Thatâs a proper celebrity death.
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Such a great song.
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No comment from Rory Gallagher
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Tina Turner was like a female Mick Jagger in terms of performing. Born to do it.
That hit me hard, rip Tina
I was watching Tina for n TOTP from the 80s there recently and noticed that her legs were nothing special really
How did she get that reputation?
A helluva story
Obituary
One day in 1976, a distraught Tina Turner turned up at the Ramada Inn in Dallas wearing a blood-stained white suit and with 36 cents in her purse. She had finally left her abusive husband Ike Turner after one beating too many.
The duo were meant to be playing a concert in Dallas that night but with her face âall beat up and battered and one eye swollen shutâ she had reached the end of the road. The hotel manager gave her a room and posted a security guard at her door, in case Ike should discover where she was.
By the time their divorce was finalised two years later, Turner and her children were living on food stamps. Seldom had any chart-topping star fallen so low.
With no recording contract, she was reduced to playing low-rent cocktail lounges in an attempt to pay off the $500,000 of debts with which the split had saddled her. Even her name was not her own, for Ike had copyrighted it. As part of the settlement she got to keep her name but in return Ike loaded on to her the entirety of a vast tax bill that the couple owed on their musical earnings.
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Yet her pride and self-respect were intact and she gradually began not only to rebuild her life but to stage one of the most extraordinary comebacks in showbusiness history.
With an ambitious young Australian promoter named Roger Davies installed as her new manager, she determined to break out of the cabaret circuit and refashion herself as rockâs ultimate diva.
Her first step was to call on the help of some heavyweight celebrity fans. The Rolling Stones and Rod Stewart were persuaded to book her as their support act and David Bowie intervened to get her a recording contract, telling executives at his label, EMI, that she was his âall-time favourite singerâ.
Turner on stage in 1990, in the middle of her second coming as an artist
ROB VERHORST/REDFERNS
To please their biggest star they signed her as Bowieâs vanity project but what happened next took everyone by surprise. When Turnerâs 1984 single Whatâs Love Got to Do With It went to number one, the label was caught totally unprepared. It had been five years since her previous album and EMI had not thought to record another one.
She was rushed into the studio and two weeks later emerged with Private Dancer, which included a cover of Bowieâs song 1984 as a thank you. The album went on to sell 14 million copies and won Turner three Grammy awards. The washed-up has-been had gone almost overnight from living on food stamps to rivalling Michael Jackson and Madonna as the biggest-selling solo star of the decade.
Turnerâs second coming continued with a film role in 1985âs Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, alongside Mel Gibson. The film gave her another hit single with its theme song, We Donât Need Another Hero. That same year there followed a raunchy duet with Mick Jagger, which was one of the highlights of Live Aid, and there were further multimillion-selling albums with Break Every Rule (1986) and Foreign Affair (1989). Each new release was accompanied by a spectacular world tour and a 1988 concert in Rio de Janeiro, attended by 180,000 fans, earned Turner a place in the Guinness World Records.
Such a triumphal tale of resilience in the face of adversity was tailor-made for Hollywood, and her autobiography, I, Tina, was turned into the 1993 biopic Whatâs Love Got To Do With It, starring Angela Bassett as Tina and Laurence Fishburne as a particularly unpleasant Ike.
Turner in 1964. She had two children at this point, the first with the saxophonist of Ike Turnerâs band the Kings of Rhythm, Raymond Hill
MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES
After a decade and a half back at the top, she announced she was signing out in 2000 with a farewell world tour. Despite being in her sixties she continued to wear her trademark mini-skirts, displaying the legs which President George W Bush had called âthe most famous in showbusinessâ. Her explanation for her skimpy costumes was simple. âYou canât dance in a long dress,â she said with a logic that was incontrovertible.
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She stayed retired until she was persuaded back for one last hurrah in 2008, to undertake what was billed as her 50th anniversary tour. Still not quite done, in 2013 she appeared on the cover of Vogue. At 73, she was by some way the oldest pin-up in the business.
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Tina Turnerâs most famous songs
The fairytale extravaganza of the second half of her career made it easy to overlook her earlier successes as an R&B singer with her husband, particularly as she insisted that Private Dancer should not be called her comeback album. âIt was Tinaâs debut,â she said, having become one of the tiny handful of stars who are identifiable solely by their first name.
Yet the first phase of her career with Ike, in which the duo had topped the charts with Phil Spectorâs River Deep, Mountain High, had in its way been every bit as momentous as her solo success, if considerably more troubled.
Born Annie Mae Bullock in 1938 in Nutbush, near Brownsville, Tennessee, she memorably described the rural poverty of her upbringing in the 1973 hit single Nutbush City Limits. Her home town consisted of little more than âchurch house, gin house, school-house, out-houseâ and it was in the choir of her local Baptist church that she took her first steps to becoming a singer.
