After a long illness, it was announced that Tina Turner has died at the age of 83…
OBITUARY by Ian Woolley
Ike & Tina Turner (1971)
Born Anna Mae Bullock in the small Tennessee town of Nutbush which she sang about in her 1973 hit with Ike ‘Nutbush City Limits’. Tina met Ike Turner at a performance by his band, the Kings of Rhythm, in 1956, and she soon became part of the act when it was renamed The Ike & Tina Review’.
It really all started one night after high school in 1956 when her sister took her to see to a club in St.Louis to see Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm, and the young girl was hooked. Her fortunes changed when one day she stood in for the chosen singer to sing lead on his new single ‘A Fool For Love’. Jumping at the chance, Turner gladly substituted and the single went on to be a hit in both the pop and R&B charts (where it reached no.2).
From then on the show was all about Tina. Raw energy and wearing gold wigs, short mini skirts, and attitude made them a top draw at venues around the US. The hits just came coming and her powerful vocals were perfect for up-tempo songs like ‘Proud Mary’ and ‘River Deep Mountain High’.
Behind the scenes though, Tina’s relationship with Ike was volatile and only later would she have the courage to really say about her abusive relationship with Ike. The only real surprise was that their marriage lasted so long – 16 years.
PP Arnold (in white dress) on stage with the Tina Turner Review.
In our July 2022 issue of the Beat with PP Arnold, she spoke of how Tina dealt with it all in those early days. “The music was Tina’s life and it saved her even though she was going through that abuse and everything with Ike. Tina never missed a gig and when she hit that stage every night she was on and that’s what saved you and kept you going. That’s how powerful music is.”
Cocaine and money problems reared it’s ugly head in 1976 before one show in Dallas when after a violent argument, she left Ike for good.
Two years later they were divorced. Whilst she was now able to forge her own solo career, by 1981 after several album flops nobody would take a chance on her. That all changed two years later when her cover of Al Green’s ‘Let’s Stay Together’ was a top 10 hit.
The following year, Tina became the oldest female to have a US No.1 with ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It’.
Her movie career debut was playing Aunt Entity in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and the resulting single ‘We Don’t Need Another Hero’ was another top three hit single. Over the next two decades, she would continue to have chart success and duetted with the likes of Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton and Bryan Adams. In 1995, she sang the theme to the James Bond film ‘Goldeneye’. High points in her life were singing at Live Aid duetting with Mick Jagger and appearing alongside David Bowie on a TV show.
In 1988, she broke the World record during her ‘Break Every Rule’ tour when 188,000 people packed into Rio de Janeiro’s Maracanã stadium.
Tina Turner – My Love Story
In 2018, she published her second memoir ‘Tina Turner – My Love Story‘ where she opened up about her many health scares and some of the more harrowing stories of her relationship with Ike. Whilst she was writing her book in her Swiss home, she suffered a stroke.
In an interview in 2018 Tina Turner told Entertainment’s Jim Faber, “Looking back, I realized that life has a way of turning poison into medicine, bad can turn into good. Coming through all this made me believe that I was meant to survive — that I’m here for a reason — [and] maybe to share my story, so others can learn from it.”
In her lifetime she sold over 100 million records and in 1994 moved to Switzerland. After a long illness, she died at home on May 24th. She was 83 years old.