Suzi Quatro

Suzi Quatro is a performer as famous for her image as her music; Quatro was rock & roll's prototypical Bad Girl, the woman in the leather jumpsuit with the enormous bass guitar (well, it looked enormous, given that Quatro is only five feet tall), looking sexy but ferocious as she banged out her glam rock hits in her '70s glory days. Quatro is a woman who titled one of her albums Your Mamma Won't Like Me for a reason. But there's more to Suzi Quatro than all that, and she seems determined to show off the full range of her 50-year career in music on the box set.

Suzi Quatro is a performer as famous for her image as her music; Quatro was rock & roll's prototypical Bad Girl, the woman in the leather jumpsuit with the enormous bass guitar (well, it looked enormous, given that Quatro is only five feet tall), looking sexy but ferocious as she banged out her glam rock hits in her '70s glory days. Quatro is a woman who titled one of her albums Your Mamma Won't Like Me for a reason. But there's more to Suzi Quatro than all that, and she seems determined to show off the full range of her 50-year career in music on the box set The Girl from Detroit City. Quatro is a rocker but she's also a showbiz lifer, and the music spread over these four discs is the work of someone up to do a little bit of everything, and along with Chapman/Chinn thunderboomers like "Can the Can," "49 Crash," and "Daytona Demon," you also get vintage garage rock (three numbers from Quatro's first band, the Pleasure Seekers, including the gloriously snotty "What a Way to Die"), easygoing pop numbers like "Stumblin' In" (her hit duet with Chris Norman of Smokie)…

Resurrecting its title from a series of albums launched by England's Music for Pleasure label in the early 1970s to immortalize the work of producer Mickie Most, The Most of Suzi Quatro is a 20-track CD that essentially rounds up the best of her hit single output, then fills in the gaps with key album cuts and favorites…

As glam rock debut albums go, you'll have to search a long way to find one that outclasses Suzi Quatro's opening shot. Though her fame and, of course, her hit singles thus far were based around songwriters Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman's guileless ability to crank out the classics, away from the glare of TV and radio play the pair allowed Quatro and partner Len Tuckey full rein. The result was an album of several very distinct parts, inextricably linked by the sheer power of the Quatro personality. The heart of Suzi Quatro lies in the band's choice of covers. Harking back to Quatro's years in Detroit clubland, there's a Slade-meets-Stonesy grind through "I Wanna Be Your Man," a raucous blast through "All Shook Up," and, restating the song's claim to be the best rock & roller any Briton ever wrote, Johnny Kidd's "Shaking All Over," garageland sexuality oozing out from every pore.

Suzi Quatro's fifth album took its title from one of her earliest U.K. press interviews, a mouth-agape appraisal of the leather-clad vixen whose headline, "If you knew Suzi…like the tattooist knew Suzi," seemed to sum up every ounce of the image that the glam scene's most glamorous newcomer exuded. Five years later, however, the second half of that statement wasn't simply forgotten, it was all but meaningless to the majority of her audience, so thoroughly had she reinvented herself. Gone was the leather, gone were the guts, gone was the violent threat that Quatro once posed to passing manhood, to be replaced – as the album's cover made clear – by a demure, cord-clad lass in a pastel blouse and a look of such winsome vulnerability that, when she sang "Don't Change My Luck," it was enough to break your heart.

Suzi Quatro remains a staple for so many rock fans spanning far and wide so it’s of little surprise that news of a new album is the catalyst for celebration the globe over. If one puts aside for a moment who this is and with a feeble attempt to ignore the hype the most striking element of the new album title No Control is surely that it is a genuinely great album all on its own. Returning our key protagonists to the fore and releasing the cheers of unbridled glee is when the collection establishes a new dimension of genuine greatness…

As glam rock debut albums go, you'll have to search a long way to find one that outclasses Suzi Quatro's opening shot. Though her fame and, of course, her hit singles-so-far were based around songwriters Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman's guileless ability to crank out the classics, away from the glare of TV and radio play the pair allowed Quatro and partner Len Tuckey full rein. The result was an album of several very distinct parts, inextricably linked by the sheer power of the Quatro personality. The heart of Suzi Quatro lies in the band's choice of covers. Harking back to Quatro's years in Detroit clubland, there's a Slade-meets-Stonesy grind through "I Wanna Be Your Man," a raucous blast through "All Shook Up," and, restating the song's claim to be the best rock & roller any Briton ever wrote, Johnny Kidd's "Shaking All Over," garageland sexuality oozing out from every pore.

EMI's Greatest Hits starts off as any Suzi Quatro collection should, with the stunning one-two punch of "Can the Can" and "48 Crash" followed by the cat-scratch glam boogie of "Daytona Demon" and "Devil Gate Drive." From there the rest of the disc collects some of Suzi's best rockers and ballads, providing a wide-angle view of her stellar career…