Stevie Nicks Was Furious Mick Fleetwood Was Writing About Her in His Memoir

In the late 1980s, Mick Fleetwood was going through his second bankruptcy and decided to write a book to make a little money. He teamed up with music biographer Stephen Davis to write Fleetwood: My Life and Adventures in Fleetwood Mac. The rest of Fleetwood Mac was wary about having a writer hanging around, but Stevie Nicks was particularly resistant. She worried about the world learning of their affair. 

Stevie Nicks and Mick Fleetwood had an affair 

Several years after Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac, she began an affair with Mick Fleetwood. At the time, he was married to Jenny Boyd. 

“Eventually I fell in love with her and it was chaotic, it was on the road and it was a crazy love affair that went on longer than any of us really remember — probably several years by the end of it,” Fleetwood wrote in his book Play On.

Nicks considers him one of her great loves, but she thinks the relationship was doomed from the start.

“Mick and I would never have had an affair had we not had a party and all been completely drunk and messed up and coked out, and, you know, ended up being the last two people at the party,” she said for Oprah’s Master Class. “So guess what? It’s not hard to figure out what happened — and what happened wasn’t a good thing. It was doomed. It was a doomed thing, caused a lot of pain for everybody, led to nothing.”

A writer wanted to include information about their relationship Mick Fleetwood’s book

Several years after the dramatic end of their affair, Davis teamed up with Fleetwood to write the autobiography. 

“I don’t think anyone in the band welcomed it,” Fleetwood said, per the book Gold Dust Woman: The Biography of Stevie Nicks, also by Davis.

Eventually, though, John and Christine McVie, as well as the band’s various producers and road managers, opened up to Davis. In these conversations, someone mentioned that Nicks and Fleetwood had an affair. When Davis said they had to include this information in the book, Fleetwood was nervous.

“She’ll kill me, or leave the band,” Fleetwood said. 

Eventually, Fleetwood broke the news to Nicks that Davis knew about the affair. She was not happy.

“Stevie was huffing and puffing for a while,” Fleetwood said. “And I said, ‘Stevie, you’ve got to trust me. I’m working with you. I’d have to be out of my mind to scuttle anyone that was close to me, in a very distasteful way.’”

She was upset enough to move out of the hotel where the band was staying, but she neither killed Fleetwood nor quit the band. 

Stevie Nicks eventually approached Davis

Davis didn’t ask Nicks for an interview because he knew she wouldn’t agree to speak with him. She would greet him with a polite smile, but they never exchanged words. Eventually, though, she approached him after a concert in London.

“Everything they say about me is true,” she said.

Several decades later, Davis would write an unauthorized biography about Nicks.