#Popmatters | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

whileiamdying · 2 years ago

Text

She wants her MTV: How ‘Private Dancer’ made Tina Turner a video Queen

Tina Turner at the American Music Awards [28 January 1985]. Copyright: Ralph Dominguez/MediaPunch. MediaPunch Inc / Alamy Stock Photo.

In this PopMatters exclusive, the directors, choreographers, and dancers behind Tina Turner’s platinum-selling Private Dancer video 45 recall how the Queen of Rock went from MTV to number one.

13 September 1985 — A standing ovation greets Tina Turner at Radio City Music Hall. It’s the evening of the Second Annual MTV Video Music Awards and David Lee Roth has just announced Turner as the winner of “Best Female Video” for “What’s Love Got to Do With It”, her number-one single off Private Dancer (1984). Prevailing in a category with strong contenders like Madonna, Sheila E., Sade, and Cyndi Lauper, Turner’s win completes a trio of year-long victories that began with multiple GRAMMY Awards and American Music Awards.

“To have this now with all the others, is really a triumph for me,” she says from the stage. “I’ve been really winning!”

“What’s Love Got to Do With It” had been an MTV mainstay ever since its premiere in June 1984. Original VJ Nina Blackwood was among the first to see Turner attired in a mini-skirt and denim jacket, strutting through New York’s West Village neighborhood. “The video was powerful,” she says. “All she’s doing in that video is walking, but you can’t take your eyes off of her. She has this dignity and this gravitas about her. It’s a very special way of carrying herself and that’s really on display in that video.”

Those same qualities shaped each of the four videos Turner made for Private Dancer, amplifying the singer’s undeniable magnetism. “Tina was special,” says Gale Sparrow, who presided as MTV’s Director of Talent and Artist Relations. “Everybody had a pick, each week, of someone that they really wanted to promote. Tina? Everybody wanted to promote.” Indeed, MTV executives regularly placed Turner’s videos in heavy rotation at a time when the channel had amassed 27 million subscribers over a four-year period.

While music videocassettes had been on the market since the early-’80s, they became a key product line for record companies in the wake of MTV’s emergence as a groundbreaking promotional platform. In December 1984, Capitol Records and Sony Video announced their partnership on Tina Turner — Private Dancer (1985), a seventeen-minute “Video 45” featuring the four clips that fueled Turner’s comeback. It inaugurated Billboard Magazine‘s “Top Music Videocassettes” chart at number one in March 1985 before reaching platinum certification just a few months later.

As viewers await the premiere of Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin’s forthcoming HBO documentary Tina (2021), PopMatters revisits the four videos that sparked Turner’s career resurgence in 1984. For the first time ever, video directors David Mallet (“Let’s Stay Together”), John Mark Robinson (“What’s Love Got to Do With It”), and Brian Grant (“Better Be Good to Me”, “Private Dancer”) join legendary choreographers Toni Basil and Arlene Phillips (CBE), video cast members Cy Curnin (the Fixx), Ann Behringer, Ming Smith, and Jay T Jenkins, plus original MTV VJ Nina Blackwood and former MTV executive Gale Sparrow for an exclusive discussion about how Tina Turner — Private Dancer propelled Turner from MTV to number one.

“Rolling on the River” … and on the Screen

The story of Tina Turner — Private Dancer began 20 years earlier on LA’s Sunset Strip, specifically Ciro’s nightclub. “That was the club,” says David Mallet. “Sonny Bono took me because I was working for [producer] Jack Good on Shindig!. I was nineteen years old. The Ike & Tina Turner Revue just blew the place apart. I’d never seen anything like it in my life.” As an assistant producer for Shindig!, Mallet was so struck by the singer’s performance that he booked her on ABC-TV’s weekly music series, furnishing one of Turner’s earliest prime time television appearances.

Toni Basil, assistant choreographer on Shindig!, had also seen Ike & Tina Turner during their engagement at Ciro’s. “It changed me!” she exclaims. “You’d never seen anything like it. I was also assistant choreographer on The T.A.M.I. Show (1964) — that’s when I saw James Brown, but I had seen Tina before I saw James Brown. There were so many other great singers that you wanted to hear them sing or watch them sing, but Tina and James? You wanted to see them dance as much as you wanted to hear them sing. What they were doing was actually what a Gene Kelly or a Fred Astaire were doing, but they were doing it from ‘street dance’ vernacular. They took street and really made it into a theatrical event.

youtube

“I think The Ed Sullivan Show did a damn good job with James Brown and Tina Turner because the white American audience really had never had any access to anything like that. Shindig! was featuring these people before Ed Sullivan but that’s more of a younger audience. The Ed Sullivan Show reached all ages, shapes, and sizes.”

Nina Blackwood first saw Ike & Tina Turner on Sullivan’s Sunday night program in January 1970. The act’s rendition of “Proud Mary” exploded onscreen. “I was blown away,” she says. “Ed Sullivan seemed to be, as weird as it sounds, the MTV of the ’60s, where you saw artists like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Ike & Tina Turner for the first time. The Ikettes, with these wonderfully wild dance moves and this freedom of movement and expression, were so dynamic. I can’t think of anybody prior to Tina, other than James Brown, who had that powerful persona.”

Across the UK, Ike & Tina Turner had rocked television audiences during their 1966 appearance on the pioneering music series Ready, Steady, Go! “I was a mod,” says Brian Grant. “Mods listened to Black American music, which was Tamla and Stax and Atlantic, and they listened to two bands in England — the Small Faces and the Who. ‘River Deep-Mountain High’ was probably the first Ike & Tina track I ever heard … and danced to it as a mod, probably!” Though it stalled in the US, “River Deep-Mountain High” reached the UK Top Five during the summer of 1966, securing Ike & Tina Turner’s invitation to open for the Rolling Stones later that fall.

Whether standing in concert halls or seated behind small black and white television screens, viewers were mesmerized by Tina Turner’s kinetic performance. “I remember being absolutely blown away, not just by the voice but by the speed at which Tina moved and sang,” says Arlene Phillips. “It was like two separate instruments were working together, each one more powerful than the other, and vice versa. As I think about it, there was a style that was completely invented by Tina Turner and the Ikettes. It was just phenomenal.”

Applause notwithstanding, the singer left Ike Turner in 1976 after enduring years of his physical and emotional abuse. She embarked on the first phase of her musical reinvention a year later, rounding out her repertoire with ballads and disco numbers alike. Toni Basil was hired to choreograph Turner’s new solo show, which now featured two pairs of male and female dancers. She recalls, “I do not know how Tina knew about me but I got a call: ‘Tina has left Ike. She’s in hiding. When she comes out of hiding she wants to know if you’d be her choreographer.’ I remember the phone call. I remember where I was standing. Sure enough, it happened.

“When Tina asked me to work with her, I thought I was going to get to do Ikettes stuff. I was surprised. Tina wanted a whole new look when she left Ike. This was a different approach, with guys and girls. I had to turn my brain around. She wanted to have a jazz edge and be very sophisticated. She did different music and it was a lot of different dance styles. The music dictates steps. I choreographed ‘Disco Inferno’ … and ‘Disco Inferno’ was not ‘Proud Mary’!”

youtube

Turner sizzled onstage during her March 1979 UK tour, recasting Little Willie John’s “Fever” as a playful striptease before she and her dancers set the stage afire with the Trammps’ “Disco Inferno”. She’d recently released her first post-Ike solo album Rough (1978) on United Artists and would soon team with producer Alec R. Costandinos in London to record the follow-up Love Explosion (1979). Though neither album spawned a hit single, Turner’s concerts inspired all kinds of superlatives. “She showed that she’s still the female equivalent of Jagger and James Brown combined, and that her style, which embraces both wild rock and ballads, is based firmly on her strengths with the blues,” The Guardian noted about Turner’s show at Hammersmith Odeon (Apollo) in London. “She had no elaborate settings and she needed none” (17 March 1979).

