The Queen of Rock and Roll - Tina Turner

Tina Turner's solo career famously ignited 15 years ago, but we all know the epic tale that had already spun out before Private Dancer came to be. When you look at the dates, you might think your calculator is on the blink. That voracious passion for baring her soul in the studio and on stage has now been on public record for more than 45 years. In her seminal soul tome Nowhere To Run, writer Gerri Hirshey talks of the vocal performance at a 1953 session by a barely teenage Tina Turner as sounding like "a starving child singing for its supper," and the better part of half a century later she still has that same appetite.

Born in Brownsville, Tennessee and raised nearby in the "li'l ol' town" of Nutbush just like the song says, Anna Mae Bullock and her older sister Alline relocated to St.Louis in 1956. Tina Turner knew rejection only too well even then, the sisters having been deserted by their mother and later their father, and when Tina Turner first asked the leader of local club favourites the Kings of Rhythm if she could sing with them, the answer from Ike Turner was another firm no.

Persistence, as we know, paid off. Ike and Tina Turner, as she now was, were married in 1958 and Tina began regular work as the band's singer, but their first historic single together still only happened by one of those fateful chances that the record industry seems to specialise in. In the autumn of 1960, the session singer booked to record Ike's A Fool In Love didn't show. Tina stepped in, an R&B smash and US Top 30 pop crossover ensued, and soon the band was going by a new name: the Ike & Tina Turner Revue.

The duo's track record in the '60s and early '70s, both on cast-iron anthems like River Deep, Mountain High and Nutbush City Limits and lesser-feted soul classics like I Can't Believe What You Say, is the stuff of legend, as, sadly, is the violent disintegration of the Turners' marriage. But, emboldened by her newly-found Buddhist faith and big-screen solo success as the Acid Queen in The Who's Tommy, Tina Turner struck out on her own in the summer of 1976.

At first, she stood at the bottom of what seemed an impossible mountain of debts and disinterest from the industry. While other soul divas made good in a world that she had inspired them to enter, Tina was living for a time on food stamps. Her name still got her onto TV game shows and then the supper club circuit in Las Vegas, then in 1979, Tina Turner met Roger Davies, a young Australian manager who'd recently relocated to Los Angeles and took the challenge of redefining one of the great lost vocalists and performers of the age.

With Davies' help, TinaTurner refound the rock 'n' roll raunch of her best records, infused it with her intuitive soulfulness, and started again. A 1981 support slot on the Rolling Stones' US tour led to an invitation from Heaven 17's Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware for Tina Turner to take part on their multi-artist Music Of Quality And Distinction Volume 1 album. Before the end of 1982, she had a new solo deal with Capitol Records.

By the summer of 1984, fuelled by the acclaim that met the leadoff single What's Love Got To Do With It, Private Dancer was on its way to world sales of 11 million.

What's followed has been an extraordinary catalogue of collaborations and achievements on record, on the big screen and as an author: a role as Aunty Entity alongside Mel Gibson in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome; a duet with Mick Jagger at the greatest live event in music history, Live Aid; a raft of Grammy Awards; a bestselling autobiography, I, Tina, leading to the hit biopic What's Love Got To Do With It; record and concert dates with avowed Tina Turner fans like Bryan Adams, Rod Stewart, Elton John, David Bowie, Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler; and record-breaking concert tours including sellout shows in such singular locations as the Maracana Stadium in Rio and England's Woburn Abbey;her U2 penned smash hit from the Bond movie Goldeneye and her stadium tour of Europe in 96/96 saw her smash box office records in ten countries playing to over 3 million people.

Courtesy of the official Tina Turner Web Site