Lorde: the singer Stevie Nicks said could be “the third girl in Fleetwood Mac”
There was an incredibly tight bond between Fleetwood Mac singers Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie. A generational age gap couldn’t keep the two from forming a lasting friendship and creative collaboration. Nicks and McVie looked out for each other in the highly misogynistic rock scene of the 1970s, and if anyone tried to talk down to them, they would always have each other’s backs.
“We made a pact at the very beginning,” Nicks shared in an October 2020 interview with CBS, “That if we were ever in a room of super famous guitar players that didn’t treat us with the respect that we thought that we deserved, that we would just stand up and say, ‘This party’s over,’ and we would walk out.”
“We made a pact that we would never accept being treated as second-class citizens in the music business,” she added. “That when we walked into a room none of the uber-rockstar group of men would look through us. And they never did.”
There was no room for substitutes: it was Nicks and McVie, together until McVie’s untimely passing in late 2022. But just before that, while Nicks was on a solo tour in 2021, she hypothesised about what Fleetwood Mac would look like in the modern day. In fact, she named the one singer who could potentially step in and hold her own with McVie and herself: New Zealand pop star Lorde.
“I actually don’t know her, and I wish she was here,” Nicks said from the stage. “I was hoping I would get to cross paths with her. But I think she is so very talented. Like, if she had been my age, and lived our age, she probably would have been the third girl in Fleetwood Mac. So, if you run into her, please tell her that I’m looking for her.”
Nicks is technically discounting the fact that Fleetwood Mac did have a third female singer once upon a time. Bekka Bramlett replaced Nicks for exactly one album, 1995’s Time, before the band made a hard reset to their classic Buckingham-Nicks era lineup for 1997’s The Dance. According to Bramlett, Nicks wasn’t too big of a fan of Bramlett’s singing style, much less her visual similarities to Nicks. With that in mind, it makes sense that Nicks wouldn’t bend over backwards to keep Bramlett in the Fleetwood Mac conversation, even if she was the “third girl” that Nicks wished Lorde was.
