Little Susie from Detroit is sitting on top of the world. Or rather, Little Susie is sitting on top of the London skyline in the high altitude office of her publisher on Euston Road. Drawn here to talk about her memoirs, she slinks effortlessly in and out of her dual persona: one minute the introspective, vulnerable individual she has always been; the next, the vintage rock chick Suzi Quatro whose "total leather" look on stage fitted so tightly around her tiny frame there scarcely seemed room inside it for a beating heart.

Today, though, Quatro at 57 comes metaphorically Unzipped, the title of her autobiography charting her voyage from her native Detroit through the badlands of rock'n'roll to establish a solo career in Britain from the 1970s. Equipped with her mastery of the bass guitar and, of course, those raunchy leathers, Quatro commanded enough attention to become the radical Queen of Glam Rock. In a notoriously chauvinistic industry, she battled her way to star billing with hits such as Can the Can and Devil Gate Drive, gaining equal status with such fabled names as Noddy Holder, Alice Cooper and Iggy Pop.

"Even as young as 21, I was determined that when I picked up that bass I would get respect from musicians all over the world," she says. "And, you know what? Nobody ever said, You play good for a girl.' I never heard that phrase applied to me."

But Quatro insists that there was still a huge part of her that was the little girl from Detroit. Even now, petite and lithe as ever, she retains something of that wide-eyed, waifish quality which seemed teasingly in conflict with the early tough-girl image. "I'd left home when I was 16, and five years later I was here in the UK, not really knowing anybody and crying myself to sleep." People, she says, would never believe how thin-skinned she truly was beneath that sexy showbiz hide. "And I remain that way today. My dad always told me not to be so sensitive, and now Rainer, my husband, says the same. Stop being so upset about things,' he urges. But I can't help it. When I hurt, I hurt deep."

Quatro, who married Rainer Haas, a German concert promoter, in 1993, is too honest to gloss over her regrets. The third of five children to Italian and Hungarian parents, she was raised a Catholic and from an early age fell into the private nightly ritual of examining her conscience. Some of the most telling passages in Unzipped concern her sense of guilt over divorcing her first husband, guitarist Len Tuckey, and her remorse over the anxiety her more anarchic years may have caused her mother.

"When you're growing up you try to be everything your mother isn't. But as I was writing the book I realised that I am my mother's daughter through and through. That was a revelation because up to then I'd spent all my time thinking I was very much my dad's daughter."

Arturo Quatro was a musician, "the performer with a great sense of humour, while my mother, Ilona, the Hungarian half of the marriage, was strict and very religious, the housewife who stayed at home; everything I felt I wasn't." Quatro's mother died from stomach cancer just before Christmas in 1992. "The woman who never smoked, never drank, ate healthily and went for a walk everyday of her life was so swollen she looked like she was pregnant. What the doctor removed was a tumour the size of a football. She survived the operation but that autumn before she died was the last time I saw her."

During the final distressing weeks, Quatro, unlike the rest of her family, avoided the death-bed vigil. "I stayed put in England but I spoke to my mom many times on the phone, trying to explain that I just couldn't bear to see her that way, and she always seemed to understand."

Writing the book was obviously cathartic, but Quatro realised that she had to write the story as two people. "That's nothing to do with schizophrenia. It's just that I'm very much a Gemini. There have always been two very distinct sides to me, and the way I see it, Suzi Quatro protected little Susie, by far the most valuable part of me."

The death of Quatro's mother intensified a particularly low point in her life. She had married Tuckey, an Essex boy who played in her band in 1976, but by the end of the 1970s, her career was beginning to expand into other ventures, including stage and television acting, which caused tensions in the relationship.

"But, at that point, divorce didn't seem like an option because we had two young children, Laura and Richard. Also, there was this strong moral code in my own family, and much of that teaching has never left me. So, I guess I just waited, hoping that the marriage would get better."

It didn't, and in 1991 the couple began divorce proceedings. Then, only 10 days after her mother's death, Tuckey's mother died.

"She was like a second mom to me and the combined grief of those two bereavements was suffocating." For the first time in years, Quatro was confronted with the vulnerability of being utterly emotionally alone. "Over and over my history came flooding back. I agonised, I questioned: where had I been right and where had I been wrong? What had I done and what had I failed to do - as a daughter, wife, mother, friend?"

