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.

As intended, her few stolen minutes in the spotlight caught Turner’s ear; she sang with the band for the rest of the night, and many nights more. A turbulent fate was set. Under the stage name Tina Turner – forced upon her by her future husband (and violent abuser) Ike – she would become one of the most successful, celebrated and thunderous voices in R&B, soul, funk and pop music. She would arguably be the most eye-popping performer of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, too. Ike’s wildcat guitar-playing met its perfect match in her untamed vocals and frenzied performance. Her bottomless lungs lifted Phil Spector’s orchestrations to make 1966’s “River Deep – Mountain High” the pinnacle of Spector’s 1960s productions, the Wall of Sound expanded into a continent-straddling edifice. With “Nutbush City Limits” she redrew the county lines of early Seventies funk-soul to encompass a party metropolis. And over eight wilderness years following her split from Ike, she rebuilt her career from the ground up, becoming an icon of 1980s pop-rock and, with over 100 million album sales, the first woman over 40 to top the Billboard chart. The woman hailed the Queen of Rock’n’Roll, with – according to official insurance valuations – three-million-dollar legs.

Bullock was credited simply as Little Ann for her first recording, as vocalist on Ike Turner’s 1958 single “Boxtop” alongside R&B singer and saxophonist Carlson Oliver, but her multi-platinum potential would soon become self-evident. Two years later, when regular Turner associate Art Lassiter failed to show up to record a pedestrian R&B jive called “A Fool in Love”, Bullock suggested she sing the song instead. Turner decided to record a demo of the track, intending to eventually replace her vocals with Lassiter’s. But on reaching the ears of Sue Records in New York, her breathtaking wails and howls – rich, defiant, often confidently high-wire – made the song a million-selling crossover pop hit in 1960, one of the first to break out of the US R&B chart.

Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm were rebranded as the Ike and Tina Turner Revue (two years before the pair married), and though many of their subsequent early-Sixties R&B and Stax-style releases failed to match the mainstream success of “A Fool in Love” – “I Idolize You”, “I’m Jealous”, and their 1961 debut album The Soul of Ike and Tina Turner were strictly R&B scene hits – Bullock’s powerhouse vocals always stole the show. If Ike’s spoken-word baritone contributions to 1961’s Grammy-nominated “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine” single, their biggest hit of the early Sixties, threw back to the buttoned-down big band rock’n’roll of the Big Bopper, Tina’s passionate gospel-soul bellow was far more in step with the raw, liberated attitude of Aretha Franklin and the Hamburg-era Beatles. It’s what made the Ike and Tina Turner Revue one of the most barnstorming acts on the unforgiving Chitlin’ Circuit, as Tina and her troupe of dancing back-up singers the Ikettes made for a tempestuous, hot-stepping spectacle.

Tina and Ike Turner performing in 1974 (Kent/Mediapunch/Shutterstock)

While a slew of live albums – Ike & Tina Turner Live (1964) and Live! The Ike & Tina Turner Show (1965) – attempted to capture this potent experience for the listeners at home, the pair’s studio albums, such as 1963’s Don’t Play Me Cheap and It’s Gonna Work Out Fine, tested the worthiest scenery for Tina’s voice. There were lush orchestrations, ballroom atmospheres, brassy blues, funk-pop showstoppers, Bacharach lounge-pop tunes, even a “Locomotion”-style signature dance track encouraging fans to do the “Tinaroo”. It’s tempting now to find coded clues to the couple’s troubled home life in some of this early material – “My man, meanest little man, my man” Tina sang with some conviction, covering Willie Dixon’s “My Babe” in 1966.

The hunt culminated in 1965, when Phil Spector saw the Revue play on Sunset Strip and invited them to perform a six-song medley as the big finale of concert film The Big T.N.T. Show. Spector signed the group to his Philles Records label, and threw the full enormity of his Wall of Sound technique at their 1966 album River Deep – Mountain High, filling the studio with musicians layering multiple guitar, piano and orchestral parts to monstrous effect. The title track has come to epitomise Spector’s vision, and to stand as the grandest 1960s showcase for Tina’s voice. Her tour de force performance renders the intensity of romantic devotion as an elemental landscape, sounding as if it was sung from some cloud-breaking peak. That it was a hit only in Europe and Australia remains one of the Sixties’ biggest errors of judgement; entering reclusive decline as a result, Spector withdrew from recording for two years, and the album would only be released in America in 1969.

Whatever transpired, there was no holding her back, no keeping her down, no looking away

By then, releasing on a total of 10 labels in the late Sixties, Ike & Tina had evolved to keep pace with the heavy blues revival on albums such as Outta Season and The Hunter, and were tearing up Vegas audiences that included Elvis, James Brown, Elton John and David Bowie. The couple were on the cusp of greatness. As they further embraced blues, funk, country and rock textures on their two 1970 albums Come Together and Workin’ Together, Tina came into her own as an imaginative reinterpreter of contemporary song, unearthing a desperate emotion in The Stones’ “Honky Tonk Woman” and The Beatles’ “Come Together”. Their cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary” reworked the hit track into an “easy” doo-wop opening section and “rough” funk-rock second half, shunting the original clean off the road with sheer horsepower. It came to encapsulate Tina’s enchanting yet explosive appeal, and made the pair bona fide stars, selling a million copies in 1971 and earning them a Grammy.