Brian Grant joined the crew of camera operators who filmed that concert, later released on videocassette with different titles including Tina Turner Live at the Apollo, Wild Lady of Rock and The Queen of Rock ‘n Roll.”I was a freelance cameraman at that point,” he says. “As far as that concert is concerned, it would have been a gallery shoot. In other words, shot as live with a vision mixer cutting live in a mobile control room. A bit like they do at sports events. It was recorded on two-inch video, so a long time before the advent of digital and all pretty crude. I’d made a couple of videos for Scott Millaney at Island Records and was looking to get my first proper job. A month later in April is when I shot ‘Pop Muzik’ (1979) by M, which really started my career as a director.”

Grant’s video for “Pop Muzik” aired on the UK-based Kenny Everett Video Show, a music/comedy series hosted by former BBC Radio 1 personality Kenny Everett. Directed by David Mallet, the show featured a blend of subversive humor and risqué musical numbers, especially with Arlene Phillips’ dance troupe Hot Gossip as the show’s resident vamps. Turner also appeared on the program in April 1979 singing her cover of Dan Hill’s “Sometimes When We Touch”, but would soon toss middle-of-the-road pop ballads from her set, permanently, in a major career overhaul.

‘Tina Turner — Private Dancer’ Video 45 [1985] promotional poster. Courtesy of Capitol Records/Sony Video.

LA-based dancer Ann Behringer helped fashion a fresh sound and style for Turner. As a teenager, she’d seen the Ike & Tina Turner Revue perform in Phoenix. “When I saw these beautiful Black women with these legs and hips, I totally resonated with it, with the whole vibe, the music and everything,” she says. After moving to Los Angeles, Behringer met Toni Basil through her longtime affiliation with the Tubes, dancing to David Bowie’s “Suffragette City” in “Toni Basil’s Follies Bizarre” at the Fox Venice. She wrapped production on Xanadu (1980) just a few months before auditioning for Turner. At the time, the singer still featured a quartet of male and female dancers, including David Werthe, Geronne Turner, and former Ikette, LeJeune Fletcher. Turner needed one more dancer to replace Deborah Jenssen, who’d recently been cast on Solid Gold.

“Toni Basil recommended me along with around ten other girls,” Behringer continues. “I had a few months sobriety when I went for the job. I was basically detoxing. I’ve been sober for 41 years. Tina said that I was the only one who came in with my portfolio, ready to sing and dance. The tape that I sang to was for a singing class, so I could learn how to sing. I’d never sung ever before. Tina said, ‘Can you sing?’ Of course I said Yes — that’s what you do in the business! I sang ‘Heat Wave’. She said, ‘Girl, you can sing!’ She had me sing a slower song, ‘Since I Fell For You’, a cappella. She called me back and said, ‘I’m gonna give you the job.’ I said, ‘There’s two things I won’t do.’ She gave me that look like, Oh no … she’s trouble already. I said, ‘I don’t drink or use no matter what.’ She said fine. After Ike Turner, that was no big deal. I had hair down to my butt. I said, ‘I’m not cutting my hair.’ She said, ‘Oh, I don’t want you cutting it at all! I want that hair next to me!’ It was a dream come true, really. It was 1979 when I got the job. I started touring with Tina in the beginning of 1980. I jumped on that road like a duck takes to water.”

From the Ritz to “Let’s Stay Together”

“Tina Turner is back, and nothing else can possibly matter much at all,” declared the Daily News on the eve of Turner’s three-night stand at the Ritz in May 1981. New York audiences were about to experience the singer’s newly revamped stage show. Over the past year, Australian manager Roger Davies had helped steer Turner from the Vegas trappings of numbers like “Big Spender” to stripped-down rock ‘n roll, discharging her male dancers and replacing almost every musician except pianist/vocalist Kenny Moore.

Turner performed more than a dozen concerts at the Ritz between 1981-1984, but her first string of dates in May 1981 set the tone for the star power she’d regularly draw at every show. “I look up, there’s Mick Jagger, there’s David Bowie, there’s Diana Ross,” Behringer recalls. “It was like every star on the planet was there to support her. There was so much electricity in the whole building. When I look back, it still blows my mind because it was kind of like her coming-out party.”

Three months later, a coming-out party of another kind rocked the music world — the premiere of MTV. Directed by Russell Mulcahy, the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” launched the network on 1 August 1981, along with several videos helmed by David Mallet, including David Bowie’s “Fashion” and “Boys Keep Swinging”. At the time, Mallet and Mulcahy, along with producer Lexi Godfrey, ran a production company called MGM before partnering with fellow director Brian Grant and producer Scott Millaney to form the London-based MGMM Studios in December 1981.

Tina Turner in concert [1983]. Copyright: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

“We thought that it would be better to have all three of the main people at the time directing videos under one roof,” Mallet explains. “The three of us being together had the whole industry covered, as it were. We were all different. Russell was by far the most avant garde of the three of us. He was a great surrealist and made these wonderful mini-films. Hugely talented. I was kind of reinventing the way that you cut pictures to music and Brian was halfway between the two.” Mallet and Grant had advanced the form’s conceptual possibilities, directing full-length video albums for Blondie’s Eat to the Beat (1979) and Olivia Newton-John’s Physical (1981), respectively, while Mulcahy’s theatrical, New Romantic-themed video for Kim Carnes’ “Bette Davis Eyes” garnered praise from no less an auteur than Steven Spielberg.

Mallet, Grant, and Mulcahy’s growing library of videos kept MTV afloat during the channel’s first few months, especially since several American record companies wouldn’t even fund music videos. “In the beginning, we didn’t have any videos,” says Gale Sparrow. “When we were looking for videos, I called [production company] Gowers, Fields, and Flattery in LA because they had done the Queen long-form video [‘Bohemian Rhapsody’]. Paul Flattery was really helpful on where to find videos.

“Most of our videos came from England. In London, MGMM were the biggest and the best. They were an extremely creative company. Millaney was a great producer. Mallet was so prolific and everybody loved him. Brian Grant knew how to work with women! Russell Mulcahy — his videos are the reason we could launch because I think more than eight of the videos were Rod Stewart!

“We were financed by Warner Communications, so we had Warner, Elektra, and Atlantic Records. Then there was Chrysalis. They were with us at the beginning. Island Records was really good. The American record labels, if I can be honest, some of them really almost lost a year-and-a-half of breaking artists on MTV. I was a CBS ex-employee. John Sykes, who was a VP, had also worked at CBS, and artist managers would just give us videos. Billy Joel actually decided he was going to pay for his own videos so he could decide where they were going to go. ‘The record company doesn’t want to give it to you, but I own it.’ Springsteen — same thing.”

Nina Blackwood and fellow VJ’s Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter, J.J. Jackson, and Martha Quinn quickly became the public face of the burgeoning music channel. When Turner resumed her Ritz residency in the fall of 1981, Blackwood joined Gale Sparrow to witness the singer’s heralded return. “We launched in August, so MTV had just started,” says Blackwood. “I was kind of shy and Gale would shepherd me to these events. Gale was so responsible, in the early days especially, of getting the caliber of artists that we had involved with MTV because some of them thought, ‘What is this?’ Gale brought me, her assistant Roberta Cruger, and I don’t remember who else, down to see Tina perform. She was incredible! She was gorgeous. Her band was awesome. Her command of the stage, and that voice … It is the quintessential voice with everything going for it — the power, the rasp, the soul, the rhythm. Everything.”

youtube

In a matter of months, Turner would make her MTV debut with “Ball of Confusion”, the opening track to British Electric Foundation’s Music of Quality and Distinction, Volume One (1982). Heaven 17 producers Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh coupled thunderous synthesizers with Turner’s raw, razor-sharp delivery, outfitting the Temptations’ classic for modern listeners. It had been years since the singer had sounded so vital on record.

David Mallet was hired to direct a video for “Ball of Confusion” during the spring of 1982. “I think the person that really had the foresight was Roger Davies,” he says. “The first time I met him was when we did ‘Ball of Confusion’. He was the one that saw that Tina wasn’t just an out-of-date club singer. I agreed with him.” Mallet also filmed Turner’s tour stop at Hammersmith Odeon in April 1982, shaping the show into a full-length concert video, Nice ‘n Rough (1982). “I didn’t get to see Tina that night,” he clarifies. “You put the cameras there, you do it, and go home.”

