SUZI Quatro is marking the 60th year of her reign as “the Queen of Rock’n’Roll” by embarking on a five-date autumn tour.
On November 15, Suzi, 74, plays York Barbican, her only Yorkshire show and the first on the tour to sell out.
“It’s my 60th year in the business, and it still feels like I’ve just started,” she said, when announcing the tour. “Devil Gate Drive, number one, 51 years ago. Are you ready now? Let’s do it one more time for Suzi.”
Sixty years? Yes, Michigan-born singer, songwriter, bass guitarist, actress, poet novelist and radio presenter Suzi started out in bands in Detroit, playing concerts and teen clubs with Ted Nugent, Bob Seger and others, having first played bongos with her father Art’s jazz trio when she was eight.
“I started a band at 14,” she recalls. “I was in ninth or tenth grade. We worked the whole summer, going to New York.
“I talked to my dad about not going back to high school. He was on the phone, saying ‘is there anything I can say to change your mind?’.He quietly put the phone down and that was clever. It gave me time to pause and think about it. I made my choice: I would be in music for life.”
In May 1964, her sister Patti formed the group The Pleasure Seekers with Suzi on bass, leading to their first single coming out on the Hideout Records label in 1965, when Suzi was 15, Patti, 17.
Further singles Never Thought You’d Leave Me and Light Of Love followed in 1966 and 1968 respectively.
In 1971, Suzi flew to England to work with songwriting hit factory Chinn and Chapman after producer Mickie Most saw her perform live at the East Town Ballroom when in Detroit to record Jeff Beck at Motown.
Suzi expected to be in the UK for three months, but stayed. “I go back to America a lot but I haven’t lived there since 1971,” she says. The story goes that she did not take even a coat with her when first leaving.
Significantly, Suzi has used an iconic image from her first photographic session with Gered Mankowitz in 1973 to promote her 60th anniversary tour. The definitive one in the leather jump suit, as memorable as Mankowitz’s portrait of a teenage Kate Bush.
“I’ll try to make a long story short,” says Suzi, explaining how that look was born. “We’d recorded Can The Can and Mike [Chapman] said, it’s going to be number one’. I said, ‘we need to discuss the image’. I said ‘leather’; he said ‘No’, but I got my way.
“Then he suggested a jump suit, and he was right. People thought of it as very sexy, though I didn’t realise that at the time.”
At the photo session, Mankowitz said, ‘OK, give me that Suzi Quatro look’. “I gave ‘the look’, and that’s when the Suzi Quatro look was created. It was new,” she says.
“I have finally, at the age of 74, accepted it. I didn’t know it at the time. I was just being who I am. I didn’t think it was unusual. I’d played bass since I was 14 but Mike kept saying I was unique.”
Chapman’s prediction was right: Suzi topped the UK charts in 1973 with the 2.5 million-selling Can The Can and had further hits that year with 48 Crash, Daytona Demon and the chart-topping Devil Gate Drive.
More UK hits would follow with Too Big, The Wild One, Your Mamma Won’t Like Me, Tear Me Apart, If You Can’t Give Me Love, She’s In Love With You and Mama’s Boy, her last UK Top 40 entry in 1979, peaking at number 34.
Her native United States was slower to catch on. “There were a lot of things happening on the other side of the world that America didn’t get then, but I did start touring in America in ’74. Happy Days was the thing that catapulted me to success there: the number one TV show. Suddenly they discovered me.”
Suzi made her first of seven appearances on Happy Days, playing Leather Tuscadero, the little sister of Fonzie’s ex-girlfriend Pinky, in 1977. “I then had a number four hit in the American Billboard Hot 100 with Stumblin’ In [her duet with Smokie’s Chris Norman] in 1978,” she says. Ironically, the song reached no higher than number 41 in the UK.
She may live between her Essex manor house and her husband’s German house, but America continues to play its part in her career. “I was in Detroit in September recording with Alice Cooper for my next album. I haven’t got a title yet but it’s got 14 songs, writing with Alice, and I’ve covered MC5’s Kick Out The Jams out of respect,” says Suzi.
