(Credits: Far Out / Stevie Nicks)
Tue 3 February 2026 16:00, UK
From the minute that she hit the stage, Stevie Nicks was born to be a performer.
Fleetwood Mac was a perfectly fine band well before she and Lindsey Buckingham began working with them, but as soon as everyone got introduced to ‘The Gold Dust Woman’, there was a lot more excitement onstage than Bob Welch starting a bluesy jam with the rest of the group. Nicks had that certain swagger that people are either born with or they aren’t, but if all that came naturally, a few of her competitors worked their ass off every single day to be the best frontmen on the planet.
Because it’s not like Nicks would have been up there were it not for people like Janis Joplin. She smashed down the door for female frontmen with a bottle of whiskey in her hand, and even if we’re talking about the version of Los Angeles that Nicks moved to, Linda Ronstadt was bringing a more gentle approach to the genre even if she had some of the greatest songwriters in the world writing with her like JD Souther and Jackson Browne.
But if Ronstadt was interpreting people’s work, Nicks had her own stories to tell. She may have needed Buckingham’s help to flesh out her songs in the early days, but when she went solo on Bella Donna, she couldn’t have picked a better time. She had grown into a classic writer in her own right, and while the era of MTV wasn’t something that she was always that comfortable with, you could see her leaning into it a little bit more when working on the videos for songs like ‘Stand Back’.
Nicks did have a standoffish relationship with videos, but in the world of pop, no one had the same command of the stage that Michael Jackson did. The music video was his for the taking by the time Thriller came out, and while Nicks had a much closer relationship with rock stars like Prince at the time, anyone with functional eyeballs couldn’t deny that Jackson was one of the greatest at his craft.
He could dance like no one else, he was an immaculate singer, and when he hit the stage, he could leave any venue absolutely delirious. Motown’s 25th anniversary? Absolutely annihilated the place as soon as he hit the moonwalk. The stadium tours with the rest of his brothers? He was so good you would forget that it was technically a family tour. The Super Bowl Half-Time Show? Hell, the guy only needed to stand there in the middle of the field for a few minutes to get rapturous applause.
Love him or hate him, Jackson was unparalleled in his field, and even Nicks had to admit it was the end of an era when he passed, saying, “In show business, the stage is everywhere — it’s when you leave the parking lot, when you go to the mall. It’s about trying your best to be as perfect as possible. It’s the reason Michael was like royalty. There’s no other person like that, because the era of performers — the Frank Sinatras, the Elizabeth Taylors, the Sammy Davis Jrs — is over. He was the last emperor.”
Although there have been countless pop stars that have come up in the wake of Jackson, there’s no doubt that everyone was copying from his playbook ever since he hit it big. Prince may have been a musical god in every sense of the word, but whereas his talent seemed too out of reach, everyone from Bruno Mars to Justin Timberlake to Usher have worked their asses off every single night trying to make a stage experience half as good as what Jackson used to do.
Nicks knew never to try to tap into that sort of stage production, but she didn’t really need to. Her performance style was far more subtle than what the rest of the world expected, and while she wasn’t going to moonwalk her way across the stage or be out of breath after every song because of her insane dance moves, it took a certain kind of performer that could stop someone in their tracks with only their voice.
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