Stevie Nicks Advises Katy Perry on Her Pop Rivals
Stevie Nicks offered Katy Perry a choice nugget of rock star wisdom during a lengthy conversation back in September: “You don’t have any rivals.” In a new interview with ABC Radio, Nicks opened up about meeting Perry in London while she was in town with Fleetwood Mac and Perry was set to play this year’s iTunes festival.
“I thought it was going to be a 20-minute ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ thing – and we sat for three hours until, like, three in the morning,” Nicks said. “And we pretty much talked about everything.”
See Which Artist Katy Perry Found Herself in a Surprise Feud with This Year
Specifically, Nicks recalled, Perry asked who her rivals were around the time she began her solo career with the release release of 1981’s Bella Donna. “And I was, like, speechless,” Nicks said. “I was, like, ‘I didn’t have any rivals.’ And she said, ‘Really? None?’ I said, ‘No . . . the girls in Heart [were] friends. Pat Benatar [was a] friend.”
While Perry didn’t single out any of her peer performers as rivals, she told Nicks that fans on the Internet tend to pit female singers against each other even if there’s no basis for such claims.
“I said to her, ‘Katy, let me tell you something. You don’t have any rivals. So forget that. Never say that word again,'” Nicks continued. “‘You don’t have rivals. All of those girls? Friends. You’ll probably work with all of them at some point. Friends.'”
Nicks’ advice certainly seems to have resonated with Perry, who dismissed any sort of rivalry between herself and Lady Gaga during an interview with Entertainment Weekly about a month after she spoke with Nicks. At the time, Perry’s “Roar” and Gaga’s “Applause” had battled it out on the charts ahead of the fall release dates of their latest albums, Prism and Artpop – and, not to mention, an episode of Glee built around their music – but Perry extinguished any notion of contention.
“Gaga and I like to publicly dismiss it because it’s not healthy,” she said. “You want to feel music. You want it to resonate and relate to you. You can’t look at it like a competition because you ruin the reason why you love music. But I think that sometimes our fan groups are so big and strong, they use it as ammunition.”