Something beautiful remains…
Of course, it was sod’s law of the cruelest order that, in my previous post, I decided to preface a new review of Tina Turner’s brilliantly bonkers GoldenEye with paraphrased lyrics from 1984, the David Bowie song she covered on Private Dancer:
Beware the savage jaw, she’ll soon turn 84
And then just hours later the legendary lady — my favourite female live performer bar none — sadly succumbed to illness and died in Switzerland, aged 83. That hurt more than just a little bit.
What a woman Tina was though. There have been countless tributes to this incredible icon that it’s impossible to know what else I can add of note, other than to reiterate that she was the most energetic embodiment of ageless female power I will ever see.
It will always thrill me that Tina Turner has the distinction of being the only artist to have recorded with my two favourite recording acts, David Bowie and the Pet Shop Boys, and sing a Bond theme (the aforementioned GoldenEye, written for her by U2’s Bono and The Edge). For context, Lulu, who penned what turned out to be Tina’s last Top 10 hit in the US (1993’s I Don’t Wanna Fight) only ever managed two of the three, as did Madonna (cough cough).
GoldenEye was the formidable first single from TT’s 1996 album Wildest Dreams. Three days after the LP’s April 22 release, I interviewed the PSB‘s Neil Tennant for the first time, where he talked a little about the song the pop duo had placed on the record.
We wrote and co-produced the song called Confidential, on Tina’s new album. I think it might be [a single]. Her manager, Roger Davies, says it’s going to be the fourth single, but it’s her record so I can’t really say. It’s a really nice song, actually. I think it’s one of the best songs on the album, even if I do say so myself! (Laughs). But I really was very pleased with the way it turned out.
In 2001, Tennant talked further about the one-off collaboration, in the booklet of the Boys’ expanded version of their Bilingual album
This was written specifically for Tina Turner. Tina Turner had indicated to us when we worked with Liza Minnelli – we bumped into her once with Liza at film preview – that she wanted to work with us. She said, “I’m so jealous that Liza got you guys first!”. So we sat down and listened to Tina Turner’s Greatest Hits [the best-selling Simply The Best, criminally denied No. 1 glory in the UK in both 1991 and 1992 by Simply Red’s inexplicably static Stars].
We’ve always loved Let’s Stay Together, and I think we listened to the verse of We Don’t Need Another Hero. We just needed to get the idea of her voice. There’s also a sort of sound, with the sax and everything. I suppose we were trying to write something that was a little bit more r‘n’b, but I don’t think we really succeeded in that. But in particular the sax intro, which was played on an Emulator sample, definitely sounded like something from a Tina Turner record.
We wrote it at Chris’s house. Chris was writing the music and got a lovely chord change, and I saw that the headline in the Daily Mirror – Pete Gleadall reads the Daily Mirror – was CONFIDENTIAL. I think it was about a Tory sex scandal – it’s our second song to be inspired by the same person’s misbehaviour, the first one being [Dusty Springfield’s] In Private. That was on his first sex scandal.
I think it’s a weakness that Confidential has exactly the same theme as In Private: a woman who’s having a love affair with a man who’s married. Having said that, when Tina Turner recorded it, she said, “Oh yeah, I can relate to this”.
[It makes you wonder if her chequered past as one half of husband and wife duo Ike & Tina Turner was always on Neil’s mind, as he later revealed in another booklet, for their re-issued Release album, that PSB had posited an alternative idea: “We suggested she sing [a cover Bobby O’s Try It (I’m In Love With A Married Man), but she turned it down, which was a shame.”]We worked on it some more in Sarm West and I re-sang the backing vocals and put in the harmony section in the middle bit, and we did a quick mix of it and sent it to Tina’s manager. We didn’t release our version until several years later, when it was a b-side of Single-Bilingual.
For Tina’s version, which we produced with Chris Porter, we used our programming, and in fact on hers you can still hear Chris’s Emulator sax solo. There are also the same backing vocals, though I added to them. I kept turning them down but Tina kept wanting more of them. It eventually appeared on her Wildest Dreams album. I think Tina was secretly disappointed – she really wanted an It’s A sin stomper. And actually Tina Turner doing an It’s A Sin kind of thing would be great.
God bless you Tina. RIP TT.
Steve Pafford
How a middle aged woman from Tennessee pulled off the greatest comeback in music history is here
