Woman
• Leather and Lace
• Edge of Seventeen

Encore

• Rhiannon
• Landslide

(Soldiers Angel, dropped from this show)

Outside The Rain / Dreams 

Gold Dust Woman

Stand Back (different opening)

If Anyone Falls In Love

Review Stevie Nicks London, Hyde Park "On stage, Nicks is a consummate entertainer"

Stevie Nicks at BST Hyde Park review: Harry Styles cameo jars in resonant star’s tremendous, throwback-heavy show

The charismatic Nicks is a consummate entertainer, which is why it’s a shame to see her ceding the spotlight to a 30-year-old boyband star

★★★★☆

by Louis Chilton

Independent

Photo Lorne Thomson

There’s no escaping Fleetwood Mac. The final iteration of the seminal band may have disbanded two years ago following the death of Christine McVie, but their music still reverberates around our culture, as if held by some humongous sustain pedal that nobody dares lift.

And yet, if you bought tickets to see Stevie Nicks at London’s Hyde Park expecting some kind of dewy tribute to a bygone pop group, you will have been sorely mistaken. From the moment Tom Petty’s “Runnin’ Down a Dream” pumps out over the speaker, and Nicks walks out – dressed in black, with fingerless gloves and hair that could reasonably be described as Rapunzelesque – it’s obvious you are watching a performer with tremendous resonance in her own right.

On stage, Nicks is a consummate entertainer, a woman whose charisma and husky-voiced gravitas has only ossified with the decades. As she speaks about the wonder of performing at Hyde Park, it has the slight ring of schmoozing, the sense that we are being honeyed with rote (albeit deft) flattery. When she begins talking about playing on this same stage with Petty in 2017, however, this notion dissolves immediately. “I feel his presence and I’m happy he’s here,” she says, with an earnestness that melts your heart, before launching into a vibrant cover of “Free Fallin’” that has most of the crowd crooning along, arms aloft.

The biggest bangers here are, inevitably, the smattering of hits released during Fleetwood Mac’s 13-year peak, including “Gypsy”, “Gold Dust Woman”, and, later in the set, “Rhiannon”. The decision to medley opener “Outside the Rain”, from Nicks’s 1981 solo debut Bella Donna, with Fleetwood Mac’s diamond-tight bop “Dreams”, calls regrettable attention to just how musically similar the two tracks are.

In restricting the setlist’s Fleetwood Mac covers to her own compositions (something she has always done at solo shows), Nicks omits some of the band’s best-loved tracks: there is no “The Chain”, no “Go Your Own Way”. What that does mean is more space for solo cuts, and a couple of savvy covers. Introducing a politically charged version of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth”, Nicks urges fans to exercise their right to vote, admitting she had not done so herself until she was 70. (“Don’t be me!”)

At 76 years old, Nicks has lost some of the range and diction in her voice, though she has smartly learnt to compensate – shifting down the more quixotic high notes and making the most of the ardent middle register. She’s also girded by a first-rate backing band. For “Leather and Lace”, originally a duet with Don Henley, Nicks shares the stage with her longtime vocal coach Steve Real – the man, she says, responsible for keeping her voice in gig-ready nick well into her eighth decade.

It’s a touching moment, in a set that’s full of them. After a riffy, minutes-long instrumental intro, the band eventually cannons into “Edge of Seventeen”, Nicks’s biggest hit as a solo artist. This too is a song about grief – but the pulsing, electric melodies make it less a eulogy than a defiant celebration.

For a legacy act like this, the audience here is surprisingly young – eyeballing it, I reckon at least a decade or two younger on average than the crowd at Bruce Springsteen’s sensational 2023 Hyde Park set. On one level, it’s a testament to the 2010s Fleetwood Mac resurgence, the shift when Rumours started becoming a cool album again, after years in the “oldies” ghetto.

But more than this, it speaks to Nicks’s towering place in the industry, her role as an inspiration for younger musicians and music fans alike. Performing on stage early in the afternoon as a supporting act, country singer Brandi Carlile said that neither she, nor any of the female acts on the bill, would likely be performing music were it not for Nicks’s influence. This sentiment is palpable, through the crowd and throughout the night.

As a final showstopper, Nicks brings out Harry Styles for encore renditions of “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” and “Landslide” – the latter in tribute to McVie, on what would have been her 81st birthday. The younger members of the crowd go wild. There’s something jarring about Nicks ceding the spotlight to a 30-year-old boyband star, and he seems almost loath to steal the headlines, fanning his hands down into a performative show of worship.

But at the same time, it makes perfect sense. For all the throwbacks, the reminiscences, the sense of culmination, this doesn’t feel like an ending. Pop music will, one day, have to go on without Stevie Nicks. But for now, she gets to live in the future her music built.