Turner with her husband, Ike, in 1975. They divorced three years later, in 1978
MICHAEL PUTLAND/GETTY IMAGES
Her father, Floyd Bullock, was a sharecropper and she recalled picking cotton as a child. Her mother, Zelma (nĂŠe Currie), already had two daughters and did not want another, so âlittle Annieâ was passed around the family.
Her early years were spent living with her paternal grandparents before she was briefly reunited with her parents. When she was 11 her mother ran off to escape the abuse of her husband and she was sent to live with her maternal grandmother. The relationship with her mother remained strained all her life. âMom was not kind,â Turner later said. âWhen I became a star she was happy because I bought her a house, but she still didnât like me.â
At school she was a cheerleader and played in the girls basketball team, and a high school yearbook found her confidently predicting that she was going to be an âentertainerâ. When her grandmother died in 1954, she was sent with her older sister Alline to live once again with their mother in St Louis, Missouri.
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She took a job as a hospital orderly and by night frequented the local R&B clubs with her sister. One evening at the Club Manhattan, where Ike Turner was playing, she asked if he she could get up and sing with his band, the Kings of Rhythm.
Ike was already a formidable music industry figure as a guitarist, session musician, producer, talent scout, disc jockey and songwriter and had been the man behind Jackie Brenstonâs 1951 recording Rocket 88, frequently cited as the first rockânâroll record.
She was just 17 and Ike dismissively refused her request. A few nights later she was back and during the bandâs intermission grabbed the microphone and started belting out a BB King song.
Her impromptu performance tore the house down and Turner made her a part of his revue, initially billing her as âLittle Annâ, before he changed her name to Tina and ordered her to develop a âwildâ stage persona based on Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, a popular television series.
Turner in 1989, with the German music executive Erwin Bach. They met in 1986 and married in 2013, after a 27-year relationship
DAVE HOGAN/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
At 18 she fell pregnant by the bandâs saxophonist, Raymond Hill, who disappeared before her son Craig was born, leaving her to bring him up as a single mother.
Ike invited her to move into his house, promising that the arrangement was platonic and purely for practical purposes. Inevitably, though, it led to the arrival of another son, Ronnie, in 1960. âI didnât know how to say no because I would have been lost without him at that point because I needed the work,â she said. âI mean, I could do two things â work in a hospital or sing in Ikeâs band. I didnât know anything else.â
They married in Tijuana, Mexico, in 1962 and she adopted Turnerâs two sons from his previous marriage. Her son Craig committed suicide in 2018.
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The relationship with Ike was abusive from the outset. On stage, Tina was an indomitable force of nature. Off stage, she was enslaved. She was heavily pregnant with their son, Ronnie, when Ike administered the first beating because she disagreed with the travel arrangements he had made for the band.
âBusted lips, black eyes, dislocated joints, broken bones and psychological torment became a part of everyday life,â she wrote in her autobiography. She attempted to conceal the bruises he inflicted with layers of make-up and once sang on stage with a broken jaw.
She also revealed that his cruelty had led her to attempt suicide when she took an overdose of sleeping pills before a concert in 1968. The backstage crew rushed her to hospital, where her life was saved by a stomach pump.
Ike went to his grave in 2007 insisting that the stories of his abuse were exaggerated. âSure, Iâve slapped Tina. There have been times when I punched her to the ground. But I never beat her,â he said. The distinction was lost on all but him.
The Turnerâs with their back up dancers, known as the Ikettes, in 1968. She became a buddhist in an attempt to forgive her husband for his abuse
MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES
One of the things that got her through was that she did not turn to drugs as an escape. âWhen Ike started to do drugs, I realised he had no control, and I felt I needed all the control I could get, living in that environment,â she noted.
Instead, in 1973 she became a Buddhist. She practised chanting and mediation but still found forgiveness hard. âIke was not the sort of person it was easy to forgive,â she said. On his death in 2007 she issued a terse statement saying she hadnât had any contact with him for 30 years and would not be making any further comment. She did not attend his funeral but subsequently said she ârealised he was a sick person, an ill person at the soulâ.
Yet there is not denying that it was Ike who made Tina Turner a star and that without him Annie Mae Bullock would in all probability have remained unknown. Her first hit with Ike came in 1960 by chance. He had booked a male vocalist to record a song called A Fool In Love and when he failed to show up and with the studio time paid for, Ike asked Tina to step in.
The song made number two on the R&B chart and crossed over to the mainstream pop chart, pushing her to the forefront of the group and prompting a name change to the Ike & Tina Turner Revue. âShe really was young. She had no ambition to be a superstar,â said Jimmy Thomas, who sang background vocals for the revue. âBut when she sang, she just had it. And Ike exploited it.â
A string of further hits followed as the revue became one of the most dynamic live shows on the circuit, with Tinaâs short-skirted gyrating complemented by an equally leggy group of backing singers called the Ikettes.
