Stevie Nicks Said Mick Fleetwood Smelled Terrible on Tour: ‘You Wouldn’t Want to Be Within 50 Feet’
Stevie Nicks draws praise for her custom-made tour uniforms, but she’s not the only member of Fleetwood Mac who had a set uniform. Drummer and co-founder Mick Fleetwood not only required custom clothing due to his height, but he also found a unique tour look that he has stuck with for years. While he appreciates the way it pushed the envelope for men’s fashion, Nicks said the costume accumulated a powerful stench.
Mick Fleetwood had a custom-made tour uniform
When Fleetwood began seeking out clothes to wear onstage, he said he had a difficult time.
“What can a broke, 18-year-old, 6ft 6in beanpole find to wear in a ready-made shop?” he wrote for Express. “Answer? Absolutely nothing.”
This meant he had to be creative with his stage looks.
“I really wanted a costume that stood out when I played gigs. It had to be original, not too hot to play in, and cheap,” he wrote. “I still had my school gym kit and fencing gear. I wore the knickerbockers, tore the sleeves off the jacket to make a waistcoat, put my gym shoes on. That was the start of my stage costume, captured on the iconic Rumours cover, and I’ve worn some version of that ever since.”
Stevie Nicks said he smelled terrible while on tour
Nicks said that Fleetwood’s stage costumes made him look like he was “going to the Renaissance Faire.” While the looks fit with her ethereal stage style, she said that his clothing did not always smell good.
“Mick’s got his velvet knickers and the same tights and the same shoes he’s worn for a hundred years,” she told Creem in 1982, per The Nicks Fix. “You wouldn’t want to be within 50 feet of him in that outfit, especially the next night when he’s put it back on after it’s been in the bus all day and never dried!”
Still, she posed close to him as he wore the outfit on the iconic cover of the Rumours album.
Stevie Nicks and Mick Fleetwood had an affair
Nicks also had an affair with Fleetwood. At the time, he had a wife and children, and she was in a relationship.
“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 believes that 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.”
Despite this, the love between them has never fully faded. They remain friends, and Nicks says that Fleetwood was one of the great loves of her life.
“In terms of our relationship with each other, we still have the same connection to this day; we just love each other in the true sense of the word, which transcends passion,” Fleetwood wrote. “I will take my love for her as a person to my grave, because Stevie Nicks is the kind of woman who inspires that devotion.”