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.

Review Stevie Nicks Live in Hyde Park with Harry Styles July 12, 2024

Stevie Nicks: The Fleetwood Mac veteran brings magic to Hyde Park – with help from Harry Styles

It was genuinely special to witness Nicks duet with the young star at BST Hyde Park as a tribute to her late bandmate Christine McVie.

Neil McCormick, CHIEF MUSIC CRITIC

Telegraph

Photos Lorne Thomson

In my career as a music critic, I have heard the ear-shattering screech of teenage girls screaming many times. But I think this may have been the first time I have heard an audience of women of all ages give a kind of joyous approximation of the mass pop scream.

The object of their noisy enthusiasm was not, in fact, the star of the occasion, 76-year-old rock queen Stevie Nicks. The Fleetwood Mac veteran was certainly treated with respect, delight, enthusiasm and a touch of awe throughout an absolutely fantastic performance that put smiles on the faces of everyone on stage and in the crowd. But the screams were reserved for a guest who arrived for the last two songs, looking Hollywood handsome with chopped short hair and a baggy suit: boyband hero turned solo superstar Harry Styles.

When Styles was first charming the nation with One Direction, I don’t think this would have been anyone’s vision of his future: swinging a big orange guitar whilst standing in for Tom Petty on a rocking Stop Dragging My Heart Around and harmonising Christine McVie’s parts on a tender Landslide. As Britain’s premier contemporary pop star, Styles carries a lot of weight, but he showed the deep musical empathy to slip humbly into a supporting role with an all-time great, forging links from pop’s shining present to its glorious past. It was a genuinely special thing to witness, and Nicks was clearly moved as she drew him into a hug.

“The last time I was here in Hyde Park it was with Tom Petty, and that was the last time I saw Tom,” she had noted earlier of the great American rocker who died aged 66 in 2017. At the end, she spoke movingly about late Mac bandmate McVie. “This is Christine’s birthday,” she noted to cheers. (She would have been 81.) “It’s hard to sing a song about your best friend who died so suddenly,” she admitted. “My mom used to say when Stevie gets hurt, she runs to the stage, and that’s what I’ve been doing. And the only people who have helped me get through this are all of you.”

Fleetwood Mac may be no more, but the ladies – and, indeed, many gentlemen – of London came out for the band’s one true star on a cool summer evening in Hyde Park. There was a sense of cos-play about the occasion. Women of all ages bravely sported ballgowns, skimpy diaphanous cloaks and battered top hats in honour of the star’s distinctive look. Nicks dug into her own collection of cloaks, scarves and gowns as she twirled and sang, her voice lower and grittier than in her youth, but full of character and flair as she led us through the poetic narratives of her ethereal brand of magical blues rock. Her well-chosen solo songs sounded fantastic, with the great silver-haired guitarist Waddy Wachtel powering through Edge of Seventeen. The Mac material was transcendent. An extended psychedelic blues romp through Gold Dust Woman was better than I’d ever heard it, as free and wild as Nicks’ persona.

It was a very old-fashioned rock show. There wasn’t much in the way of stage production: some floaty screen imagery and coloured lights. It was all about a virtuoso band playing characterful songs with a charismatic star leading the way with free-flowing singing amidst welters of perfect harmonies. The woman’s got style. And, indeed, on this occasion, she had Harry Styles too.

Stevie Nicks "Edge of Seventeen" Certified 2x Platinum in the UK

 

Stevie Nicks "Edge of Seventeen" was certified 2x Platinum 

in the UK on July 12, 2024.

With Stevie Nicks headlining London’s BST Hyde Park over the weekend, Fleetwood Mac’s timeless "50 Years – Don’t Stop" collection ascends the Top 100 Albums Chart in the UK, up four in a return to the Top 10 at No.8 with 5,168 units sold.

"Rumours" also moves up on the chart to No.27 from No.32 last week. "Rumours" also moves up the vinyl Top 40 from No.10 last week to No.7 this week. On the Album Sales chart, "Rumours" moves up to No.14 from No.22 last week. 

In Scotland "Rumours" moves up the No.13 this week from No.19 last week. "Greatest Hits" moves up to No.75 from No.83 last week. 

In Ireland "50 Years - Don't Stop" moves up to No.11 from No.13 last week. "Rumours" moves up to No.27 from No.31 last week. 

Fleetwood Mac's "Go Your Own Way" Achieves 1 Billion Streams

 

Fleetwood Mac's "Go Your Own Way" has achieved 1 BILLION STREAMS on Spotify.  This is the 3rd track to reach that level following "Dreams" and "The Chain".