Tribute: 'Simply the Best' singer Tina Turner was an attitude, not just a pop & rock 'n roll icon

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Turner’s manager of 30 years, Roger Davies, put out a statement in the hours following her death on May 24: “Tina was a unique and remarkable force of nature with her strength, incredible energy and immense talent.”

Energy and talent fortified Tina the artist, whose life includes childhood abandonment and a long, much-judged and reviled abusive marriage to Ike Turner (who once led the band Kings of Rhythm) with whom she started out as a singer. The duo had the band Ike and Tina Turner revue which produced some of the most memorable of Tina Turner’s songs, including Nutbush City Limits, an ode to Nutbush, Tennessee, where she grew up, and River Deep, Mountain High.

Their cover of Credence Clearwater Revival’s Proud Mary was a formidable version of the song that celebrated the simple middle-class American life. She walked out of the abusive marriage to Ike Turner when she was 40, already a mother of two children, without money or gigs. She found solace in Buddhism during this phase. Both her memoirs, I, Tina (1986) and Tina Turner: My Love Story (2018), are difficult books to read. Like the way she sings, her writing crackles with authenticity and the ability to look at herself unflinchingly and say it as it is. But the books also reveal her most vulnerable moments, stripped of shame or self-pity.

Tina Tuner's first autobiography 'I, Tina: My Life Story' (1986).

In the first book, she describes why owning her traumas and life experiences publicly, on stage, letting them fuel her music have often had its disadvantages: “I prefer acting to singing, because with acting you are forgiven for playing a certain role. When you play that same role every night, people think that you are it. They don’t think you’re acting.”

Tina Turner's second autobiography 'Tina Turner: My Love Story' (2018).

In the second book, which has much more of her lowest ebbs, she compares sex with Ike Turner to “a kind of rape”. “He used my nose as a punching bag so many times I could taste blood running down my throat when I sang.” After the split with Ike Turner, Tina began to own what was truly spectacular in her — the ability to own all of herself and channel it in her music — and never let it go. The last glimpse of it was an electric duet of Proud Mary with Beyoncé at the 2008 Grammy Awards. Janet Jackson, Beyoncé and Rihanna have openly attributed the origins of their style of performing to Tina Turner.

For us ’70s children, the zenith of pop iconism was Michael Jackson and Madonna — we may not have been crazy fans, but we knew that for our generation, the generation that turned 18 coinciding with the beginning of economic liberalisation, MJ and Madonna would headline pop music history. They were on every chart and every MTV show, for a very, very long time; they reinvented themselves and their music, for better or for worse, every other year. But the pop voice — or rather, the rock & roll-and-soul voice rejigged for an unforgettable pop signature — that came close to inspiration, or, at least, adrenalised us with her raspy contralto and feminist vim, was of Tina Turner.

It wasn’t the age of sculpted bodies, but Tina Turner’s sinewy and shapely legs were stuff of aspiration. For us, Simply the Best and What’s Love Got to Do With It hit us hard with their female-first credo and spark. We had found a kind of wounded feminism in our boom boxes and cassette tapes.

After her death, actor Viola Davis praised Turner as “our first symbol of excellence and unbridled ownership of sexuality”. By “our” she probably means belonging to America or being African-American. Tina Turner symbolised a lot of both, because she wasn’t just a singer. Her talent — the brawn, rasp, kinesics of her voice and body, and all of it — had something to do with her life’s struggles, which included the death of two of her children. Like the poet Maya Angelou urged, Tina rose and she rose.

Tina Turner leaves behind her husband and two children.