Simply the Best

At the age of 81, rock icon Tina Turner is bowing out of public life, using the new documentary Tina to draw a final curtain on her extraordinary career. 

“It wasn’t a good life,” says Tina Turner, in the opening stages of the new documentary Tina. Because for all her phenomenal success, Turner has also experienced exceptional tragedy. It’s why she is so beloved. For women everywhere, she epitomises the phoenix who keeps rising, no matter how many times she’s burned. Her strut, her blonde wig, her leather mini skirt and above all her incredible throaty signing voice, are tough bird personified. She’s who we want to be at our most vulnerable.

“How do you bow out slowly, just go away?” she asks later in the documentary. For the come-back queen, it’s a conundrum and one she has solved beautifully. In Tina, the 81 year old speaks directly to camera of her life, loves and losses, with the perspective of age and the wisdom of someone who’s seen it all.

Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock to share cropper parents in Brownsville, Tennesee. She was the youngest of three girls and she believes her mother planned to leave her abusive father when she was pregnant with her. “She was a very young woman who didn’t want another kid,” she wrote in her autobiography. Her mother eventually left when she was 11 and Tina went to live with her strict religious grandparents. At 16, her grandmother died. At 18, she became a single parent to her son Craig, who was later to die of suicide. And then there was Ike – mentor, husband and abuser.

From the mid-60s onwards, Ike and Tina looked like the perfect partnership, romantically and musically. The single River Deep – Mountain High was an international success and in November 1967, Tina became the first female artist to grace the cover of Rolling Stone. “Tina Turner is an incredible chick. She comes in this very short miniskirt, way above her knees, with zillions of silver sequins and sparklers pasted on it. Her dancing is completely unrestrained,” went the description.

By the early 70s, Ike had a serious cocaine addiction and the abuse she was suffering at is hands drove Tina to attempt suicide. She eventually left him in 1976, running from the hotel they were staying and hiding at a friend’s house.

For the #MeToo generation, it may be difficult to comprehend just how shocking it was back 

in the early 80s when Turner finally lifted the lid on her marriage. The prevailing attitude was that domestic abuse was not something to be talked about, that what went on behind closed doors, particularly between a husband and wife, was nobody else’s business. When Turner spoke openly, not just about the violence, but what we now know as the coercive control Ike perpetrated on her, she kicked down the door for a generation of women to come forward with similar harrowing stories.

After she left Ike, Turner’s raw talent and electric performances meant that she continued to find work as a solo artist, but mostly as a nostalgic act in hotel ballrooms and clubs. That all changed in 1984, when she released the album Private Dancer, which went on to sell 10 million copies worldwide. At the age of 45, Turner won three Grammys and went on what became a series to sell-out world tours. She still holds the record for having the largest paying concert attendance for a solo artist, when 180,000 people turned out to see her in Rio de Janeiro in 1988. and the record for the biggest attendance for a tour by a female artist. The hits and the Grammys kept coming. She collaborated with Mick Jagger, Bryan Adams and U2. She stared opposite Mel Gibson in one of the Mad Max films. 

She also found love. In 1986, she met Erwin Bach, a German music executive, 16 years her junior. In July 2013, they married in Switzerland where they now live. 

In later years she has suffered a series of health problems. She suffered a stroke shortly after her marriage and was diagnosed with intestinal cancer in 2016. She had a kidney transplant in 2017 (the organ was donated by her husband).

Ike died in 2007. Tina didn’t attend the funeral but said in 2018 that she had forgiven him. 

That same year her oldest son Craig died by “self-inflicted gunshot wound” at the age of 59.  

She is a grandmother of two through her youngest son Ronnie.

Tina is available on Sky Documentaries and Now TV. It will also be released in cinemas.