The psychiatrist, she says, put her on a tranquilliser called Klonopin - 'he said to calm my nerves a little. I didn't want to do it. He said, "You're nervous." And I was nervous; I'm a nervous person. So I finally just said, all right.' Klonopin, Nicks says, is a member of the Valium family. 'It's a tranquilliser, right? And you think, what does tranquilliser mean? It tranquillises you!' Particularly when, as Nicks claims, the drug is radically oversubscribed. After a year, she realised she was beginning to put on weight and lose interest in her work. 'And the saddest thing, I did an interview in England, and somebody had sent the article to my mother and she read it to me over the phone. And it said, you could see Stevie Nicks in there, but she was very sad and very quiet and she was just a shadow of her former self. And that article broke my heart.
'And after that, it got worse, because he kept upping my dose. 1988 into '89, I'm now not even writing songs any more. I was living in a beautiful rented house in the Valley, and just pretty much staying home. Ordering take-in and watching TV. And I've gained 30lb and I'm 5ft 1in tall, and I'm so miserable. And I started to notice that I was shaking all the time, and I'm noticing that everybody else is noticing it too. And then I'm starting to think, do I have some kind of neurological disease and I'm dying?'
So 1993 comes rolling round, and Stevie Nicks is finally convinced that the protracted high dosage of Klonopin might be killing her. So she does exactly what you or I might do. She instructs her personal assistant, Glenn, to take her daily dose - just to see what effect it has.
'I said, it won't kill you, because it hasn't killed me, but I just want to see what you think. Because Glenn was terribly worried about me - everybody was. So I was taking two in the morning, two in the afternoon and two more at night. At that point if I could find a Percoset, because I'm so miserable, I'd take that, or I'd take a Fiorocet - anything.
'So Glenn proceeds to take all my medicine. He was setting up a stereo in the living-room. Well, after half an hour he was just sitting there. And he said, "I can't fix the stereo and I don't think I can drive home." And I said, "Well, good - just stay there, because I'm studying you." And he was almost hallucinating. It was bad. And I called up my psychiatrist, and I said, "I gave Glenn every-thing you've prescribed for me." And the first words out of his mouth were, "Are you trying to kill him?" And the next words out of my mouth were, "Are you trying to kill me?" '
Nicks admitted herself to the Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in Venice Beach. It took her 47 days to detox. 'Dallas Taylor, the drummer for Crosby, Stills and Nash, was there the whole time. I nearly died. I moulted. My hair turned grey. My skin started to completely peel off. I was in terrible pain.' She shivers at the memory. 'I think it's very good to talk about this to get the message out into the world about addiction to this particular drug. That was the worst period of my life. They stole my forties. It was eight completely wasted years of my life.' Here's the irony, she says: the 'powers that be' had sent her to the psychiatrist in order to keep her working, but the 'treatment' he gave her made work almost impossible. 'It's very Shakespearean. It's very much a tragedy.'
But what happened to Glenn?
Nicks throws back her hair. 'Glenn was OK, because it was just for one day.'
Stevie Nicks lives in a large, extremely beautiful house built in the 1930s in the American colonial style, situated in the hills behind Santa Monica. She is in a meeting when I arrive, and I am shown into the library - a wood-panelled room, the walls hung with pre-Raphaelite miniatures and tapestries. On the bookshelves are volumes about the Kabbalah, Madame Blavatsky and Arthurian legend; a copy of The Johns Hopkins Consumer Guide to Drugs sits beside Luxury Hotels of the World.
At length Nicks appears and leads me down the hall, past a store room filled with travel wardrobes - her stage costumes - and into a spacious sitting-room. There is a velvet chaise-longue draped in silk, Persian carpets, carved tables. Home recording equipment, keyboards and a couple of guitars stand in one corner. Nicks moves among the collection of colourful Art Deco lamps that stand on every surface, carefully orchestrating the ambient light. 'That's the famous blue lamp that's been in lots of photos; that's a Tiffany,' she says. 'And so is that one. I don't know about the others.'
