Q THE MUSIC

Kicking down boundaries like there was no tomorrow, Suzi Quatro owned the Seventies, with 50 million album sales, a primetime TV slot, and bass mastery that put most of her contemporaries to shame. But the decade wasn’t all about ‘Can The Can’, she warns: there was a whole lot of ‘Can’t’, too...

- Suzi Quatro

I don’t know about you, but if I make it to 70 years old, I plan to do a whole lot of sitting around and doing as little as possible. Of course, this is a shamefully lazy attitude, as evidenced by the phenomenal work ethic of our cover star Suzi Quatro, four months into her eighth decade as you read this—and busier than ever. In 2020 she’s recorded an internet bass series, worked on a forthcoming biopic, promoted last year’s Suzi Q documentary, and written not one but two albums’ worth of songs.

“This is what I’ve done my whole life,” she tells BP. “When things get tough, I create. When my first marriage was going bad, I wrote a musical. Creativity, that’s what saves me every time, so I’ve been non-stop this year. I had something like 85 or 90 shows booked, even busier than last year, and of course they’re all postponed. As soon as we found ourselves in this situation, I built a studio out the back, and I said to my son ‘The option has been taken up by [record company] SPV for the next album, so now that we can’t play live, we’re going to write this album’ and that’s what we did. We wrote songs every single day, and now we’re recording it. It’s going fantastic. I’ve also released a coffee table-sized lyric book called Through My Words, and I’m working on two more books.”

Suzi Q, last year’s documentary about Quatro’s life and career, offered an insight into her character that was refreshingly free of any sycophancy, unlike so many similar productions.

“You should watch it,” she advises.