Tina Turner died after a long illness. The rock’n’roll star, an absolute reference, died in Switzerland at the age of 83, his entourage announced on Wednesday May 24 in a press release published on instagram. Elected “Queen of Rock & Roll”, she alone obtained eleven Grammy Awards throughout her fifty-year career. She was one of the most popular artists in the world with 200 million albums sold.
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Born Anna Mae Bullock on November 26, 1939, she grew up in Tennessee, in the southern United States, where ” everyone worked hard, played hard and, on Sundays, prayed in church“, she says in her autobiography published in 2019. Childhood is difficult, between parents who abandon her in adolescence and learning disabilities at school. ” If, at the precise moment of putting me on the board, someone had shouted: ‘start the music!’, I would have jumped up to sing and dance like crazy“says the one who remembers having” always sung“.
His debut with “Ike”
His fate changes when his big sister Alline takes him to a hall in Saint Louis where Ike Turner and the King of Rhythm performs. This is where she was noticed by Ike Turner, the musician and leader of the group. And immediately at 18, the young girl from a modest background became a backing vocalist for the rocker. After a first affair with Raymond Hill, the band’s saxophonist, she begins a relationship with Ike.
Faced with the success of the singer, the group is renamed Ike and Tina Turner Revue . Because in the meantime, Anna Mae has become Tina, a pseudonym chosen by Ike. And the couple, who moved to Los Angeles, married in 1962 in Tijuana, Mexico. A memory with a bitter taste for the singer, who says she spent her wedding night in a brothel. “ I couldn’t afford to give my opinion. It could lead to a beating“, says Tina Turner. The daily life is difficult for the singer, who will testify later to have been beaten by Ike Turner. She confides having tried to commit suicide in 1968.
On stage, the group participated in the popularization of soul in the United States and then in Europe at the end of the 1960s. River Deep, Mountain High (1966), come together (1970) or Proud Mary (1971), become classics. Accompanied by the “Ikettes”, Tina Turner ignites concert halls with her frenzied dance steps, including the famous “pony step”. In 1968, the band opened for the Rolling Stones. The friendship between Tina Turner and Mick Jagger will last.
Solo Rupture and Rebirth
In 1976, following an argument before a concert in Dallas, Tina separated from Ike Turner. Penniless, in debt for having broken the contracts signed for the duo “Ike and Tina”, the singer launches with difficulty in solo. His first album, Rough (1978), does not convince the public.
It is with his version of Let’s Stay Together (1984), by Al Green, recorded in one take, his career took off, especially in Europe where the public was there. The title quickly climbed to the top of the charts and his album, Private Dancer, sold 11 million copies. He is crowned with three Grammy Awards.
After beginnings oriented drunk the American rocker colors her second career with pop accents, with hits like What’s Love Got to Do With It (1993), Simply The Best (1991) , We Don’t Need Another Hero (original soundtrack by Mad Max II, 2011 ) Or Golden Eye (1992, and 1995 James Bond soundtrack). She collaborates with Bryan Adams ( It’s Only Love, 1984 ), Rod Stewart ( It Takes Two, 1991 ) and David Bowie ( Tonight, 1985).
Stage beast
Incomparable singer, Tina Turner is also a beast of the stage. ” It’s not the lights, it’s the screams. When Bowie and Jagger joined me on stage and I saw the audience going crazy, I thought, yeah, that’s what I want.“, she declared in 1993 to Vanity Fair. In 2008, aged 69, the one who owns ” the most kinetic legs in the music industry“, according to the magazine Billboard, begins a world tour to celebrate his fifty-year career. The star provides a great American show.
While living in Switzerland since 1995 and obtaining Swiss naturalization in 2011, Tina Turner married recording industry magnate Erwin Bach in Zurich in 2013.” I am very happy in Switzerland and I feel at home there. I can’t imagine a better place to live “, declares the star to the magazine Blick . The singer also claims to appreciate the respect for privacy that this country guarantees her.
In the summer of 2018, the singer saw a tragedy: her eldest son, Craig Raymond Turner, 59, the fruit of his relationship with saxophonist Raymond Hill, ended his life with a gun in July. During an interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2005, Tina Turner herself called her son “ very sensitive child “, marked by the violent behavior of his adoptive father, Ike Turner.