‘Rooms on Fire’: The song about the man who changed Stevie Nicks’ life forever
It feels wholly unjustifiable to think about Stevie Nicks‘ career through the men in her life. Apart from the blatant misogyny of it all, it also ignores the sheer wealth of talent Nicks has had at her disposal. The star is not only a potent songwriter but an acclaimed vocalist, becoming a champion of the rock and roll set with Fleetwood Mac before becoming an icon in her own right with an excellent solo career. It’s a list of accomplishments that made her the first-ever female double Rock and Roll Hall of Famer.
Therefore, to look at her career solely through the men she fell in love and lust with, such as Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood and Joe Walsh, is a discredit to her impressive life under the spotlight. However, thanks to her uniquely confessional songwriting, to remove these emotional moments from her discography, tracks about her love life and the people who became integral to it, is to remove a large chunk of the most fabulous parts of Nicks’s career and her life in general.
In truth, Nicks has always worn her heart on her sleeve, even leaving a great deal of information in the sleeves of her records, too. In the liner notes for The Other Side of the Mirror, Nicks opened up about the song ‘Rooms On Fire’ and perhaps most potently about the man who inspired it, her producer, Rupert Hine – a man who Nicks herself admitted changed her as a person.
Hine has a run of credits that are too long to contain within this story. A noted career in the 1960s rock scene in Britain, he was a part of Solo, Thinkman and Quantum Jump, which all delivered noteworthy if not commercial records during that time. However, he would soon find himself pursuing the pure art of production and sat himself behind the mixing desk to help the likes of The Waterboys, Tina Turner and Bob Geldof lay down records. It was during the 1980s that he met Nicks.
“The night I met Rupert Hine was a dangerous one,” explained Nicks in her liner notes. “He was different from anyone else I had ever known. He was older, and he was smarter, and we both knew it. I hired him to do the album before we even started talking about music. It seemed that we had made a spiritual agreement to do a magic album… in a fabulous Dutch castle at the top of the mountain.”
The duo made good on their verbal contract and got together to make the record: “We recorded it in the formal dining room where, upon the walls hung all these very old and expensive pieces of art – looking at us – we were never alone. It always seemed to me that whenever Rupert walked into one of these old, dark castle rooms, that the rooms were on fire”. Naturally, he would become the object of the song, owing to this strange imagery. However, the reason for his positioning in Nicks’ story would unfurl as the two shared a “connection” which “everyone around us instantly picked up on”.
Nicks followed Hine back to England to mix the album once the recording was finished. Nicks had fallen for the producer, but something wasn’t right. “He left immediately for his studio, Farmyard Studios, somewhere outside London. It was like being in a cottage in Wales, it was a little spooky. The atmosphere was like nothing I had ever experienced. Then something happened to him that simply made it impossible for us to ever be together again.”
Their love, as brief as it seemingly was, would have an indelible impact on Nicks’ life and her album, with Hine operating as one of the most important elements of the record: “I left him there… the rooms were still burning, but the fire had been stolen from us. It wasn’t over love. In fact, it had nothing to do with love. It was just a bad situation. I came back to Los Angeles, a very changed woman.”
Hine would represent one of the main aspects of life Nicks had left behind ‘the other side of the mirror’; he was now forever ingrained into her life, not only through her many memories of the time they shared but in the music she created while she was with him. The truth is, while we may become fascinated with the men who enter into Stevie Nicks’ story as pivotal characters of crucial plot points, it’s worth reminding ourselves that she is still the narrator of it.
