Suzi Quatro: 'I'm kinda different'

Four decades after her first gig, Suzi Quatro still rocks. Or does she? Her new book tells of six-hour sex sessions and dressing-room brawls - but she lives in a moated manor house and worries about visitors dirtying her spotless carpets.

'You'll have to take your shoes off," says Suzi Quatro at the doorway to her Elizabethan manor house near Chelmsford in Essex. "Beige carpets." When she smiles - and I mean this nicely - Quatro uncannily resembles the Jane Fonda of moisturiser ads: pretty eyes, perfect teeth, marvellously imperious and impeccably put together. At 5ft nothing, she's head and shoulders beneath me, but there's no chance I'm getting past her except in my stocking feet.

Aren't beige carpets unsuitable for whatever rock chicks get up to in the privacy of their own homes? As I settle in the panelled living room while the self-styled first woman rock'n'roller makes coffee, I sniff. Mmm, beeswax. Mr Sheen has recently paid more than a flying visit. I look out of the window and notice a feature I had missed as the taxi crunched up the gravel driveway: my God, this place is moated!
Having just read her new autobiography, Unzipped, this domestic felicity is not what I expected. One paragraph begins: "Around this time I became a go-go dancer ..." Then there are the six-hour sex sessions. The time she got a wasted Iggy Pop thrown off stage for trying to muscle in on her mic. When she dragged her drunken guitarist husband Len Tuckey up to bed (again!) after a gig. The day she shot Alice Cooper between the eyes with an arrow (it had a rubber tip, but let's not spoil the story). The time Elvis invited her to Graceland and she declined. The night her father socked Chuck Berry on the jaw in her dressing room. The Australian tour when she played bass with a broken arm ...

This is the woman, for crying out loud, who in 1975 released a badass-sounding album called Your Mama Won't Like Me. Today, the living room carpet and rug are impeccably Hoovered.

When she returns with coffee, however, Quatro points out the bass guitar hanging on the wall. It's the 1957 Fender Precision that her dad gave her back in 1964. What was he thinking of? Girls (she was 14 at the time) didn't play electric basses, still less one with a really thick neck that made it particularly difficult to master. "I used to play that thing until my thumb was blistered and bleeding." But aren't bassists supposed to pluck with their fingers? "Yeah, I learned that later, when I was playing in my band Cradle. Now I am a fucking good bass player." And, as a result, she feels entitled to dispense praise and advice. In the book, she informs Gene Simmons of Kiss that the offer of remedial bass lessons still holds. Two weeks ago she spoke to Paul McCartney. "I told him his bass playing on his new album was the best he's ever done."

Were there any role models for a nascent woman bass player with ballsy vocals? "I had no female role models. I was inspired by Billie Holliday and I really liked Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las because she wore tight trousers and a waistcoat on top - she looked hot.

"I'm kinda different," she says, flexing her biceps. "See that?" Absolutely - amazing muscle tone for a 57-year-old, especially on the right arm. She has calluses, too, and weird knobbly bones sticking out of her wrist that she shows me like badges of honour. "For 43 years I've been doing this job and carrying my bass around the world. It's kept me fit if nothing else." It has also helped her sell 50m records.

She was born Susan Kay Quatro in Detroit to a Hungarian mother and an Italian dad. "Mom always said to me that they were 'Paprika and garlic - boy, oh boy, what a mix!'" Astoundingly, her surname wasn't made up by sideburned glam-rock image consultants in a Soho office in the early 70s, still less concocted by her long-time manager, the late Mickie Most. It was the name that the American authorities gave her grandfather when he arrived in New York, aged nine. His real surname - Quattrocchi - was deemed too difficult to pronounce.

Quatro's dad worked at General Motors by day and as the leader of a jazz band by night. He encouraged his five kids to play as many musical instruments as possible. Quatro played bass, piano, guitar and percussion. She and her sister, Patti, formed an all-girl band, the Pleasure Seekers, while they were in their early teens and achieved enough live success locally that Susan decided not to go back to school. Her dad supplied equipment and her mom provided food and drink for the band's rehearsals, as well as extra beds when needed.

