You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.
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.
The autobiographical thread runs thick and fast. ‘She don’t take nothing she can’t give… she’s one of a kind,’ she sneers on Little Miss Lovely. The title of Nobody Held My Hand spells it out in capital letters. There is no coyness, no apologies. Why should there be? When you’ve spent five decades being told you’re too loud, too short, too female, you earn the right to narrate your own myth.
Musically, she rocks. Of course she does. Hanging Over Me swaggers in with a faint whiff of 1974, while Here’s Ya Boots barrels along with the kind of no-nonsense chug that could teach the Gallagher brothers a thing or two about intent. Going Down and Can’t Let It Go are boxcar-door blues stompers that wouldn’t sound out of place on a lost Dr John session.
There’s a Detroit summit meeting, too: a cover of the MC5’s Kick Out The Jams with fellow native son Alice Cooper. It’s fun, maybe a shade too polite – you can hear every word – but there’s a certain joy in hearing two lifers trading lines from a song that once would’ve terrified Middle America. If they’d heard it.
Freedom isn’t up there with Suzi’s early-70s singles, of course not. What this album offers instead is something arguably rarer: continuity. The same restless spirit, decades on. The same refusal to dim the lights. She has said: “I will retire when I go on stage, shake my ass, and there is silence.” On the evidence of this record, she’s got a while to go yet.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