Mallet worked more closely with the singer on “Ball of Confusion”, keeping the special effects to a minimum and focusing instead on Turner’s magnetizing stage presence. “We were all part of a huge learning curve,” he continues. “I remember thinking that what we did must be based around live performance. We can’t do something with a story, and a this and a that. We can’t do an Ultravox-type of thing with it. I don’t think Tina had done an awful lot of what you might call ‘single camera’ filming up to then. I remember thinking, Ah, we got a problem here because Tina is a great live act, but how is she, as it were, more or less being a film person, doing the same thing time and time again? I remember trying to set it up as much as possible in big chunks so she could get into it. She got the hang of filming after that, obviously. She’s a quick learner.”

Between the video’s London set, British Electric Foundation’s production, and a UK-based label, Virgin Records, supporting the single, “Ball of Confusion” arrived at MTV as an import release. In promoting the video, the channel also broadcast Mallet’s Nice ‘n Rough concert, which typified the excitement of Turner’s shows at the Ritz. The singer even stopped by the channel’s studio on W. 33rd St. to film a station ID for the network’s “Knock Knock” promo featuring Boy George and Thomas Dolby.

“Tina was wonderful,” Blackwood recalls. “It was in our first studio that I met her. We would wake up to go into the studio and it was virtually a parade of artists in and out. Tina was a spiritual person — grounded, strong, kind, warm, optimistic — a joyous person. It sounds fawning, but trust me I would not fawn. I don’t believe in false praise and all that. She’s somebody that you’d want to hug as soon as you met her. There’s some people that you just know that they’re good souls. She is one of them.”

Most significant of all, Turner became one of the first Black female artists to appear on MTV, along with Joan Armatrading and Grace Jones, at a time when Album Oriented Rock (AOR) still governed the station. “MTV was built around a very strict radio format and it took us awhile to finally get it — that we weren’t a radio channel, we were a visual channel,” Sparrow explains. “We finally realized that our audience was smarter than we thought. They liked the visual as much as the song. Thankfully, we evolved.” MTV continued to expand its musical format throughout 1983, with Michael Jackson’s game-changing videos for “Billie Jean” and “Beat It” opening the door for several more pop-oriented Black artists like Lionel Richie and Donna Summer to join Prince and Tina Turner in rotation on the network.

Turner’s next video tilled the foundation for one of the most dramatic comebacks in popular music history. Since signing with Capitol Records in 1982, the singer had recorded a series of tracks with A&R VP John Carter, including covers of the Motels (“Total Control”) and the Animals (“When I Was Young”). She’d also worked with Pointer Sisters producer Richard Perry on Robert Palmer’s “Johnny and Mary” and Perry’s engineer Dennis Kirk on “Crazy in the Night” for the Summer Lovers (1982) soundtrack, plus other tracks for a potential full-length album that never materialized.

youtube

Martyn Ware re-teamed with Turner to record a new single for her fall ’83 European tour. Turner and Ware listened to several R&B classics before settling on Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together”. In just one take, Turner completely remodeled the song, transforming it into a showstopping tour de force of unbridled yearning and passion.

While Capitol prepared “Let’s Stay Together” for single release, Turner and her dancers flew to London for a video shoot with David Mallet. Ann Behringer recalls, “We were in the US doing two shows a night for probably a solid two weeks and then they said, ‘You’re getting on a plane tomorrow to go to London. You’re going to be doing a video the next day.’ The video took eleven hours. We were so exhausted when we did that video. It was intense. I’ve never worked so hard!”

Mallet’s precision had a purpose. “I just wanted do so something more ambitious than the last video,” he says. “I thought we’d broken the mold for Tina Turner on ‘Ball of Confusion’ and I remember thinking, Now we’ve got to outdo that one some how, but still keep her slightly live performance-oriented.” For “Let’s Stay Together”, Mallet would craft a three-and-a-half minute showcase for the singer’s smoldering appeal.

A lone spotlight illuminated Turner in the video’s introduction. She projected an alluring combination of strength and sexuality, animating the words with heart and intention. “Tina takes direction but you don’t really have to give her much,” says Behringer. “Her persona onstage is just this raw, sensual, elegant woman. The essence of a woman, really. I think she and David Mallet were in sync.”

The transition between the intro’s celestial ambience and the track’s infectious beat revealed a softly lit stage, flanked by a group of tuxedoed percussionists, while Behringer and Fletcher danced at Turner’s side. “A lot of it was choreography from the show,” Behringer continues. “That’s what Tina would do. She would take pieces of choreography dating back to the Ikettes and basically we would re-work the patchwork quilt of choreography — Toni Basil’s choreography, I threw in some moves, LeJeune threw in some moves. It was always this mix.”

Tina Turner with Ann Behringer (left) and LeJeune Fletcher (right). ‘Let’s Stay Together’ [1983] 12″ single. Courtesy of Capitol Records.

However, the impulse behind the video’s defining moment belonged to Behringer. “The whole movement of us going down Tina’s legs was my idea,” she says. “That was my choreography. Have you seen her legs? Okay. Nuff said! They kept it, but when they showed the video in London, they blocked us out because they thought it was too racy. It’s crazy. That was during the time of Boy George. There was a rumor going around that we were guys, that we weren’t really women, which I thought was hilarious!” [laughs] In fact, the trio coyly replicated the provocative pose during Norman Seeff’s photo session for the “Let’s Stay Together” single sleeve.

A backdrop of flickering flames framed the singer and her two dancers for the second half of the video. “Fire is always good,” chuckles Mallet, who used a similar effect in Billy Idol’s “Eyes Without a Face” video. However, Turner’s bond with Behringer and Fletcher is what gave the scene its soul, like a trio of glamorous “Wonder Women” ready to soar. “We were tight,” notes Behringer. “We were close. We worked together non-stop all the time. We were doing two shows a night, traveling on the tour bus with the band. I’m still very close to LeJeune to this day. She’s like my sister.”

“Let’s Stay Together” entered the UK chart in November 1983, where it became the singer’s first Top Five hit as a solo artist, though “River Deep-Mountain High” had essentially served as a solo vehicle for Tina Turner years earlier. The singer bookended the single’s debut with a pair of appearances on the UK music program The Tube in October and December. The camera even spied a besotted Annie Lennox dancing in the audience during Turner’s performance.

Capitol quickly rushed a single release in the US, where “Let’s Stay Together” bowed on the Hot 100 the week ending 21 January 1984. Two months later, it topped the dance chart for two weeks and peaked at #27 in the Top 40. Capitol had a hit single. Now the label needed a hit album and another hit single. Fast.

“What’s Love Got to Do With It”

It’s the first week of June 1984 and the first day of a week-long heatwave in New York. Temperatures have already soared past 90 degrees, but Tina Turner is the quintessence of cool as a film crew follows her outside Seravalli Playground in the West Village. It’s the video shoot for “What’s Love Got to Do With It”, which Capitol has recently sent to radio. Director John Mark Robinson has one day to film the video and four days to edit the video in time for its MTV premiere. In five days’ time, Robinson will have created a video that captures, definitively, the leonine power and presence of Tina Turner.

A lot had happened in the months between Turner’s newfound success with “Let’s Stay Together” and finding herself at an early morning video shoot in Manhattan. Capitol had released a follow-up single for the UK market, a gospel-tinged version of the Beatles’ “Help” that Turner recorded with the Crusaders. Working with a modest budget, Turner, Roger Davies, and producer/A&R executive John Carter returned to London where they corralled musicians and vetted material for a full-length album.

“Roger Davies was the really smart cookie in the whole campaign,” says Cy Curnin, lead vocalist of the Fixx. “He was savvy enough to know that if Tina collaborated with artists that were making a little bit more noise in America at the time — primarily British Invasion acts if you like — and then made the videos, the market really kind of opened up for her. He really knew what he was doing. He’d set this thing up impeccably. It was like a home run.” Featuring personnel from the Fixx, Dire Straits, and Heaven 17, as well as star players like Jeff Beck, Private Dancer was recorded in a matter of weeks.

youtube

Producer/songwriter Terry Britten presided over three tracks, “Show Some Respect”, a cover of Ann Peebles’ “I Can’t Stand the Rain”, and a track he’d written with Graham Lyle, “What’s Love Got to Do With It”. At Turner’s request, he re-worked the latter tune for the singer, tailoring it to the rough-hewn textures of her voice. She conveyed a fascinating blend of sensuality and world-weary sophistication. Nothing else on the radio sounded like “What’s Love Got to Do With It”.

