Worshipped by everyone from Mick Jagger to Beyonce Knowles, Tina Turner has an incredible catalogue of hits that shimmy between R&B and rock genres with ease. As her Private Dancer album celebrates its 35th anniversary this month – and ahead of the celebrated singer’s 80th birthday in November - I Like Your Old Stuff takes a dig through Tina’s 2018 autobiography, My Love Story, for a dozen fascinating facts from David Bowie’s “favourite singer”…
1. While backstage at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 1966 supporting The Rolling Stones, Tina Turner and her dancers taught Mick Jagger their dance ‘The Pony’, which he later adapted into his own trademark dancing style. “Not that he ever gave me and the girls credit for his fancy new footwork,” Turner noted in her autobiography.
2. On the night following her quickie wedding to the notorious Ike Turner in Tijuana, Mexico in 1962, her new husband forced her to attend a live sex show. Tina was so mortified she was unable to even mention the horrible evening for decades.
3. After forging a strong friendship when he supported Tina on 1985’s Private Dancer Tour, Bryan Adams reunited with his former duet partner to perform “All For Love” (his 1993 collaboration with Rod Stewart and Sting) at her 2013 wedding to Erwin Bach.
4. Sweating after recording so many takes of “River Deep - Mountain High” for producer Phil Spector in 1966, Tina ripped off her shirt and performed in her bra. “The reaction in the studio was bigger than Ben Hur,” she admits in My Love Story.
5. After the birth of her son Ronnie in 1960, Tina was back on stage to perform gigs just two days later under Ike’s brutal regime: “no show meant no money”.
6. When Bono presented Tina with the demo for the song "GoldenEye", it had none of the orchestral bluster which was eventually added to the song which soundtracked the James Bond film of the same name in 1996. It “was just little snippets of music that didn’t add up to a real melody,” Tina suggests. “He realised it was really bad.”
7. Tina Turner’s 1988 concert at Maracana Stadium in Brazil earned her a spot in the Guinness Book Of World Records for “the most tickets sold by a solo performer”. She performed to more than 180,000 fans.
8. In early 1983, David Bowie excused himself from going out to dinner with EMI execs in New York by telling them he had to go see his favourite singer: Tina Turner. Tina suggests Bowie’s recommendation “started a stampede” of record execs falling over themselves to sign her, with Tina eventually siding with Capitol. Alongside Bowie at the January 27 show at the Ritz were fellow fans John McEnroe and Keith Richards.
9. Before starring in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome alongside Mel Gibson, Steven Spielberg approached Tina to play Shug Avery in his film The Color Purple. She turned him down as “the story was uncomfortably close to the story of my life with Ike”.
10. After leaving the abusive Ike, Tina turned to television show appearances in the late ‘70s to pay the bills. She appeared on programs including Hollywood Squares and The Sonny & Cher Show.
11. While Tina says she was prevented from accessing her earnings by Ike throughout their relationship, she still managed to land herself a Jaguar in 1970. Sammy Davis Jr gave the “gorgeous white XJ6” to Tina after they performed a show together in Las Vegas.
12. Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler had written Private Dancer with the plan to record it himself, but Tina says his version sounded “very butch! Like something you’d hear in a pub, after too many pints”. The song became the title track of her 1984 hit album, bringing with it an incredible upwards lift in her career.
Get the 30th Anniversary reissue of Simply The Best on limited edition blue vinyl, here.
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