2023-05-24 21:34:32
The Best, simply the best. Inevitably, when learning of the disappearance of Tina Turner, this Wednesday at the age of 83, it is this huge tube from 1989 that instantly comes to mind. Yes, the Swiss singer was “simply the best”! Settled for thirty years in the Zurich region, the native of Nutbush, Tennessee, had obtained her naturalization in 2013, renouncing at the same time her American nationality. She died in Küsnacht in the house where she lived with her husband, the German Erwin Bach, a former executive of the major EMI, following cancer. Discreet, she had done everything to integrate into her adopted commune, voting for example regularly and financing Christmas illusions on the occasion of her 75e anniversary.
Born Anne Mae Bullock, the American had a difficult childhood – an abusive father, a resigning mother. At 18, she met the one she would marry in 1962, the singer Ike Turner. Convinced by her phenomenal vocal power and hoarse voice, he first hired her as a backing vocalist in his group Kings of Rhythm, but very quickly asked her to sing in a duet alongside him. It is he who will baptize her Tina. A real beast of the stage, she quickly becomes a real phenomenon. But in private, she suffers the law of this toxic and violent husband – a deadly relationship told in 1993 in the biopic Tinade Brian Gibson.
With their music borrowing from R’n’B and rock’n’roll, Ike & Tina Turner reached a wide audience in the 1960s, and mostly white, by opening for the Rolling Stones and being produced by Phil Spector, inventor of a famous “wall of sound” giving new depth to studio music. Titles like River Deep, Mountain High et Proud Mary, a cover inspired by a piece of Creedance Clearwater Revival, make the couple a requested duet. But behind the scenes, the one who will be nicknamed the “Queen of Rock’n’Roll” is going through an ordeal, while her husband, a cocaine addict, sinks completely and pulls her down. In 1976, she finally finds the strength to leave him, and their divorce will be officially pronounced two years later.
In 1999: After forty years on stage, Tina Turner is preparing her last tour
Released, Tina Turner aligns solo albums. The fifth, Private Dancer (1984), carried by the tube What’s Love Got to Do with It and its title track, composed by Mark Knopfler (Dire Straits), gives it superstar status. The era is rock and pop cut out for the stadiums, and the singer takes advantage of her enormous charisma to enthuse the crowds. On this disc which will sell some 12 million copies, she also resumes 1984by David Bowie, a close friend with whom she also recorded the same year a revisited cover of Tonight, by Iggy Pop. In 1985, it was with Bryan Adams that she sang It’s Only Lovewhile appearing – ten years following starring in The Who’s rock opera Tommyadapted for the cinema by Ken Russel – in the third installment of the post-apocalyptic adventures of Mad Max, Beyond the dome you thunder. She also performs the film’s central song, We Don’t Nee Another Herowhich would become one of the biggest career successes, just like GoldenEyecomposed in 1995 by Bono and The Edge of U2 for the credits of the first of the four James Bonds with Pierce Brosnan.
Tina Turner will only record two albums in the 1990s (Wildest Dreams1996; Twenty Four Seven, 1999), before retiring from public life. Beyond her image as a woman who had overcome many hardships before blossoming, she leaves that of an artist who admirably knew how to play with music which in the 1970s would experience a real revolution when the boundaries between R’n ‘B, rock, pop and funk will become more and more porous. After signing her autobiography in 1986, she published in 2020 Happiness is within you – My spiritual patha book in which she explains how the discovery of Buddhism saved her.
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