Tina Turner
Legendary singer who evolved from her early days with husband Ike in rhythm and blues to raunchy rock superstardom in the 1980s
TINA TURNER, who has died aged 83, was a singer whose distinctive voice, raunchy stage presence and personal charisma supported two distinct careers in rock music.
Alongside her husband she was the focus of the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, a rhythm and blues band that melded soul, the blues, gospel and rock’n’roll to create a unique sound which enjoyed critical and, ultimately, commercial success in the 1960s and 1970s.
Ike Turner, however, was as bad a husband as he was good a songwriter. Violent, addictive and adulterous, he terrorised his wife until she walked out with only a young family and huge debts to show for 15 years at the top of the music industry.
Through sheer willpower, however, Tina Turner reinvented herself as a rock singer and slowly rebuilt her career by giving her all, in everything from Mcdonald’s sales conferences to grimy cabaret venues. And then in 1984, aged 45, she released the album Private Dancer.
It sold 11 million copies and established her as a global superstar and one of rock’s great survivors – and a symbol of female empowerment, for Tina Turner was a proud, strong, independent woman who overcame numerous setbacks to carve out a decades-long career in the music business, no mean achievement in that most brittle of industries.
Tina Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock on November 26 1939 in Nutbush, Tennessee. Her father was a cotton plantation manager and young Anna worked in the fields from an early age.
After her mother, Zelma Bullock, left home (beginning an estrangement that only ended with Zelma’s death in 1999) Tina was shuttled between relatives until she arrived in St Louis, where she frequented nightclubs, ambitious to become a singer.
In 1956 she met Ike Turner and his band the Kings of Rhythm, and eventually persuaded him to allow her on stage. Her rendition of a BB King standard was sufficiently powerful for Ike to engage her whenever his usual singer was unavailable, though she continued to work in a St Louis hospital.
Ike was a perceptive musician who coupled the electric instruments and denser rhythms of urban black musicians with rural blues – the sound that would become rock’n’roll. He had a reputation on the circuit and had already enjoyed a hit on black radio stations in 1951 with Rocket 88, which is credited by many as the first rock’n’roll record.
Anna Mae Bullock replaced an errant vocalist in 1960 at the recording of Fool in Love, which sold more than 800,000 copies and established Ike and Tina Turner, as she was now known, as a major act. She married Ike in 1962.
Expanding the brass section, adding the Ikettes as alluring back-up singers and composing music that showcased Tina’s soulful vocals, Ike masterminded the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. Throughout the 1960s the band toured R&B clubs incessantly, gradually attracting an audience to their crossover music, which was fuelled by the power and passion of Tina’s voice – as well as by her provocative stage presence.
But the eclecticism of their music – described by one reviewer as the “sounds of the ghetto, the raucousness of low-down blues, the plaintiveness of country blues and a gospel fervour”, and by Tina as “Baptist blues” – alienated some listeners.
Despite success in the R&B charts they struggled to emerge from the segregated venues of the deep South. Black radio stations complained their work was “too pop”, while white radio stations considered it “too rhythm and blues.”
With consistent success eluding them, the group hopped between record labels, releasing 15 albums and 60 singles over the course of a decade. In 1966 Phil Spector, who worshipped Tina’s voice but was underwhelmed by Ike’s production abilities, recorded River Deep – Mountain High, incorporating his trademark “wall of sound”. The record, surprisingly, failed in the US, though it was a hit in Britain and across Europe. A tour supporting the Rolling Stones established the Revue as a leading attraction in Europe – as well as giving Mick Jagger the opportunity to incorporate many of Tina’s moves into his act.
With their popularity increasing and their techniques expanded by exposure to white rock bands, they continued to pound the boards, their unique brand of overdrive R&B offering a compelling fusion of black and white music.
Their 1971 cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Proud Mary put them in the US Top 10. They began appearing on such television programmes as The Ed Sullivan Show, while What You Hear Is What You Get – Live at Carnegie Hall became their first gold disc, and her semiautobiographical song Nutbush City Limits was a worldwide hit in 1973.
But success exacerbated Ike’s more unsavoury characteristics. Addicted to cocaine, he was violent and serially unfaithful. In 1976, after a savage beating, Tina walked out mid-tour with only 36 cents, a Mobil gas card and a plane ticket bought by a friend.
Ike, having tried to win her back with threats, sued for breach of contract. With a $1 million debt and a young family to support, Tina Turner was reduced to living off food stamps, borrowing money and playing the dingiest of venues to survive. But, she said: “I felt proud. I felt strong. I felt like Martin Luther King.” The couple were divorced in 1978.
For several years Tina Turner never stopped touring, a true professional who gave each performance her all. Though her raunchiness and vocal style edged dangerously close to self-parody, and despite critical and commercial indifference, Tina Turner was bolstered by her newfound Buddhism.
In 1979 she acquired a new manager and lifelong friend in Roger Davies, who had seen her play “all the wrong material to people in dinner suits and still blow the place apart”.
