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Mon 11 August 2025 17:30, UK
“She lived to get this message out,” a fan commented on a video of Stevie Nicks, staring down the barrel of a camera, and talking starkly to addicts about rehab, saying plainly, “You will have to go, or you will die.”
In the history of Fleetwood Mac, the group’s chaos and emotional carnage is often treated like the kooky plot to a movie. Especially in the years after Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined, the trials of the couple’s split, the making of Rumours, the difficulty of touring, the affairs and the betrayals are all spoken of again and again like pop culture mythology or as if all of that had to happen because the music needed it.
The ‘tortured artist’ trope has a lot to answer for in that way. Culture has convinced itself that a level of pain and suffering is necessary to create great art, or that no happy and healthy mind could make anything gritty enough or with enough substance. That’s why so many artists have overdosed before anyone stepped in to help them, or why so many people have collapsed under the weight of mental illness, because a whole industry convinced them that their sadness is what makes them great.
The story of Fleetwood Mac was almost one of them, as while Nicks’ tales of love and loss are painted out as fun stories, the singer genuinely nearly died.
‘Gold Dust Woman’ now sounds like her peering over the edge of a cliff. “Rock on, gold dust woman / Take your silver spoon, dig your grave,” she sang on the 1977 track, with no idea that the tiny silver cocaine spoon would almost dig her own. At the time, this was merely an observing song about the band’s favourite party drug and the cast of spiralling addicts she saw as separate from herself.
“’Gold Dust Woman’ was about how we all love the ritual of it, the little bottle, the diamond-studded spoons, the fabulous velvet bags. For me, it fitted right into the incense and candles and that stuff,” she said, as if initially, cocaine merely became part of her aesthetic.
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“I really imagined that it could overtake everything,” she said, adding with hindsight in 1997, “never thinking in a million years that it would overtake me.”
At the start, though, cocaine was almost essential. It was the one thing that seemed to keep the band together during the making of Rumours, which in turn made them stars. ‘Gold Dust Woman’ represented that phrase as Nicks said, “‘Gold Dust Woman’ was really my kind of symbolic look at somebody going through a bad relationship, and doing a lot of drugs, and trying to just make it – trying to live – you know, trying to get through it to the next thing.”
But it quickly became more than that when the band headed off on tour, made Tusk, toured again and suddenly years went by and Nicks was out there alone when it came to the severity of her drug taking. “All of us were drug addicts, but there was a point where I was the worst drug addict,” she said later, “I was a girl, I was fragile, and I was doing a lot of coke.” Told in the early 1980s that she’s already burnt a hole in her nose that would prove fatal if she didn’t get clean, it became clear that the drugs had overtaken her.
“It was the first thing I thought about when I woke up in the morning, and the last thing I thought of before I went to bed,” she said in an interview decades on, when she’s now reckoned with the severity of her addiction and how it almost ended her life.
Luckily, though, it didn’t, as she checked herself into the Betty Ford Clinic and made a full recovery. But even still today, when she plays ‘Gold Dust Woman’ as part of her set, it becomes a hauntingly prophetic song, written by a naive girl on the brink and performed now by a woman who survived, singing a warning to everyone listening now.
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