Better than all others: Tina Turner's recipe

2023-05-28T10:54:40.208Z

Highlights: The 'queen of rock' had an expansive personality and cemented her success from songs that in other voices went unnoticed. "You're just the best. Better than all the others", proclaimed the unappealable queen of rock and soul back in 1989 in The Best. The most amazing thing about the case is that that already intergenerational anthem had not been composed with Turner in mind and had already been taken to the recording studios by a well-known singer at the time, Bonnie Tyler.

The 'queen of rock' had an expansive personality and cemented her success from songs that in other voices went unnoticed

The refrain has been put these days on a platter to the necrologists of half the world when glossing the figure of the divine Tina Turner. "You're just the best. Better than all the others", proclaimed the unappealable queen of rock and soul back in 1989 in The Best, the theme that lit the fuse of her last great album of massive follow-up, Foreign Affair, and that became the most iconic of her interpretations in those years of maturity. But the most amazing thing about the case is that that already intergenerational anthem had not been composed with Turner in mind and had already been taken a year before to the recording studios by a well-known singer at the time, Bonnie Tyler, with an infinitesimal impact. And that was not a unique case throughout the career of the Nutbush artist, who died Wednesday at age 83. Quite the contrary: only a temperament as volcanic and overwhelming as his managed to aggravate titles that in other throats had seemed irrelevant.

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The parallels are awkward, but eloquent. The Welsh Bonnie Tyler was not an unknown vocalist during the eighties, when she chained at least two colossal hits, It's a Heartache and Total Eclipse of the Heart, and even starred in an unusual stellar appearance in Islands, the title track in 1987 to Mike Oldfield's eleventh album. But no one paid attention to The Best when Tyler released it in 1988 as a theoretically stellar piece on his album Hide Your Heart. The comparative grievance still stings, thirty-odd years later. "The subsequent success of Tina gave me a reason for consolation: in the end, it turns out that I did not have such a bad sense of choosing songs with possibilities ...", summarized Bonnie herself, between humor and resignation, on the occasion of a visit in the summer of 2021 to Madrid's Hipódromo de la Zarzuela.

How could a successful and well-recorded piece go so unnoticed at the beginning and become a world reference just one year later? We can only blame the Tina factor, that addition of vertigo, hurricane and excellence that made it unique and makes it doubly missed since this week. The Best was an original by Mike Chapman and Holly Knight, two professional songwriters familiar with the charts; in 1983 they had manufactured Pat Benatar the very popular Love Is A Battlefield. But only Anna Mae Bullock, who barely lavished herself as a composer and only triumphed in that facet with Nutbush City Limits (1973), saw it clearly: she proposed a sax solo where the electric guitar entered the original and asked the authors to add just before a transition part or, in the jargon, bridge ("Each time you leave me as I start losing control ..."). The rest, as we said, is history.

The case is the most paradigmatic, but it represents a constant in the career of women who has attracted more compliments, adhesions and messages of admiration throughout the week. Chapman and Knight themselves can attest. The tandem wrote in 1981 a hit, Better Be Good To Me, which Holly, a woman of estimable throat and stage presence, personally interpreted at the front of her band Spider. Has anyone heard that version? Did anyone remember, in fact, the existence of a group called Spider? Well, that same Better Be Good To Me reached number 1984 in the US charts in 5 and became one of the central axes of the album Private Dancer, the glittering return of the queen to stardom.

Tina Turner and her husband, Ike, pictured circa 1961, when they formed the duo Ike & Tina Turner.Michael Ochs Archives (Getty)

Contact sheet of a photo shoot of the singer in 1964. Michael Ochs Archives (Getty)

A fan looked at Tina Turner during a performance in 1969.Robert Altman (Getty Images)

Portrait of Tina Turner, November 25, 1969 in New York.Jack Robinson (Getty Images)

Performance by the duo Ike & Tina Turner in 1971.Gijsbert Hanekroot (Redferns/getty)

Turner poses in Las Vegas, August 1, 1977.Tony Korody (Tony Korody)

Tina Turner sang on stage, along with several dancers, on April 22, 1979.Rob Verhorst (Redferns/getty)

Tina Turner in a scene from the movie 'Mad Max'. United Archives / Cordon Press

Tina Turner and Lionel Richie pose with the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles in 1985. Lennox McLendon (AP/LAPRESSE)

