The singer Stevie Nicks would give anything to tour with: “That’s how much I miss her!”
Stevie Nicks has always kept a close-knit circle in her musical world. Certain people may ultimately come and go over time, but there are only a few people for whom she would give her life.
This is undeniably a major part of what makes her music so prolific, but her personal life so volatile, as those relationships are so tightly wound that when they start to go wrong, they can spiral out of control in dramatic and irreparable fashion. We could be here all day citing examples, but the upshot is this: if Nicks loves you, she really loves you. If she doesn’t, then life could get a little tricky.
All of this is easy to say, of course, but after a while, it does become true that Nicks is cast under a trope of negativity; every drama, falling out, and rock and roll escapade seems to haunt her even years after the event has passed. In a lot of ways, this does a massive disservice to the other side of the star: her closest friends become akin to her family, and nothing will ever break that bond.
It’s for this reason that for the biggest swathes of her career, Nicks has only ever gone on the road with the people she loves most in tow. It makes the time away from home less painful, and perhaps the odd tense run-in with those she doesn’t like more bearable. On this front, there are a few contenders which obviously spring to mind, but none of them ultimately beat Christine McVie.
Through many of the years of Fleetwood Mac, Nicks and McVie were bound together by an inherent sense of sisterhood which steeled them through the good times and the bad. Marriage breakdowns and relationship troubles could be managed so long as they had each other by their sides. But when one half of the equation was missing, the other was rudderless.
Of course, McVie’s decision to step back from the spotlight in 1998 can’t have come easily to her, but the impact of it left Nicks reeling as she would have given anything to get back on stage with her best friend. In 2013, she had even gone so far as to say she would “beg, borrow and scrape together $5 million and give it to her in cash if she would come back. That’s how much I miss her!”
The cynics might say that $5m in cash would not have been that hard for Nicks to come by, hence possibly the reason that, a little over a year later, her prayers were answered and McVie returned to tour with the band. Whether it was money, intuition, missing her bandmates, or a combination of all three, the frontwoman was delighted regardless. Her best friend was back, and Fleetwood Mac could storm the stage like the old days.
It makes it all the more tragic in this context, knowing that the long dreamed-after reunion only lasted the course of a few short years before McVie’s health declined and she sadly passed away three years ago. When Nicks quoted the Haim lyric: “I had a best friend, but she has come to pass/ One I wish I could see now,” in her tribute, it suddenly took on a whole new meaning.
That was the true testament to how close a relationship Nicks and McVie really developed over the years. It was one that enjoyed its fair share of champagne and success, without question, but it also weathered many storms and saw them both through a lot of troubles. The fact that Nicks said she would do anything to tour with McVie was one thing, but she only said it because she would have also done anything for her in the rest of her life.
