Stevie Nicks Has Zero Nostalgia for the ’80s: ‘I Wouldn’t Want to Ever Go Back’
’80s nostalgia is back in clothing trends, film, and music, but Stevie Nicks wants no part of it. While she acknowledges that the time period was fun, she never would want to go back to it. She explained why the good memories aren’t enough to make her want to revisit the 1980s.
Stevie Nicks’ cocaine usage worsened in the ’80s
When Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac in 1975, she and the rest of her bandmates began frequently using cocaine. Eventually, the band started lining up to take the drug before getting onstage. She wishes that people in that time period knew that cocaine could be addictive.
“I wish people had told us the same thing about cocaine,” she told The Telegraph. “But in our day everybody was going, ‘It’s not addictive, it’s just recreational fun, blah blah blah.’”
Soon, though, Nicks found it hard to think of anything else.
“I used to carry a gram of cocaine in my boot at all times,” she said for Oprah’s Master Class. “And it was the first thing I thought of when I woke up in the morning and the last thing I thought of before I went to bed.”
When a plastic surgeon warned her that any more cocaine could trigger a brain aneurysm, Nicks decided to go to a rehabilitation center.
She would never want to return to the decade
Because of the rampant drug use, Nicks does not have any interest in returning to the ’80s. While ’80s nostalgia, sparked by shows like Stranger Things, is a part of mainstream culture, it doesn’t interest Nicks.
“I wouldn’t want to ever go back there,” she told The New York Times. “Yes, it was a lot of fun between 1975 and 1990 — until it wasn’t.”
Nicks has been sober since the 1990s and wishes she could tell her younger self that she can perform without drugs or alcohol.
“I walk onstage every night now and do a three-hour show with Fleetwood Mac, and I have a great time up there,” she explained. “I wish I had known that I actually had the energy to do this entire set totally sober and get just as excited. On one hand, that makes me feel great and on the other it makes me sad that I ever did my first line of coke.”
Stevie Nicks likes looking toward the future
Nicks prefers looking to the future instead of the past. Though she’s had an illustrious career, there’s much more that she wants to accomplish. She hopes to live and work well into her 90s, working on writing, painting, and a television show.
“A lot of this creativity and all the things I want to do when this part of my life starts to go away a little bit, then I’ll be sitting down at an old typewriter that I’ll dig out of my storage unit in Phoenix and I’ll start writing stories,” she told Rolling Stone. “I’ll start working on movies. There’s so many things I want to do that this is just a part of it all. That’s all I can tell you.”
How to get help: In the U.S., contact the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration helpline at 1-800-662-4357.
