The show Stevie Nicks never wanted to stop playing: “Pull me off”
In 2015, rather bizarrely at the Isle of Wight Festival, I saw Fleetwood Mac play live, with the full Rumours line-up. I knew it was a special moment when they walked on stage and opened with ‘The Chain’, but it’s only in recent months that I’ve realised just how special a moment it really was.
Because with the usual cycle of festival headline announcements and reunion tours, Fleetwood Mac’s name seems to crop up consistently in desperately hopeful conversations of who they might see. Seemingly, most people in my generation have grown up to the sound of Fleetwood Mac, bathed in the subsequent learning of their drama and now crave one brief opportunity to see them play before it’s too late.
But now, I’ve realised that it is too late and that the 2015 show was just as special as I may have thought. Their glorious songwriter Christine McVie is no longer with us and their troublesome guitarist Lindsey Buckingham may have just broken the last ever olive branch extended to him, making the chance of a full blooded reunion impossible.
As a millennial, 2015 was likely as good as I could possibly get. The heady days of their touring pomp in the 1970s predated my birth by a long way and so I could only imagine what those high octane, drama fuelled shows would have been like.
Because the band’s personal stories were so intertwined with one another that the studio became a place of suffocation and the stage, liberation. On stage, in front of thousands of fans, they could physically exercise the demons that had been written about in the studio and in Nicks’s face. She could stand with her eyes locked on Buckingham and have a chance to tell her story.
Her ability to captivate as a performer meant she soon won over a legion of fans, who supported every syllable she uttered, reminding her that the painful solace she experienced in her writing could turn into joyous collective understanding on stage. So it’s no wonder she holds such a deep fondness for that environment.
“You know when I walk out on the stage it’s like that’s when I’m really me,” she said. “They almost had to take me off the stage with a hook to pull me off the stage at the US festival. People say to me there’s never a look on your face like there is the look that is on your face when you’re on that stage. Cause that’s where I belong and I’m not near as good at home or at a party on an airplane or anywhere else. I’m at home on a stage with those kids.”
It’s largely what keeps Nicks performing so frequently today, for despite her roaring success and artistic legacy, Nicks’s life has been one of pain and hardship. Through her art, she has had to suffer and perhaps the only place left for her to feel a true sense of freedom is on stage, singing songs to a collection of fans who grow with every coming generation.
