Stevie Nicks saved something special for the encore of her huge show last night (July 12) at London’s Hyde Park, as she welcomed longtime friend and occasional onstage collaborator Harry Styles for performances of her 1981 Tom Petty duet “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” and the Fleetwood Mac classic “Landslide.”
As Nicks told the 60,000-strong audience, the occasion was a way to celebrate what would have been the 81st birthday of her Fleetwood Mac bandmate Christine McVie, who died of cancer in 2022.
“It’s a lot to ask someone to sing a heavy song about a best friend that died so suddenly and so sadly,” she said. “So, what I want to say to you is that Christine was Harry’s girl, she was my girl, she was your girl. She was from here. and she loved all of us, and today was her birthday.”
For Styles, who was wearing a songbird pin in an apparent reference to the McVie-penned song of the same name from Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours album, it was his first on-stage appearance since wrapping his Love On Tour outing almost a year ago. He and Nicks have previously teamed up several times at one another’s shows, and he inducted Nicks into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist in 2019. Both are managed by industry legend Irving Azoff’s company Full Stop.
The Hyde Park setting was doubly appropriate tonight, as Nicks and Petty performed “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” together for the final time in July 2017 at the same venue. Petty died less than three months later of an accidental drug overdose.
Nicks has three more shows in Europe through the end of the month, and in late September will make up concerts in Grand Rapids, Mi., and Hershey, Pa., that were originally postponed in June due to illness.