Stevie Nicks has said that she once advised Katy Perry to end her “ridiculous” feud with Taylor Swift. And Perry did eventually heed that advice. About six years later. Perry apparently met the Fleetwood Mac singer at a hotel in London around a decade ago, and, Nicks says, with her fallout with Swift still very new at the time it was clearly preying on her mind.
In a new interview with The New Yorker, Nicks recalls the encounter, saying: “People get knocked down because of their fame, and the internet, and all the things that I hate. You keep yourself above that, hopefully”.
“I always think of Katy Perry and I having this long talk at the Corinthia Hotel in London once, and she said to me - this is probably ten years ago - she said, ‘So, Stevie, who are your rivals?’ And I said, ‘I don’t have rivals’. And her big blue eyes got bigger and bluer. And I said, ‘No, Katy, I don’t, and neither do you. You are Katy Perry, you’re who you are, you do what you do and you’re great at it. I’m Stevie Nicks, I do what I do and I’m great at it. We don’t have rivals. That’s just ridiculous’”.
Perry wasn’t convince, Nicks adds: “She said, ‘Well, there’s, like, the Taylor Swift army and there’s, like, the Katy army and there’s like...’ And I was, like, ‘That’s just bullshit. You have to just walk away from that. Don’t carry that around in your mind because then they’re winning this game”.
Anyway, of course, the whole thing blew up in 2014 when Swift revealed in a Rolling Stone interview that her song ‘Bad Blood’ was about an unnamed female pop star who had “basically tried to sabotage an entire arena tour”.
Despite not naming Perry, it wasn’t particularly difficult to work out who she was talking about, and so the battle continued until 2018 when Perry sent Swift a literal olive branch.