‘Queen of rock ‘n’ roll’ Tina Turner dies
Tina Turner, the Americanborn singer who left a hardscrabble farming community and abusive relationship to become one of the top recording artists of all time, died yesterday at the age of 83.
She died peacefully after a long illness in her home in Küsnacht near Zurich, Switzerland, her representative said.
Turner began her career in the 1950s during the early years of rock and roll and evolved into an MTV phenomenon.
In the video for her charttopping song, What’s Love Got to Do with It, in which she called love a “second-hand emotion,” Turner epitomised 1980s style as she strutted through New York City streets with her spiky blond hair, wearing a cropped jean jacket, mini skirt and stiletto heels.
With her bluntly worded ballads, Turner gelled perfectly with a 1980s pop landscape in which music fans valued electronically produced sounds and scorned hippie-era idealism.
Sometimes nicknamed the “Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Turner won six of her eight Grammy Awards in the 1980s.
Most of Turner’s hit songs were written by others, but she enlivened them with a voice that New York Times music critic Jon Pareles called “one of the more peculiar instruments in pop”.
Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock on November 26 1939, in the rural Tennessee community of Nutbush, which she described in her 1973 song, Nutbush City Limits, as a “quiet little old community, a onehorse town”.
Her father worked as an overseer on a farm and her mother left the family when the singer was 11 years old, according to the singer’s 2018 memoir, My Love Story.
As a teenager, she moved to St Louis to rejoin her mother.
Ike Turner, whose 1951 song, Rocket 88, has often been called the first rock and roll record, discovered her at age 17 when she grabbed the mic to sing at his club show in St Louis in 1957.
The band leader later recorded a hit song, A Fool In Love, with his protégé and gave her the stage name Tina Turner, before the two married in Tijuana, Mexico.
Tina employed her strong voice and strenuously rehearsed dance routines as lead vocalist in an ensemble called the Ike and Tina Turner Revue.
She appeared on the cover of issue two of Rolling Stone magazine in 1967.
In 1985, Turner met German music executive Erwin Bach who became her long-term partner and in 1988 she moved to London.
She released two studio albums in the 1990s that sold well, recorded the theme song for 1995 Bond movie GoldenEye, and staged a successful world tour in 2008 and 2009.
After that, she retired from show business.
She married Bach, becoming a citizen of Switzerland.
Her name continues to draw audiences years after her retirement.
Musical stage show TINA: The Tina Turner Musical was a hit first in London’s West End in 2018, and later on Broadway, and is still running.
And in 2021 HBO released a documentary about her life, Tina.
She is survived by Bach and two sons of Ike’s whom she adopted.