Tina Turner, Queen of Rock & Roll, Dead at 83

Name: Tina Turner, Queen of Rock & Roll, Dead at 83
Uploaded: 2023-05-24T22:29:19+03:00
Channel: Radio Flora TM
Description: Tina Turner COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION The singer was most known for hits including The Best and Proud Mary, and boasted a music career spanning six decades.

May 24, 2023 133 17 5

The singer was most known for hits including The Best and Proud Mary, and boasted a music career spanning six decades.

Her publicist confirmed the news of her death to PA, explaining that she suffered a long illness.

In a statement, they said: ‘Tina Turner, the “Queen of Rock’n Roll” has died peacefully today at the age of 83 after a long illness in her home in Kusnacht near Zurich, Switzerland.

‘With her, the world loses a music legend and a role model.’

The American-Swiss singer, who was born Anna Mae Bullock in Nutbush, Tennessee, won eight competitive Grammy Awards and has a star on both the Hollywood Walk of Fame and the St Louis Walk of Fame.

She had suffered ill-health in recent years, being diagnosed with intestinal cancer in 2016 and having a kidney transplant in 2017.

The ‘Proud Mary’ hitmaker first rose to prominence as the lead singer of the Ike and Tina Turner Revue before launching a successful career as a solo performer.

During more than 60 years in the spotlight, she transformed notions about aging, opportunity and resilience, most notably with her landmark album Private Dancer, which launched her to solo superstardom (finally) at age 44.

Turner’s comeback began in 1982, when Heaven 17, the British synth-pop band, recruited her for a remake of the Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion.” The song led to a new record deal for Turner with Capitol. Turner’s manager, Roger Davies, then suggested that she and Heaven 17’s Martyn Ware cut a remake of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” which hit the top 30 in the U.S. With that, and the support of her friend David Bowie, Turner began recording her Capitol debut, Private Dancer. Reflecting the way she and Davies wanted to integrate synthesizers and more contemporary production touches, they cut songs like “What’s Love Got to Do With It” by British songwriter Terry Brittan. Although Turner disliked the demo of the song, she later said she was urged to make it “a bit rougher, a bit more sharp around the edges.”

With that, she reclaimed the song, which spent three weeks at No. 1, became an MTV staple and rebooted Turner’s career in a way that rarely happened for Sixties veterans on her level. By refusing to sound retro and showcasing her voice in a way that hadn’t been done in at least a decade, Private Dancer introduced Turner (and her MTV-perfect wigs, stiletto heels, and fishnet stockings) to a new, younger audience. “What’s Love Got to Do with It” walked away with four Grammys (including two for Turner, for Pop Vocal Performance, Female and Rock Vocal Performance, Female). In another sign of her determination, Turner performed the song live during the telecast despite having the flu.

The triumph of Private Dancer was only the beginning of Turner’s relaunch into pop culture. . The following year, she starred as the villainous Auntie Entity alongside Mel Gibson in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (which included another hit, “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)”), partook in the all-star “We Are the World” session, and commanded the stage at Live Aid alongside Mick Jagger.. (Thanks to it all, she later wrote, she had “enough money to pay off all those debts I had.”) In 1986, her first memoir, I, Tina, cowritten with then-RS writer Kurt Loder, was published and became a best-seller. “One of the Living,” another song she cut for the Mad Max movie, won a Best Female Rock Performance Grammy in 1985.

At the movies, Turner had iconic roles as the Acid Queen in the Who’s rock opera Tommy (1975) and as the ruthless Aunty Entity in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). On television, she was a fixture on variety shows, on MTV and in commercials, most notably as the face (and legs) of a $20 million campaign for Hanes hosiery, which hired her at 56 to energize the brand.

But it was her harrowing 1986 memoir, I, Tina, in which she revealed ex-husband Ike Turner’s 16-year reign of terror, her escape and rise from economic ruin that sealed her most enduring role — as inadvertent activist.

“Do you realize you’re a feminist hero?” Larry King asked her in 1997. “I’m beginning to,” she said.

A redemption tale told in chilling detail, her book brought critical light to a mostly hidden crisis, inspiring a feature film, the Angela Bassett-starring What’s Love Got to Do With It (1993), and the acclaimed 2018-19 Broadway and West End production Tina: The Tina Turner Musical.

With her fringed miniskirts, taut frame, flying hair and swagger — all shocking early on — and a peerless rock ‘n’ soul catalog, Turner honed a stage act that came to fill stadiums, drawing crowds exceeding those brought in by the likes of The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen and Queen.

During 1988’s “Break Every Rule” tour, the two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Famer — she was voted in as a solo artist in May 2021 — shattered box office records in 13 countries and attracted 180,000 fans to Maracanã Stadium to see her perform in Brazil.

“I had that strange voice that most girl singers didn’t have,” Turner told CBS’ Gayle King in 2019 about her affinity for rock music. “In the beginning, I thought it was kind of ugly because it didn’t sound like Diana Ross, but then afterward I thought, ‘Yeah, it sounds like the guys.’”

Renowned for seemingly limitless stamina, Turner claimed to have no special workout regimen other than staying active, eating well and “never smoking, never drinking and never doing drugs.”

Through her final concerts before retirement at age 69, she was still tearing through the same choreography she had invented in the ’60s as well as continuing with a nightly heart-stopping stunt, during which she’d sail over the arena floor — unharnessed — in a cherry-picker, then dance in stilettos on the crane’s slim hydraulic arm.

Over the decades, she traversed Grammy categories, using a four-octave range to move seamlessly from R&B to rock and pop, winning trophies in all three genres. She created an inescapable batch of ’80s and ’90s hits — among them “(Simply) The Best,” “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” “Better Be Good to Me” and “I Don’t Wanna Fight.”

But she was equally known for remaking songs that were already perfect: Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” The Beatles’ “Help!” and John Fogerty’s “Proud Mary,” which became her career-long anthem.

She said she was relieved when she heard the first playback of her recording of Green’s classic. “It was just my version,” she told BET, “but staying right with [his] same sound and not destroying that.” Years later, Green sang the song back to her during her Kennedy Centers Honors tribute in 2005.

Meant to be a stand-alone single overseas, Turner’s “Let’s Stay Together,” following her absence of more than 10 years from pop radio, seemed to come out of nowhere in 1983. When the song climbed the charts, first in the U.K. and then in the U.S., stunned record execs scrambled to create an album to go with it.

Recorded in England in just two weeks, Private Dancer — with its sultry title track written by Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler — was released in May 1984. By the time Turner arrived stateside for a summer tour opening for Lionel Richie, “What’s Love Got to Do With It” had caught fire on the way to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Still, she stayed on as Richie’s opener, playing courteous 25-minute sets, careful to not upstage him. Just a few months later they would celebrate their multiple Grammy victories together.

Asked by Oprah Winfrey in 2013 what she thought her legacy would be, Turner replied, “Endurance.”

“My legacy is that I stayed on course from the beginning until the end,” she added. “I believed in something inside of me that told me you can make something better. My legacy is a person who strived for something better — and got it.”