It’s the first anniversary of the passing of ultimate wailing tall-haired tigress, and the embodiment of grit, sensuality and glamour, Miss Tina Turner.
Even though it was common knowledge the bold soul sister had been in failing health, the announcement of her death aged 83 on May 24, 2023 still felt wrenchingly inconceivable. What a woman. What an artist. What a loss. No one will ever shimmy in stiletto heels, shake a fringed mini-dress or whip a wig around with more abandon than the performer who more than earned her epithet “the hardest working woman in show business.”
Looking at the 1964 shot of a radiantly beautiful young Tina we’ve chosen as our feature image, it’s understandable why the filmmaker John Waters would call her “a fashion icon that influenced me for the rest of my life.” In his 2019 memoir Mr Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder, Waters declared with little hyperbole, “Ike and Tina were the best soul group ever.”
Indeed, following last year’s Simply the best covers Tina Turner made her own, we start our second Turner Perfect 10 with not only (Ike and) Tina’s most incendiary recording but also a candidate for the craziest, most thrilling song of the ’60s. It’s that good.
River Deep – Mountain High (1966)
The Ike and Tina Turner Revue were, in the main, a Rhythm and Blues act that worked nightclubs — the so-called “chittlin’ circuit”. Sociopathic svengali Phil Spector saw them perform and wanted to work with Tina and produce what he thought could be his greatest ever pop production. No wonder Spector tapped TT, whose steely belting abilities were seismic enough to withstand the onslaught of orchestral arrangements he had in mind for this track, which took the celebrated songsmiths Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich an unseasonably long entire week to write.
With its huge cathedral-like bluster, River Deep – Mountain High was, at the time, notoriously one of the biggest records ever made, thanks to Spector and arranger Jack Nitzsche’s unique Wall of Sound technique. Indeed, over two dozen musicians were brought in to the Gold Star studios in Los Angeles including Glen Campbell, and Leon Russell, and, never officially confirmed, Cher on backing vocals. Tellingly, Tina’s husband and musical partner Ike Turner was effectively banned from the studio.
Even if it borders on hysterical – as close to tantrum as it is adoration – it doesn’t make the intricacy and ambition any less impressive. There’s detail and passion in the bluster. The scale makes a kind of sense of the song too, the transition from rag dolls and puppies to the all-or-nothing crash of the chorus drawing some of the sentimental sting.
The Beatles’ George Harrison declared it “a perfect record from start to finish. You couldn’t improve on it.” And famously, River Deep went all the way to a Mountain High of No. 3 in the UK yet stalled at a lowly number 88 in the US.
Nutbush City Limits (1973)
The first self-written song the former Anna Mae Bullock ever recorded is steeped in ambiguous sentiment. Calling it a ‘city’ in the lyrics Tennessee’s finest daughter conjured up was ironic. An insignificant rural flyspeck in Haywood County, Nutbush is an unincorporated town, meaning, by law, it doesn’t have any city limits.
‘Limits’ is the key word in the song, as she artfully sketches a rootsy, circumscribed life: “A church house (above), gin house (below), a school house, outhouse/On highway number nineteen, the people keep the city clean…/Twenty-one was the speed limit, motorcycles not allowed in it/You go to the store on Friday, you go to church on Sunday…”
For all his manifold personal faults, on the hard-driving Nutbush Ike Turner was the perfect musical foil for Tina’s lyrics (although she got sole songwriting credit). It begins with a down ’n’ dirty, fuzzed-up, catscratch rhythm guitar riff. The Revue’s brass add urban swagger as Tina makes her delayed entrance, singing at her most grittily incisive as she lists her home town’s minimal charms, mythologising her country upbringing in the process.
“I used a G tuning on Nutbush City Limits that I learned from Keith Richards when Tina and I opened for the Stones in 1969,” Ike recalled of his first instrumental contribution. His other was a wild, bucking Moog synthesiser solo only slightly less memorable than the Osmonds’ absurd Crazy Horses the previous year.
Private Dancer (1984)
With a pathological and professional need to reinvent her work, her identity, and her life, Tina’s journey took a new direction after her divorce from Ike Turner was finalised in 1978. Six years on, the singer experienced an astronomical upturn in fortunes with fifth solo set Private Dancer.
The album performed the same kind of resurrection act for Tina that Midnight Love had just done for Marvin Gaye, achieving worldwide acclaim, awards and sales. And boasted numerous hit singles, including the Billboard chart-topping sensation What’s Love Got To Do With It, the compelling covers of Let’s Stay Together and Better Be Good To Me (see here), and the slinky, world-weary title track about a hustler for hire, based on an unreleased demo by Mark Knopfler.
Turner delivers some of her finest interpretative work here as an actor and first-person narrator. And although she recorded her melancholic version with members of Dire Straits, Knopfler was strangely absent, telling Stuff, sour grapes and all, in 2009 that his song was ruined due to “them drafting in Jeff Beck to play the world’s second ugliest guitar solo.”
We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome) (1985)
After I left South East London in 2013 (Brockley’s Rivoli Ballroom, where the Private Dancer promo had been filmed, was just around the corner), I upped sticks to Richmond upon Thames. As coincidence would have it, the kid’s school choir that features on this next entry was recorded a mere ten minute’s walk from my new pad on Richmond Hill. One of the choristers in the King’s House School choral group that 1985 day included a 12-year-old Laurence Dallaglio, the future England rugby captain.
