Tina Turner Appreciation Thread -- For Fans


"By the time Tina Turner released her hit song "What's Love Got to Do With It" in 1984, she had already seen her career rise and fall.

The song had been written by two British guys, Terry Britten and Graham Lyle, who offered it to Cliff Richard, the Brit rock and roller, who turned it down. A few more singers, including Donna Summer, reportedly considered it for a while. Maybe they found the lyrics a little hard to put across:

"What's love got to do, got to do with it?" seems to ask, "Am I feeling loveā€”or something dangerous? Will I just get hurt again? What does love actually do for anyone, anyway?"

As it's so piercingly phrased, and left to hang in our minds: "Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?"

By this time Tina Turner was 44 years old. She had been playing gigs on what used to be known as a "nostalgia circuit," where she sang old hits in casinos and county fairs ..."
 
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Tina onstage with the Rolling Stones.

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Any news yet on her most likely sales spike since passing away?
oh god, I did see something but didn't capture it. Gah! Keep getting distracted by the photos of her. She looked so freakin' awesome all the time.
 
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BBC tv interview with Martyn Ware (ex-Heaven 17) who worked with Tina in the comeback phase of her career and Graham Wright who was one of Tina's roadies. Graham briefly mentions the Wildest Dreams tour, 134 gigs, 98 arenas, 36 stadiums, running from May - Dec 1996. Presumably that was the leg of the tour he worked on. Wiki has extra info: 250 shows, starts April 1996, ends August 1997. The European leg alone sold 3 million tickets and generated an estimated US$100m. The tour further grossed around US$30 million in North America.

7m 35s

 
Tina Turner singing Let's Stay Together on the Tube in 1983. Martyn Ware on backing vocals having a blast.

Happy, happy memories of watching this first time around. :)

5m 26s

 
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Just need to blow the UK trumpet here, just a little bit. So proud that so many UK musicians helped Tina get her career going again. Not that she ever gave up - she wasn't helpless - but she was facing a lot of indifference from the music industry and she was on the 'nostalgia' circuit which is fine but it isn't where she needed to be, not with that amount of talent and the huge success she'd already had. She was working really hard and her manager, Roger Davies, was absolutely key to her success. But Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart, David Bowie all did stuff to help her and I think that is so cool.

In 1982, Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh of B.E.F. released Music of Quality and Distinction Volume One, an album which involved other artists covering classic songs. Tina did a cover of 'Ball of Confusion', it caught the attention of Capitol Records and they offered her a record contract. In November 1983 she released her version of 'Let's Stay Together' which Martyn Ware co-produced. The song peaked at No.6 in the UK. Went Top 20 in the US. Capitol Records gave Tina two weeks to record an album. That album was Private Dancer. And the rest is history.

Or 'herstory'. :)
 
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"Tina Turner's Ā£58m Swiss weekend retreat is reportedly set to be turned into museum.

The sprawling property in StƤfa is situated just 30 minutes away from the mansion which she lived in with husband Erwin Bach, on the banks of Lake Zurich.

Following, Tina's death at the age of 83 last week, it is now being claimed that her widower plans to use it to showcase memorabilia from the late superstar' career ..."



And there's also this:


"When Tina Turner, resident in Switzerland, read in Bilanz magazine that her old school in Tennessee was being turned into a museum, she assumed it must be a local white school from the era of Jim Crow racial segregation, perhaps with her name appended after the fact.

Then she realised it really was Flagg Grove School, the one-room schoolhouse attended by the young Anna Mae Bullock (AKA Tina Turner), having been built by her great uncle in 1889. ā€œImmediately then I became excited and got involved,ā€ Turner says in a video on the website of what is now the Tina Turner Museum containing memorabilia including costumes, gold records and her high school yearbook ..."
 
@filmandmusic

There's also this:

"To commemorate the lifetime of a true once-in-a-generation talent, we've crunched the numbers to reveal a newly-updated look at Tina Turner's Top 20 most-streamed tracks of all time in the UK."

 
When I came across that tweet I could hardly believe the video footage of her up on the cherry picker. No safety rails!

O me of little faith!

"Hanging over the railing a dozen feet above the crowd, there wasn't a hint of fear in Turner, but she upped the ante by prancing down the cherry picker's long, rail free ramp -- in heels, no less! -- that couldn't have been more than a foot wide. It's a stunt Britney Spears wouldn't even likely attempt, but Turner pulled it off with grace, moxie and effortless style."

 
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