Turner starred in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome in 1985, alongside Mel Gibson
ALAMY
As pop fashion and musical tastes changed, by the mid-1960s the hits had dried up, until in late 1965 Phil Spector (obituary January 17, 2021) came calling. After making some pioneering pop records earlier in the decade with girl groups such as the Crystals and the Ronettes, Spectorâs own star was also in decline, his sound having been eclipsed by the more advanced pop productions of the Beatles and the Beach Boys.
He saw the big, dramatic voice of Tina Turner as the perfect vehicle for his own renaissance on a song written with Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich and titled River Deep, Mountain High.
With a bombastic and magnificently over the top symphonic backing, River Deep, Mountain High was Spectorâs masterpiece as he laid Tinaâs vocals on top of his âwall of soundâ to create a track so thrilling that half a century later she claimed âit still gives me shiversâ. Released in Britain in 1966, the record made the top three but in America it flopped, a failure that left Spector so disillusioned that he retired from record production.
Tina enjoyed working with Spector â or more specifically she enjoyed working without her husband. âIke would always have me screaming and shouting on his songs to sell them,â she said. âPhil Spector just asked me to stick to the melody and to use my voice to tell the story.â
That there were no more records with Spector was a relief to Ike. Both men were control freaks and Spector reportedly paid him $20,000 to stay out of the studio while Tina recorded. As soon as Ike was back in charge, he returned to cheapskate, low-budget recordings for small, independent labels and the hits dried up once more.
The duoâs fortunes revived when the Rolling Stones asked them on the road in 1969 as their opening act, an invitation largely down to Mick Jaggerâs unrequited lust for Tina.
Turner played the Acid Queen in Ken Russellâs 1975 film Tommy. A song from the album of the same name accompanied the movie
ALAMY
Astutely adjusting their sound to appeal to white rock audiences, the change of style returned Ike and Tina to the charts with covers of the Beatlesâ Come Together and Credence Clearwater Revivalâs Proud Mary, the latter giving the duo their first American top ten hit in 1971.
However, their partnership was fraying badly as an increasingly assertive Tina tired of Ikeâs violent behaviour. Their final hit as a duo came with 1973âs Nutbush City Limits. Away from Ike she played the Acid Queen in Ken Russellâs 1975 film of The Whoâs rock opera, Tommy, and to the surprise of no one, she left her husband for good the following year.
Asked why she had put up with his violence for so long, she replied, âMaybe I was brainwashed. I was afraid of him, and I knew that if I left, there was no one to sing.â Like many victims of domestic abuse, she blamed herself and said she had felt âashamedâ. Ike begged her to complete a scheduled tour with him to prevent the promoter suing for loss of earnings but she knew she had to make a clean break and refused.
As she rebuilt her career away from Ike, she also found personal contentment.
âI have not received love almost ever in my life. I did not have it with my mother and my father from the beginning of birth, and I survived,â she said in her 1986 memoir I, Tina. âWhy did I get so far without love? I have had not one love affair that was genuine and sustained itself. Not one.â
Straight after the book was published she met Erwin Bach, a German music executive 16 years her junior, who had been sent by her European record label to meet her at DĂźsseldorf Airport.
âHe was just so different,â she said. âSo laid back, so comfortable, so unpretentious, and I needed love.â They set up home together in Zurich although they did not formally marry until 2013, when Turner also took Swiss citizenship, In addition to her main lakeside home, Château Algonquin, she also had homes in Cologne, London and Los Angeles, and a villa on the French Riviera.
Her later years were dogged by ill health. Shortly after her wedding she suffered a stroke and had to learn to walk and talk again. Three years later she was diagnosed with intestinal cancer. Kidney failure followed and she considered assisted suicide until Bach offered to donate one of his kidneys. She underwent a transplant in 2017 and her resilience in the face of adversity had won out yet again.
Throughout her illness she worked with the director Phyllida Lloyd on a stage musical based on her life story which opened in the West End in 2018 and transferred to Broadway the following year, with Adrienne Warren in the lead role.
âPeople think my life has been tough, but I think it has been a wonderful journey,â she said. âThe older you get, the more you realise itâs not what happens, but how you deal with it.â
Tina Turner, the queen of rockânâroll, was born on November 26, 1939. She died after a long illness on May 24, 2023, aged 83
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Ike was one hell of a cunt.
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To be fair you are more of a transvestite strip-tease man for kids as youâve mentioned recently. So your opinion on legs might be a bit skewed.
She was a stunning Woman, long long after her prime. She had an incredible chassis, aside from all her other qualities.
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Here you go buddy.
Jeez, thatâs a truly weird comment, no surprise where itâs come from 
You brought transvestites into the conversation, buddy. Iâm just giving you what you wanted.
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Mate, Iâm not the one with the weird views.
Nam myoho renge kyo
Itâs pretty weird that youâd choose this thread to bring up a comment that I made some months ago that youâd be more likely to die from a gunshot than attending a book reading
Very weird indeed 
Whatâs love scot to do, scot to do with it.
RIP. Hell of a voice
Ding, ding, ding.
Sick for a very long time.
A true great.
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