John Mark Robinson was tasked with creating a video that drew on Turner’s visual appeal without upstaging the song. It helped that he’d long admired the singer. “I knew she was on her own and I knew she was on the comeback trail,” he says. “I was seeing her around peripherally and I remember being knocked out by it. It was exciting. I had always been a fan.As a teenager, I grew up in the Philadelphia area. ‘River Deep-Mountain High’ was my first experience with her and seeing her in her glory in the early days. Tina was remarkable from the get-go.”

Robinson began his career in New York as a stage actor and director before moving to Los Angeles where he did guest spots on Norman Lear and Aaron Spelling television series. He also co-founded a company called Modern Props that rented props to shows like Battlestar Galactica. Robinson had just started his business when the artist M approached him about directing a video for “Moonlight and Muzak” (the follow-up single to “Pop Muzik”) that would air on Top of the Pops. Sire Records was impressed by Robinson’s work with M and sent him to London to shoot the Pretenders’ “Brass in Pocket”, which later became the seventh video to air on MTV.

Over the next couple of years, Robinson directed videos for a range of acts, including the Ramones, Bob Marley, and Bob Dylan, as well as Capitol artists like Bob Seger and Ashford & Simpson. In the spring of 1984, Capitol approached him about directing “What’s Love Got to Do With It”. “I was on another project,” he recalls. “I said when I could do it and what I thought it would cost. They said, ‘We’ll get back to you on that.’ I didn’t hear anything. I was heartbroken when they didn’t go for my initial idea. I don’t know whether it was money or schedule. I have a feeling it was a little of both.”

Tina Turner ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It’ [1984] UK single. Courtesy of Capitol Records.

Director/producer Bud Schaetzle shot a video for “What’s Love Got to Do With It”, rendering the story in moody black-and-white tones, with Turner narrating a series of emotionally charged scenes. Capitol passed on Schaetzle’s video, though it was later released as a bonus clip on Turner’s Simply the Best (1991)video collection.

About a month after initially contacting Robinson, Capitol resumed conversations with the director, who’d always envisioned New York City as the backdrop for Turner’s video. At the time, she was opening for Lionel Richie and scheduled to appear in the New York area at the end of May and beginning of June. Between the singer’s packed itinerary, including an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman, and the fact that “What’s Love Got to Do With It” was already on the radio, Robinson had to work fast.

“Capitol called me back and said, ‘Okay do it. You’ve got eight days.’ I was up for that!” Robinson recalls. “I knew that we’d be safe doing that song in New York. The city has its own life. When you’re shooting in New York, you can’t go wrong, particularly with Tina, her energy, and what she represents. She wouldn’t be out of place anywhere there. I thought, It’s just a slam dunk! I did little drawings and storyboards on the plane going there. I tried to link them together so we could move in a fashion that would be productive because the time was so short.

“I thought, what would make Tina look best? We got to get the legs! We’ve got to have a short skirt, but it’s got to have a New York street feel to it. It can’t be too highly stylized for her, just because of what the song is. It was more about what would make Tina look good and also what would be right with the pulse of the song. It was something about her movement. It had to be appropriate for the feel of the song. I felt as though just her walking through each shot would be the right tempo. She was a narrator, so she had to be floating through whatever the scene might be.”

The singer’s own wardrobe — denim jacket, black leather mini-shirt, black high heels and stockings — created a truly iconic look for the video as she moved through different scenes. “I wanted to use Tina’s stuff because I wanted her to be as real as possible,” says Robinson. “She had no attitude about what she wanted to use or what she didn’t want to use. ‘We can do this. We can do that.’ She was just the easiest, most pro to work with.” An explosion of hair, styled and sculpted by the singer, put the exclamation point on the whole ensemble.

Acclaimed photographer Ming Smith was among the young, stylish New Yorkers who crossed paths with Turner as Robinson’s storyboard unfolded. An accomplished artist and model, Smith made history in 1978 as the first Black female photographer whose work was acquired for the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. She also hailed from a close-knit community of friends and fellow artists who helped ornament the style for “What’s Love Got to Do With It”.

“We were out to win the world,” she says. “It seems like yesterday when you start talking about it. My best friend Toyce Anderson helped cast that video. Ed Love was the choreographer. Ed and Toyce were best friends. Angelo Colon did the make-up. He was a singer and a performer and he was Grace Jones’ stand-in. I was a dancer and a model so they cast me in the video, although it wasn’t a lot of hard-core dancing. I basically did the video because I was Toyce’s friend. I was friends with all of them.

“I loved that feeling of a group of people making something happen because this is Tina Turner! When they were doing the camera set-ups, they had me strutting like Tina!She was a very nice, loving kind of person. Nurturing. She knew I was her stand-in.”

Tina Turner by Ming Smith. ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It’ video shoot [1984]. Courtesy of Ming Smith.

The day-long shoot began at Fulton Ferry Landing in Brooklyn along the East River. “There was something about the prelude into the music,” Robinson explains. “It had a ‘watery’ sound. It was something that had a little bit of flow to it.” An establishing shot of the Manhattan skyline introduced the song’s opening chord. Panning the river, the camera gradually reveals Turner at the pier, watching a tugboat coast through the water. The shot was timed to perfection.

“The director of photography was a guy called Ed Lachman who went on to be quite a big name in Hollywood,” Robinson continues. “We rehearsed the opening a couple of times with Tina walking down the pier. I said, ‘Let’s try one … Wait a second! There’s a tugboat coming! Let’s see if we can time it to the boat and the song and the lip sync and the walking and the dance.’ Well, we did it and the first take went all the way to the end of the pier perfectly. Lachman jumped off the camera into my arms! [laughs]

“Technically, it was one of those things that just went right. You could shoot the shot twelve times and never get it. Something would go wrong. You could never re-position the tugboat. I think somebody at Capitol wanted a close-up in the middle of that. It broke my heart to have to break it up because it was one shot all the way down through the end of the pier, with Tina’s perfect little two-step with the guy. For a director and a cinematographer, a long shot like that, dollied, was perfect. Perfect sync, perfect timing. Tina did it perfectly. I couldn’t even believe it. It was a good omen.”

Choreographer Ed Love doubled as the suavely suited gentleman who meets Turner along the pier. “They needed someone to be Tina’s partner when they had the boat scene,” Smith recalls. “I said, ‘Why not you? You’re perfect.’ I urged him on because he was supportive of me and I was supportive of him.” Turner’s interplay with Love capped the opening sequence with a flirtatious exchange that subtly underscored the lyrics’ sexual tension.

Before Turner and the film crew decamped for Manhattan, Smith photographed the singer in a candid moment on the pier. “I brought my camera almost everywhere,” she says. “Me taking a photograph was just coincidental. My friends all knew I was a photographer. I didn’t make a big thing of it.” Smith’s photo documented Turner in a rare moment of repose. “Tina was just standing there,” she continues. “I think she was just within herself. She could have been meditating. She was not ‘on’. She was just being. She was just getting the job done. She didn’t necessarily pose for me but I had my camera and I was shooting and I just caught her. I feel like she was giving me that moment. There was some type of real connection. She knew and I knew.” Juxtaposed with the Brooklyn Bridge in the background, Turner’s stance in the photograph depicted a woman quietly in command of her power.

Robinson cross-faded to Seventh Avenue South in the West Village where Turner emerged from the Christopher Street subway station. “It was done guerrilla-style,” the director says. “We did it a couple of times. We set it up ahead of time and then walked Tina in it. I had a P.A. downstairs with a walkie-talkie. I said, ‘Go twelve steps down and come out of there on Action! and then take a left.’ We held that shot a little long. She almost looked like she was about to buy a paper!” Remarkably, bystanders didn’t interfere with filming. “If people know they’re being photographed, you lose it all,” Robinson says. “I considered myself lucky. Nobody said, ‘Oh! That’s Tina Turner!'”

The director headed west from Seventh Avenue South to James J. Walker Park, filming Turner through the park’s wrought-iron fence as she walks along St. Luke’s Place. The singer happens upon Ming Smith and a small crew of guys playing dice on the sidewalk. Musician and choreographer Jay T Jenkins, who danced on Soul Train in the late-’70s and had previously toured with Rick James and Prince, meets Turner’s gaze with a penetrating stare from behind a pair of shades. Outfitted in a yellow tank top, he complemented Turner’s effortless swag.