Quatro ached with intense loneliness for a year, walking "through fire" on her own rather than seeking professional help. "And in the end the mask came off, the ego fell away. I stripped myself back to who I really was." In effect, Unzipped is the account of this purifying journey where "every feeling burned". But isn't writing an autobiography an egotistical act in itself? "Well, I didn't write the book for applause. I wrote it from the heart to show the struggle to be in this business and keep your mind intact and not be tempted by drugs.

"And I've always said, You leave the ego on stage and that way when you come off, you lead your normal life. I don't take Suzi Quatro into the kitchen, or the bedroom." She laughs and immediately amends that last admission. "Actually, I can't lie about that. Sometimes Suzi Quatro is fun in the bedroom. But I do take marriage very seriously. Both husbands - Lennie and Rainer - would tell you that. After all, I am my mother's daughter.

I'm a one-man dog."

If her mother's "boundaries" guided Quatro through the swamps of right and wrong, her father's chutzpah provided an influential lesson in character-building. "My sisters and I were all brought up to be kind of ballsy, maybe because our dad didn't want four needy females around the house. He instilled the belief in us that being a girl made no difference."

In 1964, when she was 14, Quatro and an older sister formed their own band, The Pleasure Seekers. "We did every gig God sent, touring dives all over the US. I played drums, I played organ, I played bass. And I sang so much that I regularly lost my voice until I learned to use it properly." That rigorous apprenticeship would spook most girl groups today, but Quatro also had the "Detroit incentive" to draw on.

"Like all industrial cities, Detroit bred a sort of we gotta-get-out-of-this-place' mentality. It's a hard town, a hard school very divided between rich and poor, and the music that came out of there was high energy."

How does Quatro rate today's girl groups? In her weekly Radio 2 show, Rockin' With Suzi Q, she regularly laments their absence of musicianship. Even Madonna, she says, "can't play guitar", a conclusion she reached after seeing the singer on Live Earth.

Quatro met Rainer in Frankfurt when she was on tour, and the challenge of that encounter was how best to overcome their mutual dislike. "Rainer found me egotistical and unfriendly, while I thought he was arrogant and flash."

But that, she explains, was Suzi Quatro's self-protective view.

Intuitively she knew he was "a very nice man".

"It's still a bit of a miracle, though, that the relationship works at all. We're both very stubborn, and we both like total control, so we argue a lot, about anything." And the victor? "We take it in turns, which is why we're good together. Even so, I did feel I was taking a risk with Rainer because he's one of those handsome men, a self-made millionaire who doesn't need anybody. He could walk away, but he doesn't."

Their togetherness thrives on wrapping plenty of space around it. Haas has a house in Hamburg and Quatro one in rural Bedfordshire; they also have a house in Majorca, "our neutral zone".

And Rainer's view of Unzipped? "I suggested to him that book's perfect ending would be for little Susie from Detroit and Suzi Quatro to become one person. He replied, No, no, Susie. That would be fiction.' And he was right. What's more, Rainer says the one he's in love with is little Susie."

Just as well, really, because both of them are shrewd enough to know that, in a ruthless industry, little Susie will be around longer than the vintage rock'n'roll chick.



Suzi Quatro: the CV

  • Born: Detroit; June 1950
  • Marriages: First to guitarist Len Tuckey, with whom she had two children; second to present husband, Rainer Haas, a German concert promoter.
  • Career: Began aged 14, founding The Pleasure Seekers with an older sister and friends. By 15 she had a major record contract; by 21 she had begun a solo career in Britain. Her six albums include the recent Back to the Drive. Numerous acting roles, including appearances in Absolutely Fabulous; has a weekly Radio 2 programme, Rockin' with Suzi Q.
  • Distinction: Gained international fame with first single Can the Can; currently involved with a documentary on her life for later this year.



  • Suzi Quatro's autobiography, Unzipped, is published by Hodder and Stoughton, priced £18.99. She will be talking about it at Borders Books on Buchanan Street, Glasgow, on August 23 at 6pm. Rockin' with Suzi Q is on Radio 2, Thursdays, 10pm.