Suzi Quatro – ‘Devil Gate Drive’

28 February 1974

Would it be doing the dog on my ongoing “Chinn & Chapman, the Stock Aitken & Waterman of glam” narrative to suggest that with Suzi Quatro they even had their own Kylie? Maybe not. After all, she had star quality and seemed perfect for their writing-production style, but only ever seemed to be given their one-size-badly-fits-all line of lightweight, lazy material: for Kylie, read Suzi. The bit in the main chorus of ’48 Crash’ where she goes “I’m like a lightning flash / A lightning flash!” is genuinely thrilling but, through little fault of her own, that’s as close as the Quatro canon gets to greatness or even goodness.

‘Devil Gate Drive’ is particularly poor. The titular thoroughfare is where all the bad kids hang out, due to ill-advised nominative determinism on the part of the local council for naming it after the portal to hell. The lyrics take the usual Chinnichap Americanised theatrical rock and dumb it down to a high school musical, garnished with random sub-Bolan nonsense verse straight outta the rhyming dictionary. The stomping and chanting is by now pure formulaic bubblegum-glam cheese. Imagine if, hypothesising generously that they even had it in them, Chinn and Chapman had at least given Suzi Quatro her own ‘Better The Devil You Know’ or a ‘Block Buster!’-level glam classic for the ages. She should be so lucky.