Even though she is now 59, as Stevie Nicks puts it, 'I still look very much like me', which is to say unreconstructed fantasy flower-child: kohl-eyed, bee-stung lips, wrapped in a muted symphony of rustling satin and chiffon, legs encased in pointed heel, knee-high black suede boots. In Fleetwood Mac's heyday in the late 1970s Nicks was 'the mystical one' whose ethereal appearance, love of gothic romances and songs about witches, gypsies and dreams lent her a certain evanescently wistful air. 'Sweet, fragile, airy-fairy,' she says with a laugh. 'That was this person on drugs.'
Nobody survives in the rock'n'roll business for 30 years by being 'airy-fairy', however, and there is a palpable vein of toughness under the cordial, disarmingly confessional manner. Nicks is delightful company; but you wouldn't want to cross her.
Nicks was married once, fleetingly, but she has no children and no permanent partner. She shares the house with her god-daughter, who is in her early twenties, and who lives in the guesthouse above the garage. Nicks has lived here for two years, and it was a mistake, she says, from day one. So she is moving to a penthouse apartment on the beach and the house is on the market.
'I saw it, and there was this big family living here that obviously loved it. So there was a vibe here. And something in me thought, maybe I can have that. I was not here three days before I thought, what the hell do I here? I was too shallow and stupid to realise that it wasn't the house I'd fallen in love with but the mom and the dad and the four kids, and the smells of the cooking.' She sighs. It is, she reflects, a house 'for adults. And even though I'm pushing 60 I don't feel that I'm that old yet.'
Does she see beauty when she looks in the mirror? 'Sometimes I still think that I'm looking OK. And other times I look at myself and I go, "Oh, my God, you're so old." '
She pulls a face and laughs. 'I wrote a song once called The Prettiest Girl in the World, and that was a long time ago. But when you've been the prettiest girl in the world - and I don't mean the most beautiful girl; I just mean a really pretty girl, a really talented girl, a girl who writes really good songs. When you've been all that and you're a lot older, it is hard. You see the lines' - Nicks runs her fingers along the thickening curve of her jaw - 'and you start to see this happening; and even though I'm thinner than I was a long time ago, you see your body changing and you go, well maybe this is not age-appropriate and I shouldn't wear the chiffon scarf any more; and then you go, but if I'm going to change the whole thing it's not me any more.' She shakes the thought to one side. 'I'm just terribly excited to get into my rock'n'roll penthouse and out of here. I feel old here.'
I don't know if Stevie Nicks's passport describes her as 'rock'n'roll star', but it is the term she uses to describe herself, completely unselfconsciously, as if rock'n'roll star were a vocation, or a destiny embodied in the genes.
Nicks's father was a business executive - a vice-president of Greyhound Buses, the president of a food company - whose work took the family on a journey across the south-west of America - Arizona, Los Angeles, New Mexico, El Paso, Salt Lake City, San Francisco. The elder of two child-ren (she has a brother, Christopher), as a young girl she was fixated on two things - dressing up and singing. Her teenage heroines were Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin. In high school she met another aspiring rock star, Lindsey Buckingham. They became a couple and moved to Los Angeles, performing together as a duo, both singing and songwriting. In 1975 they recorded an album, Buckingham Nicks, that led to them being invited to join Fleetwood Mac. A British blues band that had transplanted to America, Mac had already enjoyed a distinctly chequered history with one founding member, Peter Green, succumbing to LSD psychosis, and another, Jeremy Spencer, leaving to join the religious cult the Children of God.
The addition of Buckingham and Nicks brought a pop sensibility and a clutch of exhilarating songs that rejuvenated the group. An eponymous album went to number one in America; the follow-up, Rumours, released in 1977, became a phenomenon. By then, Nicks and Buckingham were breaking up after five years together. The seven-year marriage of the band's bass player, John McVie, and pianist, Christine McVie, was coming to an end. The drummer, Mick Fleetwood, was in the midst of divorce proceedings with his wife. Rumours fastidiously chronicled this tangled and incestuous emotional mess - made more tangled still when Fleetwood and Nicks began a surreptitious affair that ended when Fleetwood switched his affections to Nicks's friend Sara Recor - the inspiration for Nicks's song Sara. Nicks, meanwhile, embarked on an affair with Don Henley of the Eagles.