Tina Turner — Private Dancer [1984] album cover [US edition]. Courtesy of Capitol Records.

“I had that musician look and that musician vibe,” says Jenkins. “Back then we called it the ‘new breed’ look. There were a bunch of us dancers and musicians who kind of had that look. I think that’s how I ended up getting cast. I think because my hair at that time looked a little bit like Tina’s, they thought, We could do something with that. It was that type of vibe that got me in. It wasn’t even on the dance side. It was more visual. ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It’ was the first video I appeared in.

“There was no real rehearsal until you got to the set, so you didn’t even know if they came up with that idea beforehand. They may have been like: ‘We got this group of extras. Let’s have Tina walk down this street. Let’s have her interact. Okay, let’s try this. Where’s that guy with the look? Okay, you! The camera’s right here. Turn, turn! Real quick, just snap. Freeze.'”

During Turner’s exchange with the group, she pushes Jenkins back towards Ming Smith, almost out of frame. “At the end, Tina apologized,” Jenkins laughs. “She said, ‘I’m so sorry!’ She warmed up to me because I respected her time and space. In our brief conversations, I may have broken the ice by saying something where she was aware that I knew music history. I wasn’t just a straight-up extra. I was just being professional. On film sets, you see people trying to weasel their way into this and that. I didn’t act like that.”

Turner’s next stop brought her to nearby Seravalli Playground off W. 13th Street where a group extras posed along the park’s chain-link fence. From crop tops to short shorts, each style reflected the neighborhood’s hip aesthetic. Turner’s spiked heels even got their own close-up. “Tina was at home in those heels, okay?” Smith chuckles. “She was walking around all during the video, regardless, with those heels on.” In fact, Smith herself only lived about a twenty-minute stroll from Seravalli Playground.

“I lived on Seventh Avenue South and Carmine Street,” Smith continues. “Toyce lived in the Village too. When I moved there, Carmine Street was still very very Italian. There were artists. It was a place where James Baldwin used to live and frequent. It was just very freeing. One time I took this acting class. There were maybe nine students in the class and each one had to say ‘Where does this person look like they live in New York?’ Everybody said I was a Village girl. Not the upper east side or lower east side — the Village! Some of my friends, before they came to New York, they were closeted. They had girlfriends in high school but then when they came to the Village, they were out. They had people around them that were accepting of them and creative and loving and real. That’s the way it was. I loved that. It was freedom for me too. I didn’t have to look a certain way, walking around the Village. I was free to be who I am.”

That sense of freedom also informed the video’s final location outside the Cherry Lane Theatre on Commerce Street, home to Sam Shepard’s True West at the time. “I have a soft spot for that area,” says Robinson. “Part of it was visual, part of it was respect to what the city means, artistically. I can’t tell you for a fact how it came about but I’m sure it was visual first, and I would maybe even say convenient to a degree. It was a run-and-gun day. What’s a place we can get to without driving for a half an hour?”

Ming Smith re-appeared during the Cherry Lane sequence, dancing around a lamp post with the video’s makeup artist Angelo Colon. Vanessa Bell Calloway, who later starred as a fictional Ikette named Jackie in Touchstone’s Tina Turner biopic What’s Love Got to Do With It (1993), even makes a brief cameo in the scene. Turner bids the smiling group of extras adieu before strutting off into the sultry New York night.

“I wanted to mix it up and have it hopefully look like New York and look like the contemporary world at the time,” says Robinson, noting the colorful variety of fashion in the scene. “I always wondered if the look shouldn’t have been a little more towards what Tina had as opposed to the stylized day-go colors and so forth. They were so prominent at the time. They were right on the edge of things and Tina wanted to be as contemporary as she could. She just had to be herself.”

Tina Turner — ‘Private Dancer’ [1984] promotional photo. Courtesy of Capitol Records.

Robinson saved a clever shot for the very end of the video — a chalk illustration of Brian Aris’ cover photo for the US edition of Private Dancer, which doubled as the single sleeve for “What’s Love Got to Do With It”.”I found somebody doing that in Central Park and I said, ‘Can you do this? How long would it take?'” he says. “That was the last shot of the night because it took a little while for him to do it. I don’t remember where it was, but I know Capitol liked it a lot!” With Private Dancer fresh on record store shelves, the closing frame functioned as brilliant cross-marketing.

Before uncorking bottles of champagne after a full day’s work, Robinson filmed Turner’s close-up, one of the most striking pieces of footage in her career. “It was a nicely lit lip sync of her going through the entire song,” he says. “I knew what I wanted and Ed Lachman got it for me. He deserves a lot of credit for that whole thing. I think it may have been filmed by the river. It’s timeless. Wherever we needed the close-up, we could plug it in, although for that dolly shot [by the pier], I wish I didn’t have it!

“Tina made it her own. She worked hard. It was 97 degrees that whole day. It was a really hard day, I remember that, but Tina was very trusting. She’s a pro. Tell her what to do and that was it. There was no emotional nonsense. No need for attention.”

Robinson had less than four days to edit the video before delivering it to MTV. “It was up on the air that day,” he says. “The record was just starting to chart as well, so Capitol really wanted to have the material to exploit it.” New York-centric music videos had become an MTV staple, whether Pat Benatar’s “Love is a Battlefield” or Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”, but “What’s Love Got to Do With It” maximized the cinematic qualities of the city. “That was one of the first that showed a little bit of the grit and a little bit of the beauty at the same time,” says Jenkins. “Tina’s coming out of the subway, so you still got the New York grit of the underground subway, but you also get the beauty of the East River, so it doesn’t look like the Bronx.”

Private Dancer bowed on the Billboard 200 the week ending 16 June 1984 just as “What’s Love Got to Do With It” moved into “hot” rotation on MTV. “I love that video because it has that New York vibe,” says Nina Blackwood. “Looking at it now, it’s a snapshot of that period. I love the song of course and I love Tina. When she had that look with her hair — even though that’s more mane-like as a male lion — she is a lioness. She is the epitome of a female.” By summer’s end, the video had powered Tina Turner to the top of Billboard‘s Hot 100 for the first time in her career. “What’s Love Got to Do With It” crowned number one for three consecutive weeks and would become the second biggest single of 1984, just behind Prince’s “When Doves Cry”.

Turner celebrated the news of her latest triumph onstage during her three-night stint at the Ritz in August 1984. “The entire MTV staff was at my door wanting tickets,” says Gale Sparrow. “The Ritz, or maybe it was Roger Davies, accommodated 35 of us there. That night … I can’t even explain it. I think it’s in my top three concerts. That show was so captivating, the hottest ticket in town, and nobody wanted her to stop. From the moment she walked out on that stage, she controlled it. All by herself. No backup singers. No dancers. Her performance was non-stop electricity. She delivered. I remember talking to Steven Tyler, who looked like he was going to fall apart. He wanted to get up on that stage with her so much. He was beyond himself. Everybody was humble that night because we were in a room with greatness, pure greatness.

“She greeted a lot of us backstage afterwards. I have pictures of me with her and everybody in that picture looks like they’re having the best time of their life because they’re surrounded by the Queen of Rock ‘n Roll. Tina’s smiling and beaming. We were in awe. It’s a bunch of kids at MTV that never went backstage with anybody and they got tickets. The look on everybody’s faces, including mine, was pure glee. Everybody was gasping at the end, saying, ‘Can we do it again?’ It was three nights but I couldn’t ask for 35 tickets for the next show. We had to be satisfied with the one night.”

Three weeks later, an effusive Bette Midler introduced Turner’s performance of “What’s Love Got to Do With It” onstage at Radio City Music Hall for the First Annual MTV Video Music Awards. In a nod to the video’s popularity, MTV screened the intro with the Manhattan skyline before segueing to Turner’s live performance.

Everyone from music legends in the audience to young viewers at home cheered Turner’s phenomenal re-emergence, due in no small part to what Robinson created with Turner on a hot June day in 1984. “He had the perfect artist to work with him,” says Blackwood. “I’ve found, over the years, the real greats, the ones with the super talent, tend to be the more professional and easier to work with. Tina’s chanting, her Buddhism has a lot to do with it because Buddhism, especially, is the lack of ego. It transcends the ego. That is part and parcel of what makes Tina who she is.”

