Why rock needs its bad girls

Suzi Quattro was the first female bass player to become a major 70s rock star. Photo / Supplied

'Aren't I pretty - please buy me!" is how Marianne Faithfull once described the role of girls in pop.

Pretty women are preferred in popular music but, out of the two types, soppy-sexy and stroppy-sexy, give me the latter every time.

Leader of the Bad Girl pack would be Dusty Springfield, who enjoyed raising a ruckus and throwing crockery around.

Punk and its aftermath produced a few you wouldn't want to meet up a dark alley unless you were a masochist, from Siouxsie Sioux to PJ Harvey. There have been whole groups of Bad Girls, from the Shangri-Las to The Slits.

And then there are the Bad Girls for whom being one of the guys is the whole point of the act; the biker chicks.

It's a select group, made up of Chrissie Hynde, Joan Jett - and their prototype, Suzi Quatro, the subject of a documentary film, Suzi Q, released in cinemas next month.

Quatro, the first female bass player to become a major rock star, arrived fully formed, in 1973, dressed in skintight leather, and went straight to number one in the UK with Can the Can.

It's easy to look back with a dry theoretical eye and critique Quatro for what she didn't do; she was a cute puppet fronting a manufactured band, she was mouthing songs churned out by the Nicky Chinn/Mike Chapman hit factory and didn't write her own material.

And have you ever actually listened to the lyrics of Can the Can? Though seemingly concerning a rather surreal menagerie, it's actually about how you should never trust another female around "your man", featuring the repeated - with relish - line "SCRATCH OUT HER EYES!"

Hardly a blueprint for modern feminism. But so what? As famous female bass-players such as Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads testify in the film, she proved to girls that it could be done - like Margaret Thatcher - which is far more important than being ideologically pure and doing naff all.

Quatro's big break came when she was 21. The daughter of a second-generation Italian immigrant living in Detroit and working at General Motors, Quatro moved to England after being spotted by the impresario Mickie Most; apparently record label bosses were seeking a replacement for Janis Joplin, though it's hard to think of two women more different than the needy Joplin begging some hippie to take another piece of her heart and the bouncy pocket-rocket who struck Most with "her comeliness and skills as bass player, singer and chief show-off".

Chinn/Chapman did their thing - and the rest was hysteria.It was a mayfly career; although she had four top 10 hits in 1973 and 1974 (including another number one, Devil Gate Drive), by the following year she sounded like a parody of herself, with flops like Your Mamma Won't Like Me.

70's Glam rocker Suzi Quatro. Photo / Supplied

She could have retired to her manor in Essex and counted her royalties. But one of the great things about starting up your dream career when you're too young to vote is that you have a) resilience and b) no Plan B - the thing you do is literally all you can do, and Quatro had been an entertainer since she played percussion with her father's amateur jazz band as an eight-year-old.

In 1977, after he saw her photograph on his daughter's bedroom wall, the producer of Happy Days offered her the role of Leather Tuscadero, an old flame of Fonzie's, without an audition.

Originally scheduled for two appearances, viewer reaction was so strong that she became a regular character in the 1977-78 season.With the independent spirit typical of her, Quatro turned down the offer of a spin-off show, saying she didn't want to be typecast and going on to act in everything from Bob the Builder to Midsomer Murders, playing characters as diverse as Annie Oakley and Tallulah Bankhead.

Latterly, she's been a broadcaster - she has a great radio voice, warm and worldly, familiar yet exotic, that Detroit husk tempered by decades of tea-drinking.Like all us enfants-terribles-turned-grandes-dames, she can be high-handed; a few years back she blasted today's young songstresses who dress like "sex objects" and make videos which are "borderline pornography".

Covering her back, lest accusations of leather-catsuit-wearing might fly, she added: "I may have been sexy, but I was covered up - there was something left to the imagination."

Causing me to counter, "When it comes to those brazen broads who hawk their wares in the world of entertainment, when the nipples go south the nose goes north." But all in all, there can be no doubt that Quatro has been a wonderful thing.

The Bad Girls are especially impressive when compared to the soppy soubrettes of today - those who were surely born to be session singers and have somehow ended up in the spotlight.

I call them the Jejune Jessies - Jess Glynne (working as a brand manager when she signed her first contract) and Jessie Ware (went to the select Alleyn's School, once amusingly known as Alleyn's College Of God's Gift) and Jessie J (Colin's Performing Arts School, musical theatre in the West End from the age of 11).

They're just so horribly nice - Jess Glynne still lives with her parents and Jessie Ware does a cookery podcast with her mum. Even Jessie J, who exhibited swagger at the start of her career, has become one of those Nervous Nellies who believes that banging on about mental health issues is a feasible alternative to making good records for a professional singer.

All the Jessies are on record as having "anxiety", mental health having gone from being taboo to mandatory if you want to drive home the fact you're A Good Person.But I will always yearn for the Bad Girls - and luckily, they're built to last.

Presuming that Suzi Q - now pushing 70 - had settled down to a life more ordinary, I looked at the Facebook page of her Official Fan Club to see what radio show she was presenting next, only to find this excitable post from Denmark: "What a great gig last night, near Aarhus, just fab... and soooooo hot! People were collapsing in the audience... thank goodness I wear leather - nice and cool eh! - I LOVE MY JOB!"