Jett's seven-year itch

Rock legend Joan Jett.

Album gets straight to the guts of it, says Paula Yeoman

Joan Jett is rock royalty - a living legend. She needn't put out an album of new material ever again. And yet, here she is, nearly four decades on since she first catapulted on the Los Angeles punk scene in the all-girl band The Runaways, doing precisely that - releasing her first record in seven years.

Why? Because she can and because a few years back it occurred to her that there were a few important things she needed to get off her chest.

"It's a significant amount of time," she says, acknowledging the gap between Unvarnished and her last record Sinner.

"Especially today, you know, the faster things move with the internet and people's life span within the music industry," says the 55-year-old.

"But where I am lucky and blessed; is that I became established before a lot of that happened. I don't have to count on having a record to get my name out. It really just gave me time to figure what I wanted to write about," says Jett, who after disbanding The Runaways in 1979, went on to have a successful solo career with hits like I Love Rock n' Roll.

The album is already receiving rave reviews, but Jett is not about to make grandiose 'This is the best record I've ever made' statements the way some veteran rockers do.

She is, however, proud of what her and her band the Blackhearts have achieved on Unvarnished - an album of straight-up rock n' roll that gets to the guts of it right off the bat, with Any Weather co-written with Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl.

"I've always been a rock n' roller so that's the music that I know how to write. I'm not really a genre-hopper, I don't know what else to do," says Jett.

"And it's not like I want to do something else, it's just the kind of music that speaks to me."

It's also the music that has spoken to hard-core rock fans for nearly 40 years and influenced a generation of women rockers, which is why August 1 on the Sunset Strip in her old stomping ground of West Hollywood was declared Joan Jett Day this year. She marked the honour doing the very thing that has kept her in the business for so long - rocking out on stage.

"That's what it's all about for me. Totally!" she hits back quickly when asked if she still gets a buzz from live gigs.

And Jett is hoping to make it to New Zealand fans left disappointed after she wasn't able to perform a concert in Auckland with The Darkness earlier this year, when the British band pulled the plug.

"It was a real bummer for us. We were all set to come then it got cancelled. I guess we really couldn't do it ourselves.

"But I would love to go to New Zealand. Hopefully the record does well enough so that we can come down there on our own," she says.

"I love being on the road. Being infront of the people is really the whole thing for me. I enjoy making the records, but I do that so that I can get out on the road."

Joan Jett and the Blackhearts' Unvarnished is out now.