One of the most poignant passages in the book is a conversation with her mother, who is dying of cancer in Easter 1992: "Susan," her mother says, "I have one big regret in my life ... I let you go too soon. You joined that damn rock'n'roll band at 14. You were just a baby. On the road with all those temptations."

And on the road, Quatro had her first big affair, with an A&R man from Mercury Records (called DC throughout). The first time they slept together was on her 18th birthday. He was married with kids. Her resulting pregnancy ended with an abortion. Tough stuff for a girl raised a Catholic. She writes: "When I get to those golden gates (hopefully), this is the sin I will pay for. Not a day goes by that I don't think about who that baby would be now. Children are a gift. I'm sorry, Father, for I have sinned ... please forgive me, Lord."

Why does she want to be forgiven? "My mom raised me as a Catholic to know right from wrong," says Quatro. "I should have known better. Because right is right and wrong is wrong. That's real simple, isn't it?"

It's also real complicated. The tentacles of guilt extend from mother to daughter and back again, wrapping round and reinforcing each other. The mother guilty that she let her daughter have too much freedom too early; the daughter guilty that she grew up too fast and that she had an abortion. How did her relationship with her mother affect the one with her daughter, Laura (Quatro has two children and one granddaughter)? "Well, she left home early too. I guess it was hard to live in the shadow of Suzi Quatro."

But that conversation with her fatally ill mother ends thus in the book: "So Mom, if you felt like that, why did you let me go?' 'Because, Susan, sometimes love is letting go.'" Quatro took that to be one of the most powerful things her mother said to her and it inspired a song on last year's album, Back to the Drive.

A few pages later, Quatro sees her mother wheeled into the operating theatre to have a tumour removed. On the trolley, her mother raised her hands to her cheeks and pinched them hard. "Mom had always been a bit vain, and by pinching her cheeks she had caused a nice natural blush to appear. I laughed out loud ... it was the last time I saw my mother alive."

"I think she was right," she says, welling up not for the first or last time during the interview, as she thinks about how her mother let her hit the road with a rock band at the age of 14. "You have to let go otherwise you suffocate your kids." But again there are tentacles of guilt: Quatro, after marrying and struggling to get pregnant, taking fertility drugs and having a miscarriage, toured the world with her kids in tow. "Len [her first husband] and I worked out some compromises about when they would be with me and when they would be at home. It wasn't ideal, I know. But I had to work. I was just another woman juggling work and family."

Quatro felt even more guilty when she left the US in 1971 for a London that had stopped swinging and was going glam. The most successful independent music producer of the 1960s, Mickie Most, saw her and her sister's band in Detroit in 1971. "He wanted me, not the band, and not Patti my sister, to come over to London where he would make me a star. And I think that broke her heart. The rejection!"

Was Most right? "I think so. I was the talented one. And if you're not chosen, as Patti wasn't, that's hard to take. Ever since, she's said to me that I got all the breaks and she got nothing."

Leaving Detroit also definitively broke her mother's heart. Did you feel guilty? "I felt guilty but I didn't regret it. In Detroit, for all that it is a great city for adrenaline-charged music [she was inspired by Motown and cites many rock acts from the city - MC5, Iggy Pop, Bob Seger, Ted Nugent, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels] there is also this attitude that you've gotta get out of this place. I had to get away, but when I did the mood in my parents' house was like someone had died."

Most put her up in a tiny hotel room in London's Earls Court. She had no money, no friends, no private bathroom, no band and a negligible grasp of English idioms (there's a particularly funny scene in which she is invited to her boyfriend's parents' home for lunch and she deploys her new vocabulary of bollocking, poxy and wanker to general horror).

Quatro gets cross when I suggest she was a manufactured pop star. "What you saw was what I was. The only image thing Mickie insisted on was the jumpsuit and that only happened because I wanted to wear a leather jacket like Elvis did. He said: 'Oh Suzi, you can't. It's been done.' I said: 'Not by a girl.' So he suggested a leather jumpsuit and I thought: 'Yeah! That would be practical. Easy to get out of.' I had no idea it would look sexy." Oh, come off it! "No, really! No idea. I had no idea that it would help so many boys through their puberty." Later, Quatro's mom told her daughter that her music was "very nice, but do you have to stand with your legs so far apart?"