“Better Be Good to Me”

Tina Turner was still on the road with Lionel Richie when she arrived at the Beverly Theater in July 1984 to shoot her next video for Private Dancer. She traded her denim jacket and mini-skirt from “What’s Love Got to Do With It” for a black leather ensemble that became synonymous with the formidable persona she created on “Better Be Good to Me”. Director Brian Grant would immortalize that look in the first of two videos he shot with Turner for the album.

Hardly four months had passed since Turner recorded “Better Be Good to Me” and “I Might Have Been Queen” with producer Rupert Hine, who’d recently helmed the Top Five hit “One Thing Leads to Another” for the Fixx. “We were in the middle of recording our third studio album with Rupert,” says Fixx frontman Cy Curnin. “He got the call from Roger Davies. Would he like to do these two songs? We broke our session at the studio, but it was a residential studio. Tina came in for a week to do these songs. She had a strong presence. I was a little nervous about meeting someone so iconic. I guess when you meet someone that you think is a huge star, you think of them as being twelve-foot tall, but she turned out to be so Zen-like, so sweet and very calm.

“We were so enamored with her. As a kid, my sister was a big American music fan. She was four-and-a-half years older than me. She was buying singles when she was twelve. I would recognize the singles she bought when they would be playing on the radio. I remember ‘River Deep-Mountain High’ and hearing the power of Tina’s voice. She had a much bigger career in England than she did ‘post-Ike’ in America. I didn’t know, because I didn’t know what the American market was or anything about America then. I thought her voice just was so powerful. Then I remember seeing her in the Who movie [Tommy, 1975], thinking she’s larger than life, so I had a real imprint of who this powerful woman was.”

youtube

Written by Mike Chapman, Nicky Chinn, and Holly Knight, “Better Be Good to Me” had originally been recorded by the group Spider three years earlier, and seemed tailor-made for the kind of theatrical flair Turner possessed as a vocalist. Meanwhile, Rupert Hine and his writing partner Jeannette Obstoj drew from Turner’s own life for what became the album’s opening track, “I Might Have Been Queen”. “I think Jeannette was very astute and so when she was asked to write the lyrics specifically for this song for Tina, she would have done her homework,” says Curnin. “I really loved the pictures she painted with that lyric.” Indeed, a line like “I remember the girl in the fields with no name” alluded to Turner’s southern upbringing as well as her Buddhist faith.

“I was just discovering Buddhism,” Curnin continues. “Tina was a few years ahead in that world. She was explaining how she’d found strength and her calmness and the power of her voice in the Zen teachings. That was very enlightening to me in the early stages of my own journey. I found out she’s a Sagittarius and so am I. She gave me a real gift, which was the strength of Zen within me. It allowed me to survive some pretty crazy days and then get beyond that.”

Curnin joined Hine and Turner on background vocals for “I Might Have Been Queen” and “Better Be Good to Me” while Fixx member Jamie West-Oram lent guitar parts to both tracks. “When we were singing backing vocals after Tina had sung her parts, we were all standing around the mic and Rupert suggested that Tina go to the back of the room because her voice was so much louder!” Curnin recalls. Both songs spotlighted Turner’s strength as a rock vocalist, where attitude and feeling account for everything. Ultimately, “I Might Have Been Queen” and “Better Be Good to Me” bookended Side One of Private Dancer with two of Turner’s most essential recordings.

“A couple of months later, we get a call,” Curnin continues. “Roger Davies said, ‘Hey we’re doing a video for ‘Better Be Good to Me’. Do you want to be in the video?’ I was like, ‘Yeah! Great idea.’ That sounded amazing. We were set to fly to Australia for a bit of our tour about a week after he called. We had to fly to LA from London, do a whirlwind eighteen hours of dancing around on this video, then fly back and fly out.”

Cy Curnin and Jamie West-Oram were already acquainted with director Brian Grant, who’d filmed the Fixx’s “Saved By Zero” video a year earlier. “We knew Brian really well,” says Curnin. “When we were doing our first videos, we used to have to beg the record company for any budget at all. In England, MTV hadn’t been discovered. Jeannette made ‘Red Skies’ on $10,000. Then we did ‘Stand or Fall’. Before we did ‘One Thing Leads to Another’, the record company had decided that they would rather go with someone that was a true and trusted professional in the video world, so we were a little wary of it going outside of our camp.

“I remember Brian taking us to dinner to discuss the idea of what the video for ‘Saved By Zero’ could be about. You could see that he was really into it and he wasn’t just a hired gun. It was still an exciting time for him. He was very organized. He was coming from the world of shooting commercials and other things he was working on. It went really well. He had a good sort of vibe. He definitely had a style of his own and then to see him suddenly do Tina’s video, which was a completely different style to ours, I was like, Wow this guy has got more strings to his bow because this was a live shoot with the energy of Tina and the band around her.”

Tina Turner ‘Better Be Good to Me’ [1984] UK single. Courtesy of Capitol Records.

“Better Be Good to Me” also resumed Grant’s professional alliance with Roger Davies. “I’d made ‘Physical’ with Olivia Newton-John in 1981,” he says. “Roger was Olivia’s manager. I had become quite good friends with him because of ‘Physical’. He was in London. He said, ‘We’re going to do some videos for Tina’s album. We don’t want to do something ridiculously difficult. We just want to do something quite simple.’ They sent me the song and then I went to America.

“I met Tina at a very short meeting in Hollywood. Roger was there. People like Tina walk into a room and … it’s Tina Turner! She was very gracious and quite funny. Artists tend to put on a smile or an act, but the truth is nine times out of ten everybody’s nervous when you first meet. You don’t quite know whether the chemistry is going to work. I seem to remember she was very gracious. We had the conversation, talked about the song. They wanted to make the video feel as if it was a live gig. Tina has always been brilliant live, always. She’s always been an incredible performer, right back to the ’60s. I knew that whatever else we did, we’d get that.”

Grant headquartered the shoot at the Beverly Theater, a venue where Turner herself was booked to perform two months later. The director transformed the Beverly into a small rock club, dressing the venue with glowing cat eyes and oversize paintings of panthers from Turner’s own stage set. Grant simulated a full moon to herald Turner’s entrance, creating a shadow of tousled hair that crowned Turner in silhouette.

The singer’s stunning visage commanded attention even before she sang a note. “We shot in 35 millimeter,” says Grant, whose finesse in shooting close-ups had become a hallmark of his music videos. “In those days, most of the stuff we shot was on 16 millimeter, which is still lovely, but it’s not the same as 35 mm. That’s why that close-up looks as good as it does — it’s lit beautifully and it’s 35 mm.

“I’ve photographed quite a lot of good-looking women and I always shoot a close-up. It always gives the artist a great deal of confidence because you’ve spent an hour making them look fantastic and they’ve gotten a great performance out of it. I was a camera man before I was a director, so I’ve always shot things, but I realized that you’ve really got to make women look beautiful. I learnt that with Kiki Dee [‘Star’]. It almost becomes a photo session. You usually get rid of everybody. I operate the camera. By taking an hour just to do that one shot, a number of things happen: you get a beautiful shot, make-up and everyone have all the time in the world to get it right, and you form a bond with the singer because it’s just you and her and a camera. If the music’s great, it always gets me going because she’s singing to me. That creates this dynamic between you. The day becomes much easier, as it were.

“What you do on a day like that is you shoot some kind of wide shot to make everybody feel good, then I would have shot Tina. Then I would have shot the band. When you’re shooting a normal band, everybody’s part of that music video, but when you’re shooting guys who are really session guys, they don’t get that kind of attention. When you start shooting them, I think it surprises them. For example, you do an entire take on the drummer. Most of the time, they’ll get two or three shots if they’re lucky.”

