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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.
