Chart entered : 13 November 1982
Chart peak : 60
This is an unexpectedly early exit. In terms of a media profile, Suzi's never really gone away so I wouldn't have been at all surprised if she'd had minor hits running into the nineties.
Suzi's initial hot streak tailed off, like glam itself, at the end of 1974 and she had a lean time in the mid-seventies , perhaps exacerbated by her marriage to burly Len Tuckey in 1976, before switching to a more country rock style like labelmates Smokie brought her another Top 5 hit with "If You Can't Give Me Love in 1978. That year also brought her a high profile acting role as Leather Tuscadero in Happy Days. This crucial exposure to audiences in her homeland led to the big duet hit with Chris Norman, "Stumblin In" which reached number 4 in the US but stalled at 41 here. Suzi declined a mooted spin-off show for Leather, preferring to concentrate on her music, but after "She's In Love With You " made number 11 in 1979 her fortunes dipped markedly and she never returned to the Top 30. By 1980 she had fulfilled her contract with RAK and signed with Mike Chapman's new Dreamland label. After a minor hit with "Rock Hard" and two flops the label collapsed in 1981.
Although they'd done well in other countries Suzi had never managed to sell her albums in the UK. Only her debut album ( a lowly 32 ) and a 1980 compilation charted at all here so she wasn't a particularly attractive proposition despite her string of hits. Nevertheless Polydor took a punt on her and this was the first single for them.
"Heart of Stone" was a co-write with sixties hitmaker Chris Andrews who was an old friend of Tuckey's and had a studio near the couple's home. Suzi was pregnant with their first child Laura while recording it. The single may have benefited to some extent from the success , a few months earlier , of Joan Jett who acknowledged Suzi as a key influence . "Heart of Stone" is quite a likeable little tune with its acoustic strum but it's too similar to "If You Can't Give Me Love" to be memorable in its own right and suggests that Suzi was running out of ideas.
She followed it up with the title track from her album , "Main Attraction" which is in very similar vein . It did nothing and Polydor accepted they'd made a mistake in signing her. After a successful appearance at the Reading Festival in 1983 she re-signed for RAK and made two singles with Mickie Most. " I Go Wild" from July 1984 , after she'd given birth to her second child Richard, is an unadventurous synth-pop chugger which belies its title. For the second, "Tonight I Could Fall In Love" in July 1985, Suzi was given an eighties makeover such that she was barely recognisable on the cover or in the grooves , the song being a horrible plodding Euro-ballad in the Jennifer Rush vein.
By this time Suzi had dabbled in acting with appearances in Dempsey and Makepeace and Minder and she now moved into musical theatre enjoying a successful run in Annie Get Your Gun in 1986 although the single released on the back of it , "I Got Lost In His Arms" went nowhere. She was on the 1986 Children in Need single Heroes which didn't attract much attention then did an absolutely dreadful electro-disco version of "Wild Thing" with Reg Presley which is probably her musical low point. She was on Ferry Aid's Let It Be but only on the chorus, her musical stock having fallen too low to get a solo line.
By the end of the decade Suzi's mariage was foundering and Tuckey wasn't featured on her next album "Oh Suzi Q" in 1990 which she wrote in collaboration with the Bolland Brothers from Holland, best known for writing Rock Me Amadeus for Falco. The first single "We Found Love" is bland Euro-pop with shockingly banal lyrics. "Baby You're A Star" sounds like Tranvision Vamp but at least that 's a style in which she sounds comfortable. "Kiss Me Goodbye" is an over-produced Bonnie Tyler-ish Hi-NRG number but not bad if you're partial to that sort of thing. She also contributed a lead vocal to the song "Hey Charly " on the Bollands' Euro-concept album "Darwin The Evolution" which has a certain naff charm.
None of the singles did well enough to sustain her so she returned to the stage in 1991 with a lead role in a new musical about Tallulah Bankhead. She also presented the first of her long-running Rockin With Suzi Q series for Radio Two. She finally got divorced to Tuckey in 1992. She went to Germany to record another duet with Chris Norman,the dreary ballad "I Need Your Love" and met concert promoter Rainer Hass. They married the following year. Suzi released another single that year, the Holly Knight penned "Fear of the Unknown" which is actually pretty good in a US college rock vein.
In 1995 she reunited with Most for an album mainly of re-recorded old hits "What Goes Around". The semi-acoustic title track was released as a single. After that Suzi became more of a ubiquitous TV personality who occasionally made records ( including a self-help album with faith healer friend Shirley Roden in 1999 ) . She appeared on Countdown, Surprise Surprise and Never Mind The Buzzcocks to name a few. In 2006 she dabbled in reality TV in Trust Me I'm A Beauty Therapist.
That same year she made the album "Back To The Drive" with Sweet's Andy Scott, the title track a deliberate evocation of past glories written by Mike Chapman. The following year she published her autobiography Unzipped and released a cover of "Desperado" to mark it.
Her most recent album was 2011's "In the Spotlight" made with Chapman and Scott which included a pointed cover of Goldfrapp's "Strict Machine" to emphasise its similarity to "Can The Can".
Suzi's now in constant demand as a talking head for music documentaries, the deaths of Brian Connolly , Les Gray and Alvin Stardust and the , erm ,indisposition of Mr Glitter having left the popular end of glam seriously short of spokespeople.
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