Over 50 years into her career, Suzi Quatro could be forgiven for taking a break. And yet, last spring, staring down almost one hundred cancelled shows, her first instinct was not to put her feet up but to team up with her son Richard Tuckey on a new collection of songs as a follow-up to their recent collaboration on 2019’s No Control. With songs referencing imprisonment, darkness and solitude, it’s fair to say Quatro had the pandemic on her mind while pulling together 18th album The Devil in Me - but, unsurprisingly, her take on the isolation blues wears a hard rock sheen.
The album bursts out of the gate with a title track and string of songs that place it in the same lineage as her 1970s glam rock catalogue, all chugging bass and snarling vocals - before the first curveball hits five tracks in. “My Heart and Soul” is not just a soulful piano ballad, complete with gorgeous, Supremes-esque backing vocals - it’s a bona fide Christmas song, an extended take on a single released at the turn of the year. “I’m gonna love you ’til I break in two,” the ferocious rock n roll queen practically croons, her plaintive “need you home for Christmas” refrain dissolving in a flurry of sleigh bells.
It’s the first of several changes of pace on an album which features quarantine-inspired barroom blues-rock (“Isolation Blues”), moody, sax-heavy noir (“Love’s Gone Bad”) and dark, sensual piano balladry (“In The Dark”) - but delivers them all in a voice that is unmistakably Quatro. If the “old and grey” heroine “holding onto visions of yesterday” in anthemic rocker “Hey Queenie” is intended to be even semi-autobiographical, so too is the “attitude screw-ya” strut of the song’s bassline. And if the jailbreak howl that breaks up “Get Outta Jail” - a clumsy metaphor for lockdown, but I’ll allow it - is anything to go by, Suzi Quatro at 70 is a long way from done.
Below: watch the video for "The Devil in Me" by Suzi Quatro
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