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Sat 8 November 2025 19:00, UK
Stevie Nicks has penned some of the most enduring rock ballads of her time.
Between her tenures as the resident witch of Fleetwood Mac and her prolific, enchanting solo career, her distinct eloquence personifies her personal struggles and the lives of those around her.
Eerily empathetic, Nicks’ writing and vocals capture the essence of her subjects and immortalise them, in all their splendour: the good, the bad and the ugly. She is no stranger to chronicling matters of the heart, baring her soul and exposing others’ in her lyricism.
One of her finest is the song ‘Leather and Lace’, written initially for country singer Waylon Jennings and his wife, Jessi Colter. She was a close friend of the couple and, observing their dynamic, wrote of a man who personified the toughness of leather in contrast with his partner’s gentility.
The song was intended to be included on Jennings and Colter’s duet album of the same name, but when Jennings opted for the song to be sung for his solo work, Nicks became attached to the sound of a duet. Eventually, including it on her debut solo album, 1981’s Bella Donna, she enlisted her former lover, The Eagles’ co-vocalist and drummer, Don Henley. The pair were only involved for about a year from 1977 to 1978, but stayed in each other’s lives in the years since. Nicks has since reflected on their time together fondly, though there was a time during the relationship when Henley made an impression on Nicks’ Fleetwood Mac bandmates that stuck.
As Nicks recounts per Stephen Davis’ Gold Dust Woman: The Biography of Stevie Nicks, she and Henley dated in the tumultuous aftermath of her on-again, off-again relationship with bandmate Lindsey Buckingham, a dynamic that would remain unsteady for years. “Here’s one thing that Don did that freaked out my band so much,” Nicks recounts.
Adding, “We’re all in Miami, they’re recording at the gorgeous pink house they’re renting. It’s right on the water, totally romantic. Anyway, he sends a limousine driver to our hotel with a box of presents for me, and they’re delivered right to the breakfast room where everyone’s eating. There’s a stereo, a bunch of cool records. There’s incredible flowers and fruits, a beautiful display.”
Slightly caught off-guard by the lavish display, Nicks anticipated a range of reactions from her bandmates. “The limousine driver is putting all this out onto the table and I’m going, ‘Oh please … please … this is not going to go down well,’” she said. “And they want to know who this is from. And Lindsey is not happy.”
Jealousy was not a foreign emotion for the members of Fleetwood Mac; rather, it seeped into their dynamic. In light of their romantic and professional crossovers, Nicks has since shared that it meant keeping her personal life somewhat concealed.
In 2013, she told The Guardian: “[Christine McVie and I] almost always had boyfriends, but they weren’t on the road because they’d just get stomped on. For me to have a guy out on the road with us, and have Lindsey glaring at him the whole time? Or for Christine to have a guy out and John just walk past and flip him off? No, we both learned very early on that we would never bring boyfriends on the road because it created arguments.”
Nicks and Henley, immortalised in their duet on ‘Leather and Lace’, remain a rock tale for the ages. Even in all of its humour, the pair endure as a fascinating footnote in Fleetwood Mac’s history.
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