“The next night Alice asked me to do School’s Out with him, on bass, which I’d never done before and had to learn real quick to play to 12,500 people at Pine Knob [Music Theatre], just outside Detroit. I was just grinning from ear to ear.
“I’ve known him since I was 15 years old. I did the Welcome To My Nightmare Tour with him in 1975 in America, and it really was a nightmare tour, though I loved it! It was a long tour, doing a couple of flights a day sometimes.”
As well as selling more than 55 million records – she featured in the UK charts for 101 weeks between 1973 and 1980 – Suzi has branched out into acting, writing novels and poetry, broadcasting, making her documentary film Suzi Q and presenting her autobiography Unzipped live in a one-woman show.
Suzi has been a ground-breaker. “Chrissie Hynde, Debbie Harry, Joan Jett, they all said , ‘none of us would have done what we did without Suzi Quatro’, which made me cry, as I didn’t realise what I’d done, but I can now accept it,” she says.
“It had to fall on someone like me because I didn’t know I was doing it, and if I had known, it would have looked manufactured. That’s why I’m still here because whatever you see, it’s real.
“It’s funny. When I’ve done big shows with other acts, you end up talking in the bar and usually the conversation gets round to me and how different I was. ‘But did it look like I was I was just being me,’ I asked, and they said ‘yes’.”
She describes herself as “really stubborn”, giving the example of make-up artists asking if they could make her “bushy” eyebrows smaller. “I said, ‘you can enhance them, but don’t change them, this is me’.”
In 2019, Liam Firmager directed the documentary Suzi Q. “I said yes as I’d always wanted to do one. When we met, he said, ‘I’m not a fan, but I like your music’. I said ‘OK, but why do you want to do a documentary about me?’,” Suzi recalls.
Firmager said he had been fascinated by her. ”I knew that as a ‘non-fan’, you’re going to get the truth, even the ‘cringe’ moments, and he did stick to that,” says Suzi.
“It’s great documentary. There’s nothing I didn’t know, but it brought it to the fore that I’m very family orientated, very soft inside. There’s little Suzi from Detroit and there’s Suzi Quatro, who strides out on stage.”
Suzi says she has a sharp tongue when she is pushed. “Don’t mess with me. I’m a deep thinker.”
How does she feel she has been treated in a male-dominated industry that has had its stories of women being exploited? “Absolutely fine, because I demand that,” says Suzi. “It’s all about my attitude. I’m from Detroit. I’ve got a quick mind. I’ve got a quick mouth. If you touch me inappropriately, you will have a soprano voice.
“My father brought me up to have balls and my mother’s teaching, as a strict Catholic girl, gave me my morals. There’s an invisible line [not to be crossed], but I can play the softer side too.”
What is her advice to women in the business? “You can be tough but don’t lose your femininity,” she says.
Next Friday’s show will be a two-hour set with an interval. “I’ll be taking you on a journey through my life, with a song from every album, two from the album I did with K T Tunstall [2023’s Face To Face], an eight-minute bass solo – it’s not boring! – and some clips on the screen.”
The Wild One will rock on, she vows. “I will retire when I go on stage, shake my ass, and there is silence,” she says. “I’ve always been the same and I will always be the same. I’ve never coasted and I never will.”
Looking forward to playing to a sold-out York audience, Suzi says: “My overall feeling is that I am grateful and I am so happy that people want to see me. I take it very seriously.”
Performing in York brings back memories of working with Berwick Kaler, the legendary, newly retired pantomime dame. “We worked together for about a year in Annie Get Your Gun. We’ve been friends ever since. He was the best man at my second wedding [to German concert promoter Rainer Haas]. He’s my best friend.
“He once asked me to write a song for the panto – I’ve been to his shows many times – and wrote The Queen Mother Of Rock’n’Roll for him.”
Suzi Quatro, Rockin’ On, York Barbican, November 15, doors 7pm, SOLD OUT. Box office for returns only: ticketmaster.co.uk/event/360060579D80156E
