Itaught Mick to dance, but he never made a move on me!
TINA TUrNer insists she never used sex to sell her music when she performed on stage. ‘All I ever wanted to do was give people a good time,’ the rock ’n’ roll legend tells me. ‘I never did sexual moves, and I never did sexual gestures.’
she wasn’t averse to a bit of teasing, though. ‘I played with sex,’ she agrees. ‘But I never actually did it so they thought I was really trying to come on to someone.
‘when I stood there, sweat dripping from me, all the make-up on, and the hair, and everybody looking up at me, smiling, that was what I always left the stage with,’ Turner says.
The secret was knowing when enough was enough. ‘Give them too much and you’ll get them on stage with you.’
Tina, now 77, draws a sharp contrast between her act, at the height of her solo fame in the eighties, and the female superstars of today: women like Beyonce, rihanna and Jennifer Lopez.
‘I’ve got to be careful,’ she says, likening criticism to ‘a pillow that you cut in the wind’.
she blames competiveness — and weak management — for the sexual provocativeness that pervades the world of female music stars now.
‘It just went further and further. for me, it’s too much. I just want to say that it really can be a turn off. I think the new generation is on that road.’
Turner believes the pendulum will eventually swing back, ‘though I probably won’t be around by that time’.
But, in the meantime, today’s stars are trying to outdo each other, in their efforts to be outrageous. ‘one does it; and everyone does it. The costumes become less and less. I just take a deep breath and say: “when is it over?!”
‘But at least most of them can sing,’ she adds, with a laugh, followed by a sigh. We were talking as the singer prepared to launch TINA: a new musical based on her life directed by Phyllida Lloyd (the first musical Lloyd has worked on since Mamma Mia!, which is still running after nearly two decades). TINA will look at Turner’s hardscrabble childhood in Nutbush, Tennessee; her years of servitude with the controlling Ike Turner and the freedom years, after she walked out on Ike and became an international solo star. The show, written by Katori Hall and produced by Tali Pelman (for stage entertainment), starts previews at the Aldwych Theatre on March 21, 2018, and opens officially on April 17. It’s not all bad news for Beyonce and co, by the way. she loves Beyonce’s elegance. ‘I love how rihanna sings. I love how Jennifer Lopez looks — except her behind is a little bit heavy. Those girls are the leaders.’ And what of the dancing? ‘I always did the shimmy from side to side. The hips went from side to side — never from the front. You’ve got to admit that when you see the grinding on stage, it turns you off a little bit.’ Dancing, she insists, should be ‘feet and hips — not pelvic thrusts!’ Tina says she had rules when it came to working with ‘ the boys’, too. And what boys! Mick Jagger and David Bowie were ‘like the brothers that I never had’. ‘we never slept together; and they never came on to me, because I think they saw me as a role model in some kind of way. ‘Mick wanted to dance — and I was a dancer — but he never gave me the credit!
‘He said his mother taught him how to dance. But we worked with him in the dressing room, me and the girls, and we taught him how to Pony.’ (for those with two left feet, that’s a sixties dance move.)
‘I had a different kind of collaboration with David,’ she continues, ‘and it was more to do with the singing. All those english guys felt I could sing. My vocals are natural. I hit the note naturally and they’d go: “what?! How’d you do that?”’
Turner started singing in church, as a girl. even then, she knew the importance of taking care of her voice.
‘Being a church girl you were taught that alcohol was not a good thing. southern church people didn’t drink anyway back then, though some imbibed the corn whisky.
‘But I wasn’t attracted to smoking, or the drugs or the drinking — though later on I did enjoy a glass of wine, and champagne; but even then, always in moderation.’
she attributes her enviable figure to moderation, too. ‘I’ve been lucky with my weight,’ she says. ‘I grew up skinny, like a little pony. The style of the women in those days was big hips, big legs.’
But 50 years of dancing — not to mention hustling through airports while on tour — helped keep her trim. As did eating carefully. ‘I still have what I want to eat, but moderately. I don’t overdo the chocolates.’
Now, Turner is turning her attention to the hunt to find an actress who can play her in TINA.
‘she will definitely have to be able to sing,’ she says. ‘we’re not pushing that she has to be pretty; but she has to be in shape. she can’t be fat.’
Director Lloyd told me that when she met Tina, she was struck by how radically different she was from her onstage persona.
‘I began to think I was looking for someone who was prepared to live like a nun,’ Lloyd joked.
OUT
of the limelight, the singer contends that she’s not actually Tina Turner at all. ‘when the lights go out, I go back to being Anna Mae Bullock (her birth name).’
There’s still a spiritual side to her — although she is no longer a Baptist, but a Buddhist. ‘when life got tough, I needed all the help — from all the gods,’ she jokes.
Despite those tough times, she doesn’t see her past as dark. ‘ You know, they say there’s a light side and a dark side. I think I’ve always been on the light side.’
Part of the light these days comes from a good marriage, to long-time love erwin Bach. The pair wed in 2013 and now live in Zurich.
‘I’ve touched upon a happiness I thought was impossible to have,’ she says.
she’s happy with retirement, too; though doesn’t rule out a one- off comeback, particularly if the old gang — ‘all of whoever is still alive, from my time’ — were involved.
‘I think something like that I’d be a part of,’ she concedes. ‘ But to actually go back to work on a tour or something? No. retirement is retirement. Two years from now I’ll be 80, and I don’t want to be seen as a cruddy old woman, walking around on stage with a walking stick.’