Of the four videos Turner made for Private Dancer, “Better Be Good to Me” evidenced the singer’s connection with her audience. A local LA radio station announced the video shoot, drawing an eager crowd of Turner’s fans, who brought a sense of authenticity to the performance-driven nature of the video. “It’s a very quick and cheap way of getting extras,” Grant chuckles. “‘If you want to come to the Beverly Theater and spend an afternoon with Tina Turner, please come along’ … whatever it was. As long as she’s on the stage, they’ll stay forever.” In a sense, the crowd mirrored an eclectic range of styles and sensibilities akin to the West Village dwellers in “What’s Love Got to Do With It”, further highlighting Turner’s cross-format appeal.

Tina Turner with director Brian Grant [far left]. ‘Better Be Good to Me’ video shoot [1984]. Courtesy of Brian Grant.

Earlier that day, Cy Curnin and Jamie West-Oram surfaced at the Beverly to take their position onstage. “Jamie and I turn up at this great little theater in LA,” Curnin recalls. “We didn’t really know what we were going to do other than just mime our part. Brian said, ‘Jamie, do your studio guitar thing as if you’re in a live band and Cy you can come on and dance around.’ I played this kind of cheeky boyfriend who had been tormenting her, whatever the idea was in the video. It was all just spontaneous.

“You could see Tina’s a natural. Whether it was take one or take 30, she was still doing it. She wasn’t miming. She was belting it out. That just made it feel all the more real. We’d had somewhat of a relationship at the studio before, so we felt comfortable. I’m pretty good at rising with someone else’s energy so I just kept going along with her. I wanted to keep this element of surprise, so her reactions to me or my reactions to her would be real. I decided, Oh, I’ll do this barefoot, thinking five takes and I’ll have it. About 50 takes later, my feet are killing me! I’m asking the crew, ‘Do you got any cocaine?’ It wasn’t to snort. It was to rub on my feet!”

In between, Toni Basil was summoned to contribute ideas for choreography. “I’m just assuming Tina asked for me,” Basil says. “All of a sudden, I’m there. I think it was more of an overall idea in working with Tina. I contributed whatever I could.” Curnin continues, “Toni was working with Tina on some of the moves. She turned to me and said, ‘You can get these moves going.’ I said, ‘I’ve got one schtick. I do my schtick and that’s about what it’s going to be.'” Basil understood Curnin’s approach, having worked with many legendary front men. “When I worked with Mick Jagger, which was several times, you don’t give them your steps,” she says. “You give them back their steps because of their persona, or you might re-work it or give them some ideas.”

Incorporating some of Basil’s moves and some of her own, Turner rocked every corner of the Beverly. She towered over the crowd, gliding across the stage in zebra-stripe heels. This was the leather-clad Tina Turner that had wowed Lionel Richie fans for the past three months on the cusp of a comeback.

Only one incident nearly halted production. “Believe it or not, we are inside the theater for the whole day, but Beverly Hills says it doesn’t matter, you still got to have two policemen with you and you’ve got to pay for them,” Grant explains. “We had two Beverly Hills cops sitting in the theater for the whole day, drinking our coffee, eating our food, just sitting and watching the whole proceedings. It gets to about 10:00 p.m., and we have a license that you’ve got to stop shooting at 10:00 p.m. I hadn’t finished everything. One of the cops walks up to me and says, ‘Mr. Grant, we’ve got to shut you down now. Your license is up.’ I’m going, I just need another thirty minutes. ‘It says on the piece of paper that we’ve got to shut you down.’ At that point I said, ‘Okay, you can tell Tina.’ At that point, I promise you, this guy looked at Tina and said, ‘Half an hour.’ It was just brilliant. She can be fierce!”

MTV premiered “Better Be Good to Me” the last week of August 1984 as “What’s Love Got to Do With It” continued its reign at number one. The video became a favorite among viewers, as well as the the singer herself. “This was my favorite video and my favorite song of that time,” Turner later declared in a 1989 interview with MuchMusic in Canada. A day after Turner’s performance on the MTV Video Music Awards, “Better Be Good to Me” debuted on the Hot 100 where it would peak at number five.

“I think the close-up does the work,” says Grant, reflecting on how “Better Be Good to Me” captured Turner’s essence. “That close-up does it for you! She seems to be singing to you when you watch that close-up. Even though it’s a raunchy song, it seems quite intimate in a funny sort of way. If you go back and look at Tina in the 1960s, she was younger and music was different, but that raunchiness and that energy was there in the ’60s. That energy hasn’t gone away at all in ‘Better Be Good to Me’.”

“Private Dancer”

“She’s Got Legs!” a Rolling Stone headline exclaimed in October 1984. It was the fourth time since 1967 that the magazine featured Tina Turner on its cover. The singer had even more good news to celebrate that month. Director George Miller had recently cast the singer as Aunty Entity, ruler of the post-apocalyptic desert outpost Bartertown, in his third installment of Mad Max.

A decade earlier, Turner had won rave reviews for her incendiary performance as “the Acid Queen” in the Who’s Tommy, but Aunty Entity was not a singing role. This was a lead role where Turner’s character fueled most of the film’s most dramatic scenes. However, before Turner transformed into Aunty Entity, she had another character to play — the title role in “Private Dancer”.

Roger Davies approached Brian Grant about directing Turner’s fourth and final video for Private Dancer. He recalls, “Roger sent it to me and said, ‘Have a listen to this.’ I listened to it and loved it. It’s thematic, it’s cinematic. It could be from a film. It’s got a story, so you’re already dealing with some kind of narrative. If you can interpret the song, not in a literal way, from a directing point of view, then it’s your script.

“There’s a reason that those of us who were making music videos at the time were there. We all wanted to make movies. You can’t do it with every piece of music. It’s impossible. You have to be driven by what the track’s doing. If you try and do something else, and I’ve done it, then you fail. When you get a track like ‘Private Dancer’, which has a narrative of some sort, and it is about something other than love and sex, then it gives you that opportunity to enhance your own ability. MTV was a kind of apprenticeship. Other people paid for our film school, basically, so here’s an opportunity to do something that’s a period piece, which is always beautiful.

youtube

“I didn’t quite know what ‘Private Dancer’ was all about at first, so I did some research. It’s about a taxi dancer. Taxi dancers were paid dance partners in dance halls in the twenties and thirties in Chicago and New York. Basically, you could walk into a taxi dance hall and hire a woman to dance with you. You paid for how many dances you had with her. Once I realized that, I thought, There’s a very interesting story there. I had somewhere to start. I thought, How do we do this? You can’t just have an entire video where Tina is dancing with lots of men who are constantly paying for her. Once you’ve seen that twice, you’ve seen it! I remember thinking to myself, I’ve got to go into what this woman is really about. In other words, try and illuminate the character in the song. That was the starting point.”

Grant enlisted his longtime collaborator Arlene Phillips to choreograph the video. “Arlene’s choreographed almost everything I’ve ever done,” he says. “For Arlene, ‘Private Dancer’ was wonderful because it’s a celebration of dance and at that point she was the go-to choreographer in London, therefore she attracted all the best dancers and had very distinct ideas.” In fact, the same night Turner performed at the first MTV Video Music Awards, Phillips received a “Best Choreography” nomination for her work on Donna Summer’s “She Works Hard for the Money”, directed by Grant.

The director and choreographer scouted locations around London before discovering the Rivoli Ballroom in Southeast London. “It was about to close down because they had found asbestos in the roof, which was very very dangerous,” says Phillips. “They agreed to let us make the video there but it was closing down the day after. It was like being on a building site yet they had preserved the ballroom. The ceiling was rough. The dressing rooms, the toilets, everything was really quite unpleasant … not a place you’d want to go!” Grant continues, “We used the Rivoli Ballroom for itself, but then we built little tiny sets inside the ballroom. Each one of those sets was much smaller than it looks, believe me. We would have done all of those inserts first, taken them all down, and then we would have had the big space of the ballroom to shoot the wide stuff.”

Turner’s role as the taxi dancer embodied a poignant exploration of reality versus fantasy. “I treated it like I would do a drama,” says Grant. “Let’s create a character. Every day she goes to work, she puts her makeup on, she goes out, she dances, she has to put a smile on. She dances with this guy or that guy. It becomes tedious. It’s boring as hell. I thought, What’s really going on in the head of this woman as she dances with these people? I made up the fact that maybe she wanted to be a professional dancer in another way, maybe she wanted to be a ballerina or maybe she wanted to be a flamenco dancer. What I’m thinking is, as she’s dancing with this guy, a way to get past the drudgery and the boredom of it all is to pretend you’re doing something else, as it were. That’s how I think I conveyed it to Tina — you’re playing two characters. You’re playing the real taxi dancer, and within that character is a fantasy of another character.” That duality anchored the most dramatic and conceptually elaborate video Turner ever made.