Was she a feminist? "I was a me-ist. I believed in the right to do whatever I wanted to do regardless of gender. Still do."

At least she was a looker. Otherwise, British glam rock was, Bolan and Bowie excepted, an oxymoron. It featured men with stubble peeping through their foundation and beer guts swelling their ill-advisedly tight satin tops. Two years after arriving in the UK, she got a band together and supported Slade, all the while honing material that had mostly been written by Most's songwriting duo, Chinn and Chapman, the men responsible for her biggest hits: Devil Gate Drive, Can the Can and that delightful song about the male menopause, 48 Crash. Can the Can gave Quatro her first No1 aged 23, selling two and a half million copies around the world. These were the songs that defined her for a generation, not just here but around the world, where she still plays to packed houses. In Japan, there is a sake named after her.

During this heady time of early 70s celebrity, she started dating her future husband, the guitarist Len Tuckey. Their stormy 16-year marriage - the last six of which they were married in name only - is detailed unremittingly in the book. Why did they stay together so long? "We were essentially both stayers by temperament, which made it hard for us to give up on the marriage, especially when there were two children."

Eventually, though, she decided that Tuckey was holding her back. He never liked it when her career diversified away from rock'n'roll, especially when she was cast opposite Henry Winkler in the sitcom Happy Days. "I spent most of our years together treating him like a king, building up his male ego and taking a back seat in our personal lives ... Len told me years later that he was always aware that I was doing this, and loved me all the more for it. He also told me I had been wrong - he didn't need his ego building.

"He wanted me in a jumpsuit for the rest of my life," she muses. That, I suggest, is no way to live. "Yeah, I wanted to try other things. After he left, it was awful - the first Christmas with the kids here seemed so empty. I wrote a song, Empty Rooms, about it.

"But I had to find myself, not as somebody's wife. I'm more satisfied now. Divorce freed me to do other things - play in a musical [she starred in a West End production of Annie Get Your Gun] and write a musical [called Tallulah Who?, of which more later] and generally do things that took me out of my comfort zone."

Do she and Tuckey get on well now? "We do. We share a cosmic connection. I look at it this way: I've had two good marriages." Since 1993 she has been with Rainer Hass, a German concert promoter. The very big trainers in the hall next to my shoes may well be his, or those of some terrifying Norse god.

I am intrigued by her association with Willie Rushton. She collaborated with him - surely, against all odds - on a musical about the allegedly nymphomaniac bisexual Hollywood actor Tallulah Bankhead, which had a brief run in Hornchurch, Essex, but never made it to the West End. How did the leather-clad Motown rocker get on with the late, plummy-voiced and bearded cartoonist, satirist and co-founder of Private Eye? "I loved the guy. I know I'm quick-witted, but this guy would always come back with something wittier. I'd be basking on the laurels of a joke I'd told, and he would always wait until the perfect moment and come back with a better one-liner."

At this very moment, she's visited by Rushton's spirit. "Hey! I just felt him. Hi Willie!" she says. That or it's the Mr Sheen, for whom Rushton once did the voiceover in a TV ad.

Quatro is in touch with the spirit world, including the ghosts of two drowned children who once lived at her Essex home. She filled in the pond they died in, telling her children not to go to that part of the garden because the devil lived there. During the interview she is also visited - and why not? - by the spirit of Most.

What next, though? "I think I've got at least two more albums in me, and they would be worth doing, because I think I'm better than ever. I would like to do a movie - it's the only medium I haven't worked in." One medium she has mastered is radio - her Rockin' with Suzi Q show is one of Radio 2's most popular shows. This month she leaves for her 23rd tour of Australia; she hopes to carry on touring for several more years.

Interview over, Quatro walks me back to my shoes, past walls of framed gold and platinum discs. When will she stop rocking? "When I go on stage, turn my back to the audience and shake my ass and there's silence - then I stop".

· Unzipped by Suzi Quatro is published by Hodder & Stoughton, price £18.99. To order a copy for £17.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.

· Suzi Quatro will be talking about her autobiography at Borders, 120 Charing Cross Road, London WC2, on Thursday August 9 at 7pm.

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