Suzi Quatro’s favourite song by Prince: “It would keep me dancing”
As with any good rockstar, Suzi Quatro is rightfully not afraid of making her voice known. She has always been one for breaking the mould, flying from her native US nest for the UK aged just 21 to pursue her music career and making sure the sacrifice paid off with a driving force of hits such as ‘Can the Can’ and ‘Devil Gates Drive’. With such a sense of strength and conviction, Quatro more than held her own against a rock backdrop dominated by male power – but inevitably along the way also found a muse in the work of her contemporaries, much in the same way she is likely to have inspired them.
A Quatro seal of approval should be a cornerstone of the highest quality, because it’s fair to say she has an eclectic but impeccable taste. Her 1986 appearance on Desert Island Discs attests to this, where she picked out eight of her most favourite songs in everything from Nat King Cole to Billie Holiday. They may seem like unusual choices; markedly softer than Quatro’s own natural hard rock sound, but they represent the mark of a woman who has railed against the notion of conventionality her entire life, and sits atop a mountain of success for doing so.
In this sense, it’s an almost obvious fact that she found a musical kinship in Prince, the fellow American flamboyant rockstar whose work and legacy has redefined modern music as we know it. Quatro’s favourite pick of his, included in the aforementioned top eight, was ‘When Doves Cry’, taken from the iconic album Purple Rain. While not exactly a neat segue from some of her other choices like ‘(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay’, the song is a more fitting echo of Quatro’s own work, slicked with guitars and innovate overall sound.
This is not to say, of course, that ‘When Doves Cry’ is completely sonically similar to something like ‘If You Can’t Give Me Love’ by Quatro – far from it – but they both respectively chart the evolution of popular music between the late 1970s and early 1980s in ways that are fascinating to look at. “It’s so intense, it’s analytical of his life,” she said of the track. “You can get right inside his persona. He’s produced it with a very unusual drum beat. I’ve never heard anything quite like he does, and it would keep me dancing.”
Although Quatro was regarded as a pioneer as a woman on the hard rock scene at the time, the whole meaning of the term had been upended in just a few short years by the release of Prince’s smash hit in 1984, where he represented the pinnacle of androgynous image and musical ingenuity.
To this end, with Quatro’s career ethos marked by much of the same characteristics, it’s easy to see why she would single out ‘When Doves Cry’ as a particular favourite. She wasn’t the only one – it topped the charts in the UK, US, Australia, and Canada, becoming not only one of the standouts of Purple Rain but also among Prince’s defining hits and indeed rated as one of the best songs of all time.
Greatness indeed breeds greatness, but in the case of Quatro and Prince, such pioneering personae could not have been created without the ability to stand on their own two feet.
