He had been retired from music since 2009, when he turned 70. Shortly after, Tina Turner settled permanently in the Swiss city of Küsnacht, where she lived much of her life, together with the German music producer Erwin Bach, whom she married in 2013 at the age of 73 (he was 57) after twenty-seven years of marriage. relationship. That same year, Ella Turner suffered a stroke and three years later she learned that she had colon cancer.
Recognized worldwide as ‘Queen of Rock and Roll’, Tina Turner will always be remembered for her energetic live performances, her outlandish outfits, her power on stage, and above all for her torrential and heartbreaking voice with which she lifted stadiums.
Seeing her in her element, on stage, was – and is – an absolutely impressive spectacle due to the leonine and contagious energy she exuded. Turner danced and dominated the stage from end to end with the fierceness of the best rocker, a vitality that she always transmitted to the audience.
Turner – always hard-working, always volcanic – created a new, very warlike and powerful style of performing that paved the way and many artists tried to imitate. Mick Jagger himself has said on many occasions that he learned the way she moves on stage from her great friend Tina Turner.
In her more than 50 years in the world of music, the singer, songwriter, and also actress, was recognized worldwide for her impressive performances, where her songs were accompanied by a spectacular way of dancing and moving, in which all The gaze went straight to her powerful and hypnotic legs.
Throughout her career, the “Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll” achieved more than 200 million albums sold and an entire legacy gathered in 22 albums, 12 studio albums, 3 live albums and 7 compilations. She also received eight Grammys from more than twenty nominations.
The artist managed to place a dozen songs in the Top 40, including hits like “Typical Male”, “The Best”, “Private Dancer”, “Better Be Good to Me” and What’s Love Got To Do With It.
«HAPPINESS IS BORN FROM YOU»
Despite his professional success, his personal life was not easy. “The list of obstacles is long: an unhappy childhood, abandonment, a violent marriage, a stagnant career, financial ruin, the premature death of members of my family and multiple illnesses,” Tina herself said in her memoirs, Happiness. It is born from you, published in 2021.
Tina Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock on November 26, 1939 and raised in Nutbush, Tennessee. “I was brought into the world in a windowless basement relegated to the colored maternity ward at the county hospital. My mother, Zelma, was affectionate with my sister, but she was different with me. I knew he had never loved me. “That is a heavy burden for a girl,” she wrote in her memoir.
Her mother left home when she was only ten years old and then her father did the same. Somewhat later she began to work in the home of a white family: the Hendersons, whom she considered her family. At 18 she was already a single mother from a brief relationship with saxophonist Raymond Hill.
At the beginning of the sixties she joined the band of the musician, Ike Turner, who knew how to appreciate Tina’s potential, with whom she formed the duo Ike & Tina Turner Revue, and with whom she married in 1962, perhaps because he always exercised excessive control over her. physical and psychological control.
The successes began to arrive. Her volcanic and exuberant presence on stage was surprising as a sexual bomb, and black!, something totally unusual in those years. Thus he began to forge his own and original style, inherited from gospel, soul and rock.
The couple’s forte was live performances, where Tina, as she would later confess, vented all her anger at the oppression she experienced. And already in the seventies, Ike and Tina became the favorite opening acts for white rock stars such as the Rolling Stones, Elton John or The Who. There was no better show than the Turners to warm up an audience.
In her first autobiography “I, Tina: My Life Story” (1986), she already confessed the abuse and mistreatment she suffered from Ike in a few years that were not talked about. Tina had learned to hide the tragedy of a horrible marriage. The physical and psychological torture to which her husband subjected her led her to attempt suicide.
THE HAPPY EIGHTIES ARRIVE
In 1978 the divorce finally came, a year in which his life changed radically and for the better. Soon the decade of the eighties begins and with it her solo career in which after updating herself musically she achieves a success never seen in a woman. These were times when the world of rock was occupied only by men but where Turner opened, with her power and determination, the way for other women who recognize having had her inspirational model in her.
There is no doubt that Tina was really intelligent: she knew how to adapt to the new times and enter the synthesizer sound of the eighties but without losing the personal grip of her voice and her volcanic live performances in which it seemed that everything was about to explode. when that ‘panther’ came out.
With Let’s Stay Together (1983) she sold 8 million copies and filled so many stadiums that the Guinness Book of Records considered her the artist with the largest audience at her concerts. She always remembers the one in Rio de Janeiro in 1988 in which she gathered 180,000 people, one of the highest records for a soloist.
They followed Private Dancer (1984), a success that elevated her even more, which was followed by Break Every Rule (1986), Foreign Affair (1989), which contained the very famous Simply The Best or We Don’t Need Another Hero, a song against war and violence, which appeared on the soundtrack of “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome”, the post-apocalyptic thriller starring Mel Gibson in 1985.
Become a rock icon, in the nineties she made countless tours around the world in which she performed duets with big stars and even had time to release the main song of the film “Goldeneye” (1995) of the James Bond saga. .
In 2008, after a long period of relative silence, a 69-year-old tireless rocker appeared at the Grammy Awards, offering an unforgettable live show, dancing as fiercely as ever alongside a young Beyoncé. Only a year later she announced her retirement and gave her last live concert at Sheffield Stadium in England.
Despite her image as a captivating star, this woman also had to suffer at the end of her life the death of two of her four children, the two biological ones of the artist (the other two, adopted, are children of her ex-husband Ike Turner had with another woman). Her eldest son, Craig, committed suicide in 2018 at the age of 59, a devastating blow to which another was added last December with the death of her son Ronnie Turner, a victim of the same cancer as his mother.
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