(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sun 26 April 2026 18:00, UK
There’s no accurate way of teaching what Stevie Nicks could do whenever she performed with Fleetwood Mac.
She looked like a singer possessed whenever she kicked herself into gear during ‘Rhiannon’, and while she did have a lot of spiritual feelings towards her songs, no amount of production could ever replace how she made her audience feel when she strutted out onto the stage. A lot of her greatest moments may have come from bouncing off her bandmates, but she had already learned how to hold a crowd in the palm of her hand before her and Lindsey Buckingham got the call to join ‘The Mac’.
But when you look at the way that Nicks performs every single night, it’s a lot more subtle than the average rock and roll heavyweight. While both of them are absolute legends in their own right, Nicks’s show and Joan Jett’s show are going for two totally different vibes, and while they execute both of them perfectly, Nicks needed to embody her songs a little bit more whenever she sang.
She didn’t want to bother going through the motions and giving the people a mediocre performance, because a lot of her biggest inspirations were already leaving everything onstage. Grace Slick was already pushing the boundaries for what a frontwoman could do in Jefferson Airplane, but anyone who has ever tried to push against the status quo in rock and roll owes it to themselves to look at every single second of Janis Joplin’s performance at the Monterey Pop Festival.
Joplin had absolutely no reservations about shocking her audience, and the massive vocal performances she gave on tunes like ‘Ball and Chain’ meant more than just about anyone else when Nicks saw her back in the day, saying, “Janis [was] very different, feathers in her hair, fantastic bell-bottoms, really high-heeled shoes and a top with little bell sleeves in silky beautiful material and beads, and wild, crazy, curly hair. I was blown away by her. I learned more from her during that hour and a half—watching how she dealt with the crowd, how she paced herself, how she sang—than any hour and a half in my life.”
And judging by the rest of the rock and roll scene at the time, Nicks needed to learn these lessons if she wanted to make a name for herself. Aside from all the other male-led rock and roll outfits at the time, bands like Heart were putting a bit more muscle behind their delivery, so Nicks couldn’t afford to make the same kind of upbeat rootsy rock tunes that she was making in Buckingham Nicks.
Buckingham was always going to rise to the challenge when it came time to work in the studio, but you really needed Nicks during the Rumours era for everything to come together. She wasn’t the greatest musician in the world, but no one could have created the kind of disturbing energy of a song like ‘Gold Dust Woman’ by simply playing all of the notes correctly and singing everything on pitch.
Judging by what Joplin was doing, though, Nicks knew how to harness that sense of energy whenever she performed. Everyone might fawn over the various shawls that she wore every single night, but the purpose was for her to almost put a spell on the audience at every opportunity, to the point where she looked like a genuine sorcerer by the time she kicked into the main groove of a song like ‘Dreams’.
Nicks didn’t necessarily need to tear up her voice the same way that Joplin seemed to be doing every time she played, but she understood what mattered in the long run for most singers of her ilk. It’s one thing to have a lot of experience dealing with the crowd, but what makes a singer go from decent to sensational is their way of being able to play the crowd like its an instrument no matter what venue they’re in.
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