An almighty soul tempest: How Tina Turner’s elemental voice spanned many eras

From fiery R&B to Seventies funk-rock to high-gloss Eighties pop – Mark Beaumont traces the musical journey of a true original

Under the stage name Tina Turner, she would become one of the most successful, celebrated and thunderous voices in R&B, soul, funk and pop music (Shutterstock)

Wherever she went – on screen, on stage, in life – Tina Turner wouldn’t be ignored. There she went, sashaying around New York in the video for “What’s Love Got to Do with It”, facing off against street gangs and bawling in the faces of the sidewalk dancers, all legs, pout and lion’s mane. Here she came, prowling across a paddock with equine grace singing “The Best”. Look at her, careening across the stage of 1965 concert film The Big TNT Show, hip-shaking and jitterbugging with her backing singers the Ikettes in a tornado of minidress mania. Whatever transpired, there was no holding her back, no keeping her down, no looking away.

It was there from the very beginning, the making of her. During an intermission of a show by Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm at St Louis’s Manhattan Club one night in 1957, the 18-year-old Anna Mae Bullock, from Brownsville, Tennessee, talked her way onto the microphone. Bullock was a huge fan of Turner – a one-time Sun Records producer who’d released what has been considered the first ever rock’n’roll song in 1951’s “Rocket 88”. She’d asked to sing with his band, but he’d never called. Undeterred, she stepped up and grabbed the mike anyway, belting out B B King’s “You Know I Love You” in a raw, firebrand voice later described by one label boss as like “screaming dirt”.

Even then, she already had a whole lifetime of hurt to get out. Abandoned by both parents by the age of 13, after a loveless early life marred by her father Floyd’s violence. Freshly grieving the grandmother who had taken her in through her teenage years, and the sister, Evelyn, whom she’d lost in a car crash. Channelling her pain into powerful, impassioned song with the Nutbush Spring Hall Baptist Church choir, or in childhood street performances that saw bystanders shower her with money, grew into a compulsion to perform.