BETTER THAN ALL THE REST: TINA TURNER
Posted by Deirdre | Filed under Blog
Tina Turner is back in the news. A new film about her airs on HBO at the end of March, precipitating a flurry of interviews and reminiscences about the living legend who is mow 80 and living on splendid retirement in a castle-like home on Switzerland. I want to add to the tributes and do have gone back into the archives to find the review I wrote of one of her high impact concerts when I was pop music critic for the Globe and Mail. I caught her just as she was cresting a new wave of extraordinary success, post-Ike. She had just done the Max Max movies and was then dominating the charts with Private Dancer. She radiated power. But as the stories now coming out about her now reveal her on-stage exuberance hid a lot of pain. You would never have known that to see her. As I write here, she seemed fully in control. A rocker for the ages:
Tina turns on the heat at the CNE
DEIRDRE KELLY
31 August 1987
Tina Turner , with her thigh-revealing dresses, leonine hair, red lips and shimmy, has become one of pop’s most recognizable icons. Hankered after by hordes of female impersonators (Toronto’s La Cage nightclub nightly draws crowds to see its Tina lookalikes), a contender for a spot in the newly established Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (Aretha Franklin recently beat her out), Turner has been celebrated as the sexiest thing on two legs since Marilyn Monroe.
But the 47-year old Turner, who played a rollicking and raunchy 90- minute set at the CNE Grandstand Saturday night, is tired. After her current world-wide, year-long tour winds down in the spring, Turner will take an extended break – no records, no movies (Mad Max will have to wait) , no books, no concerts. This may very well be the last time Turner heats up a Toronto stage.
Turner has been gyrating and screaming and seductively caressing microphone stands – in public – for the past 25 years. She was an overnight sensation when she joined Ike Turner’s band (subsequently renamed the Ike and Tina Turner Revue) and tumbled and turned her way through Proud Mary, the band’s greatest hit.
After she split from the band and her volatile man, Turner had trouble re-establishing herself. She became a perennial lounge-act favorite, playing such establishments as Toronto’s Imperial Room. Then with the 1984 Grammy-award winning Private Dancer album, she cut through the music industry’s indifference and became another overnight sensation.
The show she brought to the CNE, and the one she has been touring for six months now, shows the best of Turner through an energetic pastiche of songs culled from her past two albums – Private Dancer (which sold 10 million copies worldwide) and Break Every Rule (which has sold more than a million copies in North America) – and from her sleepy days as a lounger when she managed to put out some commercially successful covers of other people’s songs (namely Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together). There are also songs from the period before her I, Tina days (she includes a blistering version of Proud Mary at the close of the set). Encore numbers included a version of It’s Only Love, the duet she did with Bryan Adams in 1984 (Adams’s lines were sung by one of her band members).
It was a high-powered, immensely entertaining show. The stage presentation was as elegant as anything in a lounge act; colored lights, floating spots, dry ice and large sweeping staircases that led from the front of the stage to a raised platform at the back gave the show a rich Las Vegas feel, yet without the crudeness and the shoddy glitz.
Turner’s voice, a sandpaper-and-velvet combination that sometimes makes her sound like a female Rod Stewart or a dried-out Marianne Faithfull, was full of cracks and rasps. Songs like Better Be Good To Me, I Can’t Stop the Rain, Private Dancer and What’s Love Got To Do With It were meant to be sung by Turner, a woman with a tough personal history and weathered vocal cords. Though her choice of tunes were predictable – at this point in her career any concert she gives sounds like the Tina Turner Hit Parade – and the pacing of the show fast and slick, Turner was still the personable rock and roller, the Acid Queen with a heart of gold who was able to get a crowd of 21,000 up and dancing in the aisles. Turner is a good study of the icon as real woman.