At 75, Suzi Quatro is still shaking her ass – and, crucially, there is no silence. There is instead the same devil-gate drive that propelled 14-year-old Susan Kay Quatro to join all-female garage rock band the Pleasure Seekers with her sister before most of us had worked out how to tune a transistor radio. Precursor to The Runaways, to Pat Benatar, to Courtney Love. Bass slung low, chin set high. Suzi didn’t so much kick down the door of rock’s boys’ club as remove the hinges and pawn them for (17 bottles of) Schlitz.
Freedom, her third album in collaboration with her son LR Tuckey, knows all this. How could it not? This is a record about identity, legacy, survival. About Suzi being Suzi. ‘I remember walking along, dreams in my pockets/Singing my songs, in the shadows,’ she sings on Choose Yourself, a track that sidles in with a vaguely Sympathy For The Devil-ish shuffle before thinking better of it and remembering exactly whose record this is. ‘Life is too short, so choose yourself.’ Quite.