The Thunderdome subtitle refers to the use of We Don’t Need Another Hero as the main theme song for Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome, in which Tina started as Aunty Entity opposite the titular Mel Gibson character. Despite the obligatory eighties sax solo, the majestic instrumentation carries a soaring and impassioned Tina vocal I’d certainly rate the song as possibly the best of the Turner originals of the decade.
Typical Male (1986)
I suspect Private Dancer was – in Britain at least – viewed as a sort of ‘happy ending’ for Tina, and the emergence of another album in 1986 seemed to catch many rather on the back foot.
Lead single of Tina’s sixth solo set Break very Rule, the lightly poppy but fabulously fun Typical Male made No. 2 in America (behind Cyndi Lauper’s True Colors) but had to make do with a woeful 33 across there pond, joining flop 45s from Dead Or Alive, Spandau Ballet et al in an unexplained period of poor performers.
Phil Collins plays drums on the song, but don’t let that put you off. Typical Male is also unusual for a pop choon, in that the chorus includes a single measure in 2/4 time.
I Don’t Wanna Fight (1993)
With her occasionally harrowing biopic What’s Love Got To Do With It, she Tina essentially reenacted her career as timeless myth, submitting every brilliant exploit and humiliating compromise to the unmatched lust and lustre of her legendary pipes. And she rarely sounded more beautiful or more alive than on the soundtrack album’s stately lead single, the intelligently thematic I Don’t Wanna Fight, co-written by diminutive Scots diva Lulu.
It was back to the winning formula – a glossy, mid-tempo, world-weary ballad that played to every one of Turner’s strengths and ticked all the right What’s Love boxes. The evocative production values and enigmatic delivery will titillate your sensorium even if you’re not in the mood, while emphasising an artistic appeal that by this point seemed to inhere in the raw fact of her triumphant survival.
GoldenEye (1995)
On a personal note, Tina Turner remains the only artist to have recorded with arguably my two favourite recording acts, David Bowie and the Pet Shop Boys, and sing a Bond theme. For context, Lulu and (cough cough) Madonna only ever managed two of the three.
Musically, 007’s EON Productions found some ready made heavy hitters for GoldenEye, the theme tune for Pierce Brosnan’s first film as the celebrated superspy — U2’s Bono and The Edge wrote the piece, Nellee Hooper was on production duties, and one of the biggest, brassiest voices in music belted it out. And how.
You can’t fault Tina’s vocal performance. Well, you can if you’re a Welsh windbag in Monte-Carlo like Shirley Bassey (there is that note, thank you, sweetie), because the girl from Nutbush, who, with delicious irony, was living in nearby Villefranche-sur-Mer (in the foothills of the French Alps just outside Nice, from where I pen this) injects so much personality into it that you can’t help be intoxicated by the brilliantly bonkers drama of it all.
Whatever You Want (1996)
For Wildest Dreams a dazzling array of A-listers lent their assistance to what became TT’s ninth solo set, including Sting, Pet Shop Boys and, in the producer’s chair for much of the album, sonic supremo Trevor Horn. Nowhere is his huge Wall of Sound ethos more evident than on the epically complex Whatever You Want, Indeed, it’s clever Trevor’s River Deep – Mountain High refashioned per a future age.
Way before Miley Cyrus set out on her Climb, our Tina was taking us higher in a symphony of sonic majesty. Here she demonstrates how best to collaborate with Horn by embracing the histrionic drama of a song that suspensefully builds a trajectory of a woman’s desire, until it whips up a storm of juddering synth-rock electronics, powered by an incendiary Tina vocal full of guts and gusto. Masterful
When The Heartache Is Over (1999)
For Twenty Four Seven, her tenth and final solo set, Tina chose old hands and new songwriting pals to pen her grand finale. Admittedly, it takes a degree of searching to dig out the gold on a professional yet slightly bland album.
Yet the supple, soulful grace of When The Heartache Is Over allows Turner to go out on top, as her raspy resonant vocals simmer and shimmy softly across its elegant chords and glorious dance floor grandeur. This song doesn’t sound like a farewell as much as it does as a welcome home.
It Would Be A Crime (2008)
It Would Be A Crime was one of a pair of new songs that closed the far-reaching if haphazardly collated compilation album TINA!, released in conjunction with her final 50th Anniversary Tour of 2008-2009 which brought the curtain down on the live performer who remained as trademark dynamic and energetic as ever as she stared down her 70th birthday.
An inspirational slightly Disney-ish cut co-written and produced with Britpack boy Guy Chambers (Robbie Williams, Diana Ross, Kylie Minogue), the track shows off Tina’s voice as hard, confident and high in the mix. Indeed, the warm and vigorous theatricality is perfectly suited to the Chambers pop-rock sound, which she delivers with effortless ease.
Ending on a personal note, the second and sadly final time I met Tina Turner herself was during the recording of this and the other Chambers track, I’m Ready. It’s October 2006 and I’m at my personal trainer’s gym at Buspace Studios in London’s Ladbroke Grove and after the session Rob and I venture into the Asian Bistro cafe on the corner of building, for our customary post-workout lamb shank. And there she was: a vision in black, sitting there quietly and very unassumingly with a plate of chicken fried rice and a diet coke. Only much later did I realise Guy Chambers’ own bespoke recording studio Sleeper Sounds was in the next block.
It feels like a fitting way to end this article too.
Steve Pafford
With thanks to Andy Caine
