Annie is the gun role for Susie Quatro

Press, 21 April 1986, Page 21

Annie is the gun role for Susie Quatro

Like the sharp-shooting hillbilly she is playing in the musical “Annie Get Your Gun,” rock’s Suzi Quatro confesses to the DUO writer lAN WOODWARD she is as contradictory as a two-way mirror.

Belting out her songs on stage in black leather, Susie Quatro projects a bawdy femininity as the Queen of Rock. Offstage, swigging back beer and whisky and telling dirty jokes with the lads, she is the eternal asexual tomboy. Her overt sexuality in a concert turns on the girls as well as the fellas — she considers herself the female Elvis. Yet she is a mother-of-two with a welldefined streak of puritanlsm, a devout churchgoing Roman Catholic, who refuses to let anyone but her musician husband touch her.

She conveys a tough exterior and is not adverse to raising a man’s voice. an octave with a well-placed knee if he tries to become too familiar. But when the 155 cm (sft lin) blonde bombshell has downed a few drinks, a woman emerges who is prone to vulnerability, insecurity and in need of applause. “I’m just an out-and-out schizophrenic, a typical Geminian,” proclaims the 35-year-old rocker from Detroit. “I’m two different people, with two different minds. “I’m tough and aggressive when I have to be, sure; there’s not a man alive I can’t handle. But I also need someone to come up to me, after a scene or a take, and tell me he thinks I’m terrific.

"I feed on that. It’s not ego. It’s

the vulnerable, insecure side of my nature needing to be reassured.”

It is this complex duality of Suzi’s nature which is exciting the producers who have cast her as Annie Oakley, the real-life nineteenth-century sharpshooter who appeared with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, in a lavish new production of the Irving Berlin musical, “Annie Get Your Gun,” in Britain.

Casting Suzie as Annie was doubly inspired. Both are tearaway rebel tomboys. Both are sharpshooters — Suzi’s prowess with a gun will be seen soon on the BBC TV programme, “Star Shot”

Both eventually married tall, tough men who were prepared to live with, if not actually tame, their minxish personalities: ... Annie married her fellow marksman, Frank E. Butler, Suzi her band’s lead guitarist, Len Tuckey.

"I’ve been offered lots of musicals, but I. knew that was it when Annie Get Your Gun was mentioned,” says 1982’s Rear of the Year whose theatre debut this is

following a string of TV acting roles in “Minder," “Happy Days,” and "Dempsey and Makepeace.” “Annie is a tough survivor, which is me exactly. She shoots well, and I’m a bloody good shot She’s a tough cookie with a soft centre, like me.

“She sings You can’t get a man with a gun, and she’s actually a better shot than Frank Butler. So she uses her womanly wiles to get her man.

"I was like that before I met Lennie. I used to play a different role for every guy I went out with. If they wanted me to be soft, I’d be soft If they wanted me to be harsh, I’d be harsh. “And then there are the songs; real ballsy songs. I can put all my oomph and energy into them and really make them mine, because being tomboyish and larger-than-life has always been me.”

Suzi, as it happens, has changed very little, if at all, since coming to Britain 16 years ago and being promoted as the “first raunchy female rock star.” She met Len Tuckey in 1972,

married him four years later, and they now live with their two children, Laura, aged 3ft, and Richard, aged 16 months, and their nanny, Michelle, in a six-teenth-century mansion in Essex. She is the boss and pay-master and Len, as a member of her band, is an employee as well as a husband. This, I suggest, could cause irreparable damage to many a husband’s self-esteem.

"Lennie’s not like most men, that’s the answer,” says Suzi crisply. “You never ruffle him. It wouldn’t matter I was the Queen of England. He just lets me be Suzi Quatro. “I said to him soon after we fell in love, How did you ever see through my tough exterior? And he looked at me and said, “What tough exterior?”, and that is what Lennie is all about