Tina Turner performing in 1978 (Andre Csillag/Shutterstock)

Mainstream success inspired Tina to a certain degree of creative autonomy. She began writing more songs, penning almost all of 1972’s Feel Good album and half of 1973’s Nutbush City Limits. The title track, the pair’s last major hit together, exemplified the personal aspects emerging in these songs, revisiting the church houses, gin shacks and everyday routines of Tina’s hometown on an ebullient glam-funk road trip (T Rex’s Marc Bolan is rumoured to have played guitar). Her debut solo album, a collection of soulful, sophisticated country covers titled Tina Turns the Country On!, appeared in 1974, and her star power practically fried the screen during her cameo appearance as the Acid Queen in Ken Russell’s 1975 film adaptation of The Who’s rock opera Tommy. Turner owns the movie, upstaging even Elton John’s Pinball Wizard and transforming Pete Townshend’s portrait of a drug-pushing sex worker into an almighty soul tempest. Her scene-stealing performance even prompted a second solo album, Acid Queen (1975), on which she turned similar tricks on further Who songs, The Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together”, and a sultry funk take on Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love”.

Though now accepted into the upper echelons of the 1970s musical fraternity as she wound her way towards stadium ubiquity, Turner was on a rocky road. After she split from Ike following a particularly violent altercation in Dallas in 1976, the singer found her solo career stalled over the course of two albums – Rough (1978) and Love Explosion (1979). Their R&B ballads and funk-soul tracks worked to her strengths, but the more disco and gloss-rock productions often tempered and tamed her vocal fireworks (a rip-roaring version of John’s “The Bitch Is Back” being one exception). Taking on a sexier stage image from 1977, she found herself touring the cabaret circuit as a nostalgia act until the A-listers started throwing her a lifeline.

Tina Turner performing in 1979 (ITV/Shutterstock)

In 1981, Rod Stewart invited her to sing “Hot Legs” with him on Saturday Night Live, while The Stones took her on an American tour as their opening act. And in 1983, David Bowie used a New York dinner celebrating his new contract with Capitol to convince the bigwigs to come with him to watch “my favourite singer” – Turner – perform at the Ritz club. As owners of the Universal Artists catalogue, Capitol had dropped Turner following Love Explosion; in the wake of the Ritz performance, they re-signed her and had an instant hit with her slick synth-soul cover of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together”, co-produced by Martyn Ware of The Human League and Heaven 17.

Turner’s resurgence in the 1980s came just in time for her to join the pop super leagues

The album that followed, 1984’s Private Dancer, seemed to fall into place around Turner like fine furs. As an original 1960s diva she was a natural icon for the glamour-worshipping 1980s pop scene (see also the rehabilitations of Diana Ross, Dusty Springfield and Patti Labelle, among others). Having become a favourite of the rock establishment, she was also a fitting collaborator for Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler, who wrote the title track, a pole-dancer’s lament that doubled as a knowing comment on the merciless pop machine from which Turner still bore scars, and for Jeff Beck, who played its solo. And where disco’s sharp edges had sometimes clashed with her overpowering bellows, the smoother, sleeker tones of mid-Eighties R&B, smooth jazz and synth-rock mirrored her elder-stateswoman-of-soul class. Crucially, they didn’t inhibit the essential richness of a voice that, according to the Los Angeles Times, “melts vinyl”. It’s what made the album’s biggest single “What’s Love Got to Do with It” – previously offered to Cliff Richard, Donna Summer and Bucks Fizz – Turner’s only US No 1 hit, and the album a 12-million-selling Eighties classic.

Tina Turner and David Bowie filming a Pepsi Cola advert together in 1987 (Live Press/Shutterstock)

Turner’s resurgence came just in time for her to join the pop super leagues, singing on “We Are the World” and at Live Aid, and to throw herself into that curious period when pop stars like Bowie, Madonna, Prince and Sting made forays into blockbuster cinema. But then few others could have convincingly portrayed the villainous Aunt Entity in 1985’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and carried its mountain-high theme tune “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)”.

Break Every Rule (1986) came with another starry contributor list – Knopfler, Bowie, Phil Collins, Steve Winwood, Bryan Adams – and a gleaming Eighties pop sound, but it didn’t contain any tracks of legend, and coasted to the top of charts worldwide on the back of Private Dancer’s reputation. Making a fine fist of songs resembling Dire Straits (“What You Get Is What You See”), Collins (“Two People”), and standard MTV pop, Turner looked in danger of becoming successful by association, until 1989’s 6-million-selling Foreign Affair re-established a little of her gritty roadhouse identity, albeit as expensively restyled as a Chelsea whisky bar. “Steamy Windows” took a limo ride around Nutbush’s city limits, and “The Best” was an instant signature tune. This was the Queen of Rock’n’Roll perusing her realm from the plushest of throne rooms.

Tina Turner in 1985 film ‘Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome’ (Moviestore/Shutterstock)

Next stop, deification. Turner celebrated the launch of her 1993 biopic What’s Love Got to Do with It with a soundtrack album of re-recorded Ike & Tina tracks and an impressively modern R&B hit in “I Don’t Wanna Fight”. Then she took up her rightful place in the Bond theme hall of greats, purring delectably through “GoldenEye” (only let down by Bono and The Edge’s distinctly un-heroic tune). Sheryl Crow, the Pet Shop Boys, Sting and even Antonio Banderas flocked to contribute to the subsequent album Wildest Dreams (1996), but by now success had frozen this once endlessly adaptable singer in lucrative gloss-pop aspic, although the tech-rock production on “Whatever You Want” and her thrilling cover of Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy” did fine service to her contemporary ear.

Turner’s final album before retiring from recording in 2000 was 1999’s Twenty Four Seven, an unfittingly generic electro-R&B swansong that perhaps suggested that, now she had reached the very top, mainstream pop held no further challenges for her. But her canon speaks of far wider achievements; a proud and affirming testament that roaring, compulsive talent rises, survives and ultimately triumphs. The best? Undoubtedly up there.