He moved her towards the rock mainstream, and gradually, as she emerged from Ike Turner’s malevolent shadow, the volume and quality of her bookings increased. By 1981 she was opening for the Rolling Stones on their US tour and was sufficiently independent to turn down the song
Physical, which had been written specifically for her, on the grounds that “it was too obvious”. It became a global hit for Olivia Newton-john and the soundtrack to the aerobics boom.
But Tina Turner’s contribution to the 1982 compilation Music of Quality
and Distinction Vol 1 – put together by British Electric Foundation, a breakaway group from the Human League – renewed interest in her pulsating vocals. Then her solo career finally took off in 1983 thanks to David Bowie.
The singer turned down an offer from his record company to throw a party celebrating the launch of his album Let’s Dance, telling them he had a better offer that night – Tina Turner’s set at the Ritz club in New York. A veritable stampede of men-in-suits desperately seeking tickets ensued, and they were duly treated to a vintage Tina Turner set.
She knew her star was in the ascendant when, following the show, she went back to Keith Richards’s hotel room with Bowie: “Ron Wood dropped by, David started playing the piano and we jammed the night away. It was a rock’n’roll dream.”
She was swiftly signed by Capitol, and her version of Al Green’s Let’s Stay
Together became her first Top 30 record since Nutbush City Limits.
Then Private Dancer finally established Turner among rock’s royalty. The album – billed as “oldfashioned soul singing new wave synth-pop” – was a worldwide success. Its lead-off single, What’s Love Got To
Do With It?, set a record for the length of time between an act’s chart debut and their first No 1 – 24 years.
The album was lodged in the US charts for almost a year and marked the musical conclusion towards which Turner had been working all her life: the successful harmony of soul and rock, the ideal blend of black and white.
As the singles Better Be Good To Me, Private Dancer and a cover of Ann Peebles’s I Can’t Stand The Rain
dominated charts worldwide, Turner found herself filling Wembley Stadium, duetting raunchily with Mick Jagger at the US Live Aid concert, recording with Bryan Adams and appearing opposite Mel Gibson in the third Mad Max film, Beyond Thunderdome (1985).
Her performance in that picture inspired Steven Spielberg to offer her the lead in The Color Purple three times without success. “The script was uncomfortably close to the story of my life with Ike,” she wrote. “Did I say close? It was practically next door!” Her contributions to the Mad Max
soundtrack, including the title sequence, spawned further chart success.
Her follow-up album to Private Dancer, Break Every Rule (1986), topped the charts in nine countries and hosted a further clutch of hit singles. A globetrotting tour broke box office records, and her performance at the Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro attracted an audience of 182,000. So established was the market for Turner’s unique brand of soul driven by chugging guitars and a rock beat, her 1989 Foreign Affair album went straight to No 1 in the UK.
It was led by the single The Best which became perhaps her bestknown track and a ubiquitous presence in television adverts and sports programmes. The accompanying tour it was seen by three million people.
Poorly educated and seemingly apolitical, Turner was nevertheless visible in raising awareness of ecological issues and inter-familial abuse, to which the Tina Turner Child Abuse Centre in Tennessee bore testament.
In 1993 a biopic, What’s Love Got To Do With It, was released, starring Angela Bassett as Tina and Lawrence Fishburne as Ike. But although it was based on her bestselling 1986 autobiography I, Tina, she loathed the film, which she felt trivialised her life and cast her as a victim. Nevertheless, the soundtrack followed her 1991 Greatest Hits compilation, Simply The Best, to the top of the charts.
If albums such as Wildest Dreams (1996) and Twenty Four Seven (2000) added little to her legend they confirmed her as a trouper of the old school, traversing the globe belting out the hits into late middle age.
By the time she announced her “retirement” in 2000 she was over 60. That she retained her following was due to her boundless energy, her attention to detail, an obsessive loyalty to her band and fans alike and her unique combination of high-kicking sexiness and a voice that was once described by the singer Lauryn Hill as “a whiskey-worn wet dream”.
Her appeal remained undiminished, as evidenced by another greatest hits compilation, All the Best (2004), which went platinum in eight countries including the US and UK. In 2008 she made a performing comeback, duetting with Beyonce at the Grammys award ceremony.
Two years later, thanks to an online campaign by fans of Rangers FC, The Best returned to the charts, making her the first woman to score Top 40 UK hits in six consecutive decades. In 2013, aged 73, she was on the cover of German Vogue – the oldest person to be featured on a Vogue cover. Tina,a musical based on her life, opened in the West End in 2018 and on Broadway the following year. The show is still playing to enthusiastic audiences.
Having married Ike Turner she had a son with him, Ron, who died last year, and Tina also adopted and brought up two of Ike’s children. The Turners separated in 1976 before their divorce two years later. She had another son, Craig, with the Kings of Rhythm saxophonist Raymond Hill; this son also predeceased her, in 2018. Ike died from cocaine use in 2007.
In 1985 Tina Turner met the German record company executive Erwin Bach when he was detailed to meet her at the airport. They became partners, and married in 2013 on the banks of Lake Zurich a few months after she had taken Swiss citizenship. He survives her along with the remaining children.
Tina Turner, born November 26 1939, died May 24 2023