American singer Tina Turner during a concert in Los Angeles in 1984.PHIL RAMEY (AP)

From left, singers Mick Jagger, Tina Turner and David Bowie at the 10th anniversary of the Prince's Trust Rock Gala, in London, June 23, 1986.Dave Hogan (Getty Images)

Tina Turner, on stage, during a performance in Rotterdam on November 4, 1990. Rob Verhorst (Redferns/getty)

Queen Elizabeth II greeted singer Tina Turner at the Royal Variety in London in 1989.DPA / Europa Press

Performance of Tina Turner in the Plaza de Las Ventas in Madrid, in 1990.Uly Martín

Portrait of the singer Tina Turner for an interview of EL PAÍS, in 1989. Pablo Juliá

Tina Turner concert in Barcelona, in 1996.Agustí carbonell

From left, singers Ricky Martin and Tina Turner with actress Sophia Loren, in Milan, in 1999.

Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti kisses Tina Turner at the Sanremo Song Festival in February 2000.

Beyoncé (left) and Tina Turner sang a duet in 2008 during the Grammy Awards at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California. Michael Caulfield (WireImage/getty)

Tina Turner greeted her fans in 2011 as she arrived at an Armani show in Milan.Gian Mattia D'Alberto (LaPresse)

The singer, pianist and composer from Salamanca Sheila Blanco, an expert in vocal technique, is clear that Tina Turner's greatest asset lived in her throat. "It was a very solid contralto, almost mezzo," he specifies, "with which you did not miss either treble or melismas. He had a murky voice, not dirty; worn, not old. For all this I was able to break you in two from the first note." And he rivets: "I knew how to roar singing, but the most inimitable thing is the phrasing. That's what makes her an icon."

Beyond his dimension as a public figure, which has been mentioned a lot these days; Apart from her courage in facing terrible personal situations or that immense value as an example and reference for several generations of women, Turner has earned her place in history for an interpretive talent that seemed to come from series. His was an innate ability to sublimate materials that in other hands were only appreciable. It had already happened in 1961, at the beginning of the time of Ike & Tina Turner, when he tackled It's going to Work Out Fine with just 21 years. It was an alien theme, by Joe Seneca and the prolific Rose Marie McCoy, and the band approached it without a brass section or frills, light years away from the sound that Phil Spector would print on them in 1966 with River Deep – Mountain High, but Tina's execution was so dry and fierce as to procure her first Grammy Award nomination. Of course, no one keeps in memory that the premiere of It's going to ... had taken place without major significance a year earlier, in 1960, by the hand of Mickey & Sylvia. And not even the glossy version signed in 1982 by the illustrious Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor enjoyed special impact.

Therein lay Turner's true merit: in the ability to swallow everything and turn it into something unique and essential. That is why in 1984, when the reappearance with Private Dancer after 11 years of absolute ostracism, that 45-year-old Tina did not want to play the role of old glory and assume a story of vintage longing, but burst as a premiere figure capable of dazzling the programmers of the young television network MTV. It was not so much a resurrection as the birth of a magnetic new creature. Artists who were arriving shortly after, from Janet Jackson to Beyoncé or Rihanna, would be unimaginable as we know them today if there had not been that revived figure of TT before.

Charisma influenced, no doubt. The much talked about stage presence: observe how unbridled way he entered the set, in 1971, on the occasion of his participation in the Ed Sullivan program. It helped the story of life, the styling, the paranormal length of those stratospheric legs. As much as you want. But what made Tina Turner "simply the best" was that facility to become a protagonist from other people's raw materials.

In 1981 and 1982, during the years when she was away from the radar, she had the audacity to include in the concerts a terrible song by Rod Stewart about sexist murders, Foolish Behaviour, which she retitled, for the avoidance of doubt, Kill His Wife. The original exuded an unbridled machismo, but she did know what she was talking about. And in 1984, in the face of the triumphant return, they suggested the infallible trump card of a version of the Beatles, and she opted for a Help! So reinvented that we had to repair the lyrics to realize what the original source was. Poor John Lennon didn't arrive in time to hear it, but Tina made it as believable as if the Liverpool native had written it in 1965 with her in mind.

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