Queen of the Night

Her billowy curves outlined in clinging red satin, Maggie Bell jingles a tambourine and struts across the stage. "I was the universe in your eyes, and I was the sunset and sunrise," she intones huskily. With an emphatic toss of her head, Bell shakes out a jungle of tangled curls, bawling lustily, "I know you send your regards to the queen of the night." As the final notes drown in a roar of noisy affirmation, she mops her streaming face with a Turkish towel.

Still little known in the U.S., Glasgow-born Maggie Bell is a European rock superstar. Her impassioned, straight-from-the-gut delivery--equally effective in bluesy ballads or skull-crushing rockers--has twice earned her election as Britain's top female singer. Her earthy vitality and ability to light up a stage convinced Atlantic and Polydor talent scouts to sign her up in 1973 for $750,000 worth of recording contracts. "I've never had a hit record in my life," admits Maggie. "But I'm a working-class girl, I don't spare the effort, and I know I have the ability to make people enjoy themselves." She has just completed her first album, Queen of the Night, masterminded by Atlantic's ace producer Jerry Wexler, and she climaxes her first smash U.S. solo tour with a June 13 Madison Square Garden concert.

Upstages Headliners. "They all think I'm a freak," says Maggie. But despite the gypsy fortune-teller exterior, Scotland's princess of wails is about as funky as a Girl Scout. Music is her life, Maggie maintains, although she does not disdain the idea of marriage. She cannot pass a child without smiling, and youngsters in return respond to Bell's fresh-faced charm. "The high point of my career," she reflects gravely, "was when I came to the U.S. and found that Americans are allowing single people to adopt babies."

On her current 40-city tour, Bell has predominantly worked as a warm-up act for other groups. That will give American audiences an "opportunity to get to know me gradually," she says. But as the Doobie Brothers, Poco and Dave Mason all can attest, she frequently upstages the headliners with a vocal style as subtle as Vesuvius. Small wonder that, on occasion, lights and sound equipment have suffered mysterious malfunctions during Maggie's set.

Bell, 29, grew up in the crumbling gray slums of Glasgow's Maryhill district, which she calls "the Harlem of Great Britain." Her mother is a retired coffee-shop waitress. Her father, who died last year, was a mechanic who spent his evenings picking out popular ballads on the family piano. The family celebrity was his sister Doris Droy, a vaudeville singer and Maggie's idol, who was billed as "Suicide Sal."

Attracted by street-corner drummers, Maggie joined the Salvation Army at the age of five. She was abruptly drummed out ten years later when she was caught smoking. In fact, she had already been corrupted by American comic books and rock-'n'-roll records sent her by an uncle who lived in Syracuse, N.Y. She left school for a $5-a-week window-dresser's job and sang at night in local pubs. In one of them she met her boy friend, Guitarist Les Harvey. Together they joined a rock group that became Stone the Crows.

Two years ago, in a freak accident during a concert, Harvey was electrocuted onstage as Maggie watched from the wings. "I died too," she recalls. "But I realized Les wouldn't want me to quit, and slowly I began to experience a rebirth through my singing."

Though Maggie is often called the Scottish Janis Joplin, and there is a superficial physical resemblance, they are dissimilar artistically and psychologically. Bell's voice lacks Joplin's extraordinary naked emotional intensity, nor can she match the eerie tripartite wails approaching chords that Joplin achieved in her final performances of Ball and Chain. Bell has a bigger voice with a hefty three-octave range, and she is unencumbered by the insecurity and corrosive self-loathing that crippled Joplin. Hers may well prove a more durable talent. "The danger in this business is hanging around with too many people and listening to everybody," says Bell. "I listen 1% to my managers and the other 99% to myself." In view of Maggie's success, those seem to be pretty good odds.

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