Tina Turner's
solo career famously ignited over 15 years ago, but we all know the epic tale that had
already spun out before Private Dancer came to be. When you look at the dates, you might
think your calculator is on the blink. That voracious passion for baring her soul in the
studio and on stage has now been on public record for more than 45 years. In her seminal
soul tome Nowhere To Run, writer Gerri Hirshey talks of the vocal performance at a 1953
session by a barely teenage Tina as sounding like "a starving child singing for its
supper," and the better part of half a century later she still has that same
appetite.
Born in Brownsville, Tennessee and
raised nearby in the "li'l ol' town" of Nutbush just like the song says, Anna
Mae Bullock and her older sister Alline relocated to St.Louis in 1956. She knew rejection
only too well even then, the sisters having been deserted by their mother and later their
father, and when Annie first asked the leader of local club favourites the Kings of Rhythm
if she could sing with them, the answer from Ike Turner was another firm no.
Persistence, as we know, paid off. Ike and Tina, as she now
was, were married in 1958 and Tina began regular work as the band's singer, but their
first historic single together still only happened by one of those fateful chances that
the record industry seems to specialize in.
In the autumn of 1960, the session singer booked to record
Ike's A Fool In Love didn't show. Tina stepped in, an R&B smash and US Top 30 pop
crossover ensued, and soon the band was going by a new name: the Ike & Tina Turner
Revue.
The duo's track record in the '60s and early '70s, both on
cast-iron anthems like River Deep, Mountain High and Nutbush City Limits and lesser-feted
soul classics like I Can't Believe What You Say, is the stuff of legend, as, sadly, is the
violent disintegration of the Turners' marriage. But, emboldened by her newly-found
Buddhist faith and big-screen solo success as the Acid Queen in The Who's Tommy, Tina
struck out on her own in the summer of 1976.
At first, she stood at the bottom of what seemed an
impossible mountain of debts and disinterest from the industry. While other soul divas
made good in a world that she had inspired them to enter, Tina was living for a time on
food stamps. Her name still got her onto TV game shows and then the supper club circuit in
Las Vegas, then in 1979, Tina met Roger Davies, a young Australian manager who'd recently
relocated to Los Angeles and took the challenge of redefining one of the great lost
vocalists and performers of the age.
With Davies' help, Turner refound the rock 'n' roll raunch
of her best records, infused it with her intuitive soulfulness, and started again. A 1981
support slot on the Rolling Stones' US tour led to an invitation from Heaven 17's Ian
Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware for Tina to take part on their multi-artist Music Of Quality
And Distinction Volume 1 album. Before the end of 1982, she had a new solo deal with
Capitol Records.
By the summer of 1984, fuelled by the acclaim that met the
leadoff single What's Love Got To Do With It, Private Dancer was on its way to world sales
of 11 million.
What's followed has been an extraordinary catalogue of
collaborations and achievements on record, on the big screen and as an author: a role as
Aunty Entity alongside Mel Gibson in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome; a duet with Mick Jagger
at the greatest live event in music history, Live Aid; a raft of Grammy Awards; a
bestselling autobiography, I, Tina, leading to the hit biopic What's Love Got To Do With
It; record and concert dates with avowed Turner fans like Bryan Adams, Rod Stewart, Elton
John, David Bowie, Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler; and record-breaking concert tours
including sellout shows in such singular locations as the Maracana Stadium in Rio and
England's Woburn Abbey;her U2 penned smash hit from the Bond movie Goldeneye and her
stadium tour of Europe in 96/96 saw her smash box office records in ten countries playing
to over 3 million people.
Tina Turner's
solo career famously ignited over 15 years ago, but we all know the epic tale that had
already spun out before Private Dancer came to be. When you look at the dates, you might
think your calculator is on the blink. That voracious passion for baring her soul in the
studio and on stage has now been on public record for more than 45 years. In her seminal
soul tome Nowhere To Run, writer Gerri Hirshey talks of the vocal performance at a 1953
session by a barely teenage Tina as sounding like "a starving child singing for its
supper," and the better part of half a century later she still has that same
appetite.
