Credit: Far Out / Klaus Hiltscher
Wed 9 September 2026 16:00, UK
The date is New Year’s Day 1975, and the music world is about to get changed forever.
The charts didn’t seem to get a kick in the ass or anything just yet, but somewhere in the middle of California, the original members of Fleetwood Mac decided to take a chance with two of the greatest budding songwriters in the state, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. And while there are many moments where they would go far away from their bluesy roots, Nicks was the one who cast a little bit of magic over everything that they would do going forward.
Buckingham was always one to push forward and try to make the kind of music that he heard in his head; no one could really describe the kind of songs that Nicks was coming up with. She didn’t claim to know the most chords on any of her instruments or anything, but when she found the right moment, she could take any number of her songs into some of the most beautiful passages on any of their records.
But a lot of what makes her records so great comes from the subtlety in her delivery. She didn’t need to be screaming at the top of her lungs on every single song, and while tunes like ‘Gold Dust Woman’ do show off her versatility a lot more, it takes more nuance for someone to really understand the sentiment of a song like ‘Landslide’ whenever they sing it. And while Nicks was a legend years before the age of MTV, she was willing to champion anyone that she found on the neon-coloured landscape.
She didn’t want to rest on her laurels for a second, and half of her greatest moments have come from when she’s taking cues from what else she heard on the radio. Kate Bush was always going to be one of the greatest artists that ever lived in her mind, but there were also people like Natalie Maines from The Chicks that made her want to be in a band like that, even after years of being a solo artist.
When you look at the way that she approached her own craft, though, Nicks was always looking for the perfect song above everything else, and there were more than a few perfect pop songs coming out at the dawn of MTV. She was still in love with Tom Petty’s music and considered Joni Mitchell to be one of the greatest songwriters, but Pat Benatar threw her for a loop the first time that she heard ‘Love is a Battlefield’.
Nicks had spent years trying to find the right kind of lyrics for many of her love songs, but she felt that Benatar captured the kind of feeling that would outlive anything else on MTV at the time, saying, “I was definitely in the midst of ‘love is a battlefield’ in my life at that point. That was when videos were really superb. They were like movies. This is a song that I just think will live on forever. Every generation who see the video will be very taken with it. I think for women, it’s fantastic.”
Further reading: From The Vault
And compared to everything else in rock and roll at the time, there aren’t many songs that seemed to have the same atmosphere as this tune did. Benatar didn’t need to sing the most demanding vocals of all time whenever she delivered the chorus, but when everything breaks down to the whistling in the middle of the song, there aren’t many other instruments that can depict that kind of feeling any better.
The whole song is about love being about going through hardship and pain, and that whistling section might as well be a reminder of how lonely it can be once you’re all alone. Love isn’t easy by any means, but it’s songs like this that give people the strength to keep going even through all of the dark chapters as well.
