SUZI QUATRO

Arriving into an early-70s landscape of clearly defined gender roles, where rocking was the exclusive preserve of the male of the species (all then caked in catastrophic glam-rock slap), and music’s pop-confined women were invariably reduced to simpering Stepford encouragements while trussed up in pinafore dresses of quite astonishing ugliness, Suzi Quatro was impossible to ignore. Bursting on to the UK scene, fresh from an invaluable apprenticeship on the Detroit garage circuit, Suzi dyed her hair pink and went on tour with Slade.

Having hooked up with Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, glam’s premier tunesmiths, she made her Top Of The Pops debut in ’73 poured into a figure-hugging leather cat-suit that stopped clocks. Her single Can The Can immediately rocketed to No.1 in the UK (similar chart-topping success followed across mainland Europe, and even in Australia, where Suzi’s star soared to unprecedented heights), and a run of perfect hits followed that set her legend in stone.

Today’s Suzi – a published poet, novelist, star of West End musicals, TV chat show sofas, Happy Days, Radio 2’s Rockin’ With Suzi Q and Wake Up Little Suzi, touring solo rock star (with new album No Control), and the Q fronting Q.S.P. (her glam supergroup with the Sweet’s Andy Scott and Slade’s Don Powell) – lives in an Elizabethan manor house in Essex. As we prepare to settle down for our chinwag, Suzi takes me on a detour into her Ray-Ban room, which is exactly what you’d expect: a room full of racked vintage sunglasses. Hundreds of them… And it’s very probably the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

Growing up in the Quatro family, did you have to be an extrovert to get noticed.

I didn’t want to be just another child. I had to find a place to be. I had to separate myself somehow. And I found I could hold an audience at a very young age. Because we were a big musical family, we used to do family shows, and when I was seven or