Rumours went on to sell more than 30 million copies around the world (it remains one of the biggest-selling records of all time), launching the group into the realm of imperious self-indulgence more commonly associated with dictators of small African countries. During the group's Tusk tour in 1979, Nicks insisted that each hotel room she stayed in should be painted pink and equipped with a white piano. I remember being present at a photo-shoot for the group in LA the following year. A certain tension permeated the air, and at one point a crisis loomed when one of the group discovered that the champagne that had been provided was not of the preferred vintage; a minion was dispatched to fetch more. The shoot took less than two hours. But enough gourmet food had been provided to feed Burkina Faso. 'And nobody ate a bite, right?' Nicks says with a knowing shake of her head. 'If we'd just counted the meals that we ordered and were never eaten it was probably a million.'
Between the cocaine and the banquets, the sports cars and the Hollywood mansions, Mick Fleetwood went bankrupt - twice. 'Because Mick didn't write songs, so he didn't make the publishing money that Christine and Stevie and Lindsey did,' Nicks says. 'But Mick spent just as much money. Millions. So if Mick Fleetwood could go back right now and change that, he would.'
Nicks and Buckingham were more careful, retaining an independent business management firm to handle their affairs when they joined Fleetwood Mac. 'So even though we spent a lot of money, a lot of it was invested.'
What was it invested in?
Fame, and the privilege and separation it brings, has a way of incapacitating people, insulating them not only from other people, but from the practicalities of life. When I Аск Nicks for her zip code she admits she has no idea what it is. Or her house number, or her telephone number. Her driving licence ran out in 1978, and she has never renewed it. 'My life is very cloistered really,' she says. 'Because I don't go anywhere by myself, you know what I mean? I'm very, very famous, and I walk in somewhere and people are, like, "Oh, my God!" And I love it, and it's sweet and I sign autographs. But on the other side of that, my assistant and I get in the car and go to the mall; I'm certainly not going to give up shopping. But I would seldom get in a car all by myself.'
When she and Buckingham were living together and struggling, before Fleetwood Mac, Nicks did everything: she kept house, worked as a waitress and a cleaner. 'I made the money that supported Lindsey and me, and I paid for the apartment and the car and everything. And I loved that.'
A few years ago she went to see a psychologist - she was having a 'horrible' menopause, she says, and wanted to talk to an older woman about it - 'and she said to me that in a way the saddest day of your life was the day you joined Fleetwood Mac, because that was when you ceased to be caretaker and became somebody that everybody else took care of. And she was absolutely spot on. Because I'm very much… if my family's coming here for Christmas, I'm the one who's making the house ready and fixing the beds. I don't have people around to do that kind of stuff for me.
'The people that I have gone out with will tell you that I'm a great girlfriend. I want to make sure that you have the llama hot-water bottle, and the perfect cashmere blanket and the exact perfect pillow. I know about all that stuff.'
Nicks recorded her first solo album, Bella Donna, in 1981, and has released eight albums in the years since. Her fortunes dipped radically in the mid-1990s, when she was struggling with her addiction to Klonopin, but her last studio album, Trouble in Shangri-La, released in 2001, went multi-platinum, giving her her greatest success in two decades. At the same time she continued to play a part in the ongoing soap opera that has been Fleetwood Mac. She formally left the band in 1993, but rejoined in 1997. The last album by the band, Say You Will, was recorded in 2003, but Nicks shows scant enthusiasm for the prospect of another reunion. Christine McVie retired from touring in 1998, and Nicks says she has no interest in working with the group unless McVie returns. 'I don't like it as the boys' club. We could make millions and millions of dollars touring again. But I just don't know if I want to go again without Chris.'
This dedication to her career has not been without cost. Nicks 'pretty much sold my soul to the devil a long time ago', as she puts it, so that 'I could follow this dream fully and completely, and not be wrapped up in children and husbands and boyfriends and all of that. I chose not to have child-ren.' Her brief marriage in 1983, she says, 'doesn't count'. It was an odd episode. That year her best friend Robin died of leukaemia three days after giving birth to a son, Matthew. A grieving Nicks convinced the bereaved husband, Kim Anderson, that they should marry and raise the child together. 'Completely crazy.' She shrugs. 'We were all in such insane grief, just completely deranged. The families were just outraged at what we were doing; in a lot of people's eyes it was very blasphemous. But I didn't care. All I cared about was that little boy, Matthew.' The marriage lasted only a few weeks, before Nicks made the decision to bring it to an end. 'I said, "You have to t...
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