[So, she paid Chris to dance with her, huh?]
Courier Mail, September 25, 1986
HEADLINE: ROCK A LITTLE WITH STEVIE NICKS
SOURCE: QNP
BYLINE: EATON M
BODY:
Blitz THE FIRST TIME STEVIE NICKS CAME TO AUSTRALIA, Fleetwood Mac were the biggest pop act in the world. The year was 1977 and their hit album Rumours was well on the way to selling 15 million copies worldwide. Three years later Stevie returned to our shores again as part of Fleetwood Mac's massive Tusk world tour. When Stevie, 38, arrrived in Australia this month _ this time without Fleetwood Mac, one of the hugely-successful superbands of the 1970s _ she did so as the most consistently successful female recording artist of the past decade. Fresh from a three-month, coast to coast American tour that has seen her selling out 20,000 seat venues, Stevie will be performing with her 10-piece band in Australia. She appears in Brisbane at the Boondall Entertainment Centre on Saturday night. On this, her third visit to Australia, she is playing in the wake of a successful solo album Rock A Little. So far two of the album's tracks have charted well in Australia, You Can Talk To Me, and I Can't Wait and the record has sold close to 100,000 copies here. More than two million copies have sold in the United States. This will be Stevie's second appearance in Australia this year. Actors Equity refused to let Stevie perform here during a holiday trip early in 1986. She had wanted to appear at the concerts of Bob Dylan and Tom Petty, with whom she had recorded a hit single Stop Dragging My Heart Around. Although she was only able to sing at their last concert, she reportedly followed them around the country. Rock A Little is Stevie's third solo album. Her first, Bella Donna, was recorded in 1981 and the second, The Wild Heart, was finished in 1983. That album featured Stop Dragging My Heart Around, a now-famous duet with Tom Petty. In between those came the Fleetwood Mac LP Mirage. Stevie was able to establish herself as an artist in her own right before the group went quiet. But Fleetwood Mac never really broke up and later this year they will release their first album since 1982. Stevie has spent parts of this year writing and recording songs for that. She will not overlook the old songs in her Australian concerts. Stevie will do many of the numbers her voice has helped make famous over the years. The Stevie Nicks story really began when as a four-year-old her grandfather taught her to sing country songs. He played while she sang and danced in the gin mills of Phoenix, Arizona. ""I'd pay my brother 30 cent a week just to dance with me, just because I loved to dance so much," she once said. ""But I didn't want to go to ballet school every day and study and kill myself, so I had to figure out a way of to do something wonderful without working at it. ""So as a real little girl I started singing along with the Beach Boys learning all the words, working out my routine." On her 16th birthday, her parents gave Stevie her first guitar and on that day she composed her first song _ I've Loved and I've Lost. Since then, she says, she's been a mad songwriter. In Los Angeles at age 17, Stevie joined a four-member folk group, Changing Times. A year later in San Fransisco she met and sang a duet with Lindsey Buckingham, who later joined Fleetwood Mac with her. ""I went to a kind of church meeting that nobody really went to," she recalled. ""Lindsey walked in the room and sat down and started playing a song that I just happened to know every word and harmony to, California Dreaming. ""He was somewhat, I guess, ever-so-slightly impressed _ not to let me know it _ but he did sing another song with me." Two year later she and Lindsey joined a psychedilic rock band until 1972 when they recorded demos for an album in a small room in Lindsey's father's coffee plant. ""We did seven songs and it took us a year," Stevie said. ""They were really good and when they were finished we drove to LA where every record company in the world passed us." But in 1973 Polydor Records signed them. They produced an album buckingham -Nicks which was dropped soon after release. Stevie had to work as a waitress while Lindsey worked on the music in 1974, but in the same Mick Fleetwood asked them to join his band. ""We were on cloud nine because nothing had gone right for us in so long," Stevie said. ""We went into rehearsal a week later, went into recording four weeks later, finished the album in three months in three months and we were on the road." In 1975 the Fleetwood Mac album was released featuring the hit single Rhiannon by Stevie. In 1981, after several Fleetwood Mac world tours and four, Stevie released her first solo album Bella Donna. ""The album was my finding out if I could still do something on my own," she said. ""You start to doubt yourself after seven years with Fleetwood Mac. My life was completely, undeniably, wrapped around the band. You stop living in the real world."
|