Simply the Best: Remembering highlights of Tina Turner's career following her death after a long illness aged 83

Tina Turner (November 26, 1939 – May 24, 2023) so affirmed and amplified Black women’s formative presence in rock’n’roll, that apparently Rolling Stones’ frontman Mick Jagger admitted to taking inspiration from her energetic live performances for his own rather indomitable, snake-hipped, on-stage persona.

Anna Mae Bullock was raised in Nutbush, Tennessee, where she recalled a childhood that entailed picking cotton with her family before singing in the town’s church choir and then as a teen singing her way into Ike Turner’s band in St Louis.

He had initially refused her plea to join until the feisty would-be star grabbed the microphone, sang a rendition of BB King’s You Know I Love You and he immediately changed his mind, as we can all imagine.

The rising star and Ike, who became her husband, and with whom she would go on to have a notoriously fractious relationship, also enjoyed a two decade collaborative career with him that reached the heights of fame before she left him to fly solo.

The mercurial, controlling Ike gave her the stage name ‘Tina Turner’ and trademarked it in order to make it difficult for her to leave him.

The pair were a runaway success together for decades, picking up Grammy awards and becoming the darlings of innumerable big names in the 1970s domains of rock and pop.

But Turner eventually found the strength to leave Ike, and after a few false starts began her solo career in earnest, becoming one of the most important and instantly recognisable pop icons of the 1980s with the release of her album Private Dancer.

It was following the release of this landmark album that the star became the powerful, leather-clad, mullet-adorned virago and force of nature on stage that we all knew and fell in love with.

In the documentary Tina, she said of the release of Private Dancer: “I don’t consider it a comeback,” she said. “Tina had never arrived.”

But arrive she did.

And with total aplomb, gusto, charisma, the most incredible hair and what appeared as unflappable fearlessness.

Turner went on to star in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome opposite Mel Gibson in 1985, published her first memoir, ‘I, Tina’, in 1986, (later adapted in to the 1993 film What’s Love Got to Do With It?) and in 1995, sang the theme tune to the James Bond film GoldenEye.

Turner announced her retirement in 2000, a year after releasing her final solo album, Twenty Four Seven, though she would return to the stage in 2008, performing at the Grammy awards with Beyoncé, and for a final tour to mark half a century in the music industry.

This was the end of her musical career, and after so long up front and centre, the star had no regrets whatsoever – she had clearly stayed the course and fought the good fight to win all kinds of critical acclaim and was bowing out in style.

“I was just tired of singing and making everybody happy,” she told the New York Times in 2019. “That’s all I’d ever done in my life.”

Turner collaborated on the musical Tina with Phyllida Lloyd, which premiered in 2018 and won Laurence Olivier and Tony awards for its respective West End and Broadway runs.

“This musical is not about my stardom,” Turner said of the production. “It is about the journey I took to get there.

"Each night I want audiences to take away from the theatre that you can turn poison into medicine.”

Though many thought of her as an ‘invincible’ force, the star never saw herself in this way, confiding once more to the New York Times that: “I don’t necessarily want to be a ‘strong’ person. I had a terrible life. I just kept going. You just keep going and you hope that something will come.”

In 2020, a remix of 1984 hit What’s Love Got to Do With It? by Norwegian producer Kygo made her the first artist to have a UK Top 40 hit in seven consecutive decades, and the following year she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist.

Turner is survived by her second husband, German music executive Erwin Bach whom she married in 2013 after 27 years together. The pair lived together in Switzerland.

Her first child, Craig Raymond Turner, died in July 2018.

She is survived by two of Ike Turner’s sons, Ike Turner Jr and Michael Turner, whom she adopted.

In 2020, Turner told another prominent news outlet that the last ten years of her life had been her happiest.

“True and lasting happiness comes from having an unshakeable, hopeful spirit that can shine, no matter what,” she said.

“That’s what I’ve achieved, and it is my greatest wish to help others become truly happy as well.”

Tina Turner died on Wednesday (May 24, 2023) at the age of 83 after a long illness, having battled intestinal cancer in 2016 and undergoing a kidney transplant in 2017.