Phillips helped animate more than a dozen dancers who signified the title character’s felled hopes and dreams as a dancer. “Every one of those people could have been her,” she says. “I was listening to the recording a lot. I started to think about private dancers, dancers for money. For whatever reason, all of the private dancers, had wanted to be a [professional] dancer at some point and somewhere along the way, life has changed for them and they need to go and make their money as a private dancer. I wanted Tina Turner to look at all of the different ways that she could have been. I wanted everything to be meaningful to her, knowing where she was going to end up that night — in some little room at the back of the ballroom.

“If you sit and listen to the record, you are hearing, in Tina’s voice, longing but it also has a dream-like quality. It has a calm and an acceptance of life. If you study the video, you can see that longing and that yearning in her face as she walks through and she sees these different scenes. I always think that somewhere they were part of her life, somewhere it’s something that she saw or she had been through or she dreamed of. Did this happen or didn’t it? Is this a dream or was that moment real? I love mystery. I love these sort of enigmatic moments.

Director Brian Grant and Tina Turner. ‘Private Dancer’ video shoot [1984]. Courtesy of Brian Grant.

“When I look at that video, I see that the dancers are so involved in what they’re doing. I tried to do little stories kind of all the way through. On music videos, you had kind of one chance to be able to tell a story, but that story is always something that you use to guide the dancers to what you want from the piece and also having to make it as visual and entertaining as possible. On MTV, everyone was trying to entertain, to capture the star, the music, and the whole visual presentation of video, so you’re kind of working in a lot of things, but I’m always going to give the dancers something to think about, so they’re not just dancing steps. I’m always like a mirror with their faces — ‘This is what I want you to tell. Use your eyes. Use your hands. Use your face.’ Sometimes the dancers are shot for just a few seconds, but every second matters.”

Each of the characters that Turner observes in the video’s fantasy sequence is a portal to her own character’s life, whether real or imagined. “I thought it would be nice if you could have moments in it that she might have experienced,” Grant continues. “For example, the moment when the sailor throws the hat. At some point, she would have met a sailor. There’s a moment where there’s a guy in an army uniform. That could be a soldier who’s come back from the first World War, who hasn’t danced with anybody for ages. That might have been an experience she had.

“In the second verse she says, ‘I want to have a husband and some children’ and you see a couple that are in a wedding gown but they’re covered in cobwebs. The marriage might last or it might not, so that’s what the cobwebs are all about — longevity. That might seem like the right thing to do — have a husband and children — or it might be worse than you’ve got now, or it might be better. I covered the band in cobwebs — that’s about it being repetitious. Same old thing, every night. There’s the couple dancing in bandages. That’s about being trapped. These are all image metaphors, as it were. All of these images have some kind of reasoning behind them.”

A sensuous dance overlays the instrumental portion of the track, where Turner’s character sits alone pensively, almost frozen in daydream. “I love that dance routine in the middle,” says Grant. “It’s beautifully shot and lit, and beautifully executed by those dancers. I’m very fond of that. I said to Arlene, ‘Just create something fabulous’, which is what she did.” Phillips adds, “I wanted to build up everything that Tina saw and here was, ultimately, the performance. Is that something that she never realized as a reality for herself or is it a moment where she’s saying, ‘I was once part of that. I was not a private dancer. I was a part of the big picture of dance’?” Indeed, Grant shrouded the scene with an elliptical quality that left the meaning open to interpretation.

As the video continues, Turner’s character is glimpsed dancing alone behind a gauzy scrim. “What she’s doing there is her performance in the private dance room,” says Phillips. “You’ll notice her mood change on that little bit. You can see that she’s slightly aggressive. You can kind of see the pain in her face. It’s like, ‘I know I have to do this.’ It’s that moment where she sees herself — this is what she does for money.”

For a fleeting moment, “Private Dancer” returns to the grandeur of the Rivoli Ballroom where it seems as if Turner has escaped the mundanity of her world. “She appears to be dancing with the right guy,” Grant says. “The possibility in her head is that one day the guy that’s going to take me away from all this is going to walk into this ballroom, which of course is a fantasy in itself because it’s probably never going to happen. That’s why we put the old lady in there, watching. She has a kind of skeptical look.”

The director closes the video’s fantasy sequence with a tableau steeped in the tradition of dance — tossing flowers. “At the end of a ballet or an opera, people throw roses or flowers onto the stage,” Grant says. “It seemed much more interesting to put Tina on the floor. She’s enjoying adulation.” The back cover of the “Private Dancer” single even featured a still from the video where long-stemmed roses and carnations adorn Turner.

Tina Turner ‘Private Dancer’ [1984] US single. Courtesy of Capitol Records.

However, Turner’s character eventually returns to her “dime-a-dance” reality. “It wasn’t supposed to have a happy ending,” says Grant. “When she walks off at the end, she has a little tear in her eye. I seem to remember us having some conversations about that. This always happens — there was somebody at the record company who said, ‘Well it’s got to have a happy ending.’ ‘Well, what would you suggest we do?’ It’s not exactly an uplifting song in that regard. It is a very melancholy piece of music. It is about reflecting and it is about the life of somebody like this.”

During the video’s extended dance sequence, one of the dancers approaches Turner and tenderly touches her face. “For me, that moment was the collective way I think that we all felt about her on that night of filming,” says Phillips. “The video was made with so much love. Everybody wanted to be part of this. The most beautiful thing I remember about that, and I will never forget this, is that there were long breaks, setting up cameras, changing shots or shooting little bits here and there, and Tina was sitting on a wooden crate, always surrounded by the dancers, totally wonderful with everyone, and just became a part of what we were doing. It wasn’t ‘Tina Turner’ and the crew and the dancers and the choreographer. It was everybody together. She sat telling stories. There wasn’t a person in that ballroom that hadn’t totally fallen in love with her. It was the only shoot that I’ve been on where the dancers didn’t start complaining about how many hours they’d been there or when they were going to get paid before they left.”

As someone who aspired to pursue acting beyond music videos and her role in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), Turner was genuinely eager to learn about the technical aspects of filmmaking. “Tina was on the set the whole time,” says Grant. “She sat and watched every single part of the process, even when she wasn’t involved, which artists don’t usually do. I think she wanted to see about the story and how it was going to work.” In an interview with Billboard, Turner shared her satisfaction with “Private Dancer” stating “It came out exactly as I wished” (2 February 1985), a compliment to the vision that Grant and Phillips derived from Mark Knopfler’s lyrics.

“The video seems to stand up after all these years, for its time,” Grant says. “That’s all you can ask for really. There’s plenty of videos that don’t, and this one does. Tina inhabited that character.”

The video for “Private Dancer” led Capitol Records and Sony Video’s campaign for Tina Turner — Private Dancer, a videocassette that compiled the title track, “Let’s Stay Together”, “What’s Love Got to Do With It”, and “Better Be Good to Me” as part of Sony’s “Video 45” series, which also included releases by Capitol/EMI artists like David Bowie, the Motels, Kim Carnes, Ashford & Simpson, Stray Cats, and Duran Duran. Sony Video Software’s national marketing manager Andrew Schofer told Billboard that the video marked the first time “a Video 45 is made available at the marketplace at the same time that one of its clips is going into rotation on music video outlets and its single is being pushed up the charts” (22 December 1984).

Bill Burks, Vice President of Merchandising and creative services for Capitol, explained the synergy behind the label and video company’s partnership. “Video dealers and distributors are often hurt when music video product enters the marketplace so long after first being viewed on video outlets that they don’t benefit from the earlier exposure,” he said. “This way both sides reinforce each other while the whole thing underscores the fact that we’re midway through the Private Dancer project, and are reminding the industry, retail and consumer communities that it’s longterm.”

The strategy worked. Capitol issued “Private Dancer” on 28 December 1984 in advance of the videocassette’s mid-January release. The single debuted on the Hot 100 the week ending 19 January 1985, slowly climbing up the Top Ten. A week later, