Ronnie Spector is a regular at the Black Angus steakhouse in suburban Danbury, Connecticut. “Hey hon,” says the host, before leading us to a long table in the corner that they save for Spector when she has business to attend to. As the lead singer of the beehived 1960s girl group the Ronettes, Spector helped invent rock’n’roll, and at 76, she still exudes it: teased dark hair, leather jacket, tight jeans and black sunglasses that stay affixed to her made-up face throughout most of our conversation.

We are meeting ahead of her Best Christmas Party Ever! tour. Since the Ronettes’ versions of Frosty the Snowman and Sleigh Bells appeared in 1963 on their producer Phil Spector’s album A Christmas Gift for You, Ronnie’s aching voice – a perfect pop storm of innocence and rebellion, grit and glee – has been a ubiquitous seasonal treasure. “My family didn’t have a lot of money when I was little,” she says. But at Christmas her father would take her to watch the ice skaters at New York’s Rockefeller Center, and to see Macy’s ornate window displays of trains and dolls. “I didn’t just like Christmas, like most kids, or even love it,” she explains, her voice peaking with excitement. “I was obsessed!”

Veronica Yvette Bennett grew up in Spanish Harlem, part of a huge family – six aunts, seven uncles, many cousins, a strict grandmother – and dreamed of being the neighbourhood’s answer to Marilyn Monroe. As she wasn’t allowed outside, Spector spent a great deal of time gazing out of the window at cool girls smoking cigarettes below. The Latin jazz of Tito Puente drifted up from the street. As a biracial young woman with African-American and Cherokee heritage, she often felt isolated. “When you don’t look like everyone else, you automatically have a problem in school,” she says. She would get picked on and worse. “They would beat me up because I was different-looking. To be honest, I caught hell.” It is part of what made her want to be tough.

Spector on stage, 2015. Photograph: Chris Hall

Spector learned to sing using the fantastic echo in the lobby of the apartment building where her grandmother lived; her cousins were her backup singers. “I’d go to my grandmother’s and get up on a coffee table and start singing,” she recalls. “My family would all come watch.” Spector’s signature, soaring woah-oah-oahs were inspired early on by attempts to yodel like Hank Williams with her grandmother. But teenage doo-wopper Frankie Lymon was her biggest influence. “His voice pierced me. My grandmother would say: ‘Ronnie, you are going to go deaf if you listen any closer to that radio with Frankie on it.’ I loved his voice, his diction, his lyrics.”

Ronnie’s mother, a waitress at a diner across from the Apollo Theatre, threw out her alcoholic husband who had harboured unfulfilled fantasies of becoming a jazz drummer. She eventually turned a flirtation with one of her customers, who worked at the Apollo, into a slot for the Ronettes at its legendary amateur night.

The Ronettes opened doors for themselves. When they were tired of playing bar mitzvahs and sockhops, determined to become real-deal rock’n’rollers, they marched over to the Peppermint Lounge and got a gig in the club that night. When they wanted a hit record, they called up Spector, who delivered them one. Ronnie was half-asleep and sharing a bed with her sister and cousin at a hotel on tour when Dick Clark proclaimed that the next tune on American Bandstand would be a “record of the century”. They shot upright and gasped: it was their Be My Baby. The sound of that drum fill – bump-de-bump-tssh – thrills her still. “It just does something to my whole body,” Spector says.

Ronnie married Phil, but he tried to slowly sabotage her career – for instance, convincing the Ronettes not to accept an invitation from the Beatles to travel on their private jet as Beatlemania hit America. Over seven years of marriage, Phil set up his 23-room mansion with chain-link fences, barbed wire and intercoms in every room, making it nearly impossible for her to leave. He also put an inflatable version of himself in the passenger seat of her car, so she would never seem to be alone, drove her to alcoholism and threatened to get a hitman to kill her if she left. Eventually, she found a way out, and with the help of her mother, left for “a walk” – with no shoes on her feet. He kept those from her, too.

She wrote a memoir detailing her abusive marriage, and began an ultimately successful 15-year court case to get more than $2m in unpaid royalties from Phil – a situation that Ronnie likens to Taylor Swift’s current feud with her label owner, Scooter Braun. “It’s good to see women out there saying: ‘This label guy took advantage of me,’ and showing other women how to [get redress],” she says. For Ronnie, her case wasn’t about money but justice. “It was about winning back me. I gave birth to those songs in the studio.” At 76, Ronnie now tours and records and enjoys her life, while Phil is in jail for murder.

“When I was making records 50 years ago, you didn’t have a voice of any kind,” she continues. “What the man wanted was what you did. You made his records, with his lyrics and men producers, everybody was a man back then. All women have power, we just couldn’t show it … That’s why I love #MeToo and Time’s Up – because men’s time is up.”

The emotion of Be My Baby felt visceral and infatuated, but tenacious and forthright. Amid a brash, hip-shaking sex appeal that made Ronnie “like a girl Elvis”, a powerful force drove the Ronettes. “It was all about love,” she says. “We were hungry. When you’re hungry for something, you want to do it even better.” Brian Wilson “freaked out” the first time he heard the song and had to pull his car over, his “mind revamped”. Joey Ramone was a devout fan, and he produced an excellent Spector EP, She Talks to Rainbows, in 1999. Later, Amy Winehouse would cite her as a primary inspiration. “She reminded me that what I did mattered,” Spector says, “and that was so important.”

I mention how the myth of the lone male genius is currently being debunked, and culture is catching up to women’s contributions. “I love it,” she says. “When I was making my hit records, my ex was always ‘the genius’ and you felt like: ‘Well, who am I?’ You felt that small. I’m so glad I’m still on this Earth to see women going out there and saying: ‘You can be fabulous like me, you can do anything.’”

The Ronettes in the 60s. Photograph: PR

As Spector packs up her uneaten lobster roll and orders a medium-well done burger to go, she and her husband of 36 years, Jonathan Greenfield – who is also her manager, and has been sitting quietly tending to business on his phone – offer me a lift to the train station. Outside the steakhouse, Spector takes a couple of drags on a cigarette and tells me that she quite often gets recognised and takes an average of three selfies every time she goes to Shop-Rite, where one of her sons works. The other is a tennis instructor.

Her life in Connecticut, her home for three decades, is peaceful. When she is not on tour, she likes to paint – she has an easel near a window – and lately, with a nod to the #MeToo movement, she has been painting images of other women. Her old friend Keith Richards also lives 15 minutes away, and whenever she is at his house he tries to get her to sing at the piano, songs such as the Supremes’ Stop! In the Name of Love. “All he does is want me to sing – he records everything.”

In the car, I ask her and Greenfield how they met – backstage at a production of a play that starred the drag queen Divine, best known for appearing in John Waters’ films. “I had met Divine at some club,” she says. “Me and John Lennon were there together.” Spector was gossiping about Liza Minnelli with Minnelli’s ex-husband when she noticed Greenfield, a production manager on the play, in earshot. “You were wearing a black jumpsuit and you gave me this look like: ‘You better not say one word,’” Greenfield recalls. “I was scared out of my mind!” Still, he told Spector he was a big fan and asked for a hug. “It was so cute,” Spector says.

“Outsiders always felt a connection to Ronnie,” Greenfield says from the driver’s seat. “The Ronettes’ first crowds were really gay folks in [Greenwich] Village.” Spector concurs. “They felt like they were different, like we felt we were different,” she adds. I remember that it is Jimi Hendrix’s birthday. “Jimi was our bandleader once,” she says, a reference to their appearances together at the New York club Ondine, another casual fact of her life.

Leaving the car, I turn back to say goodbye, and there’s Spector – sunglasses at night, Marlboro dangling from her fingers, the person she wanted to be, sending me off: “Love ya baby!”

Ronnie Spector’s Best Christmas Party Ever! UK tour begins 17 December at Warwick Arts Centre, with further dates in London (19), Gateshead (20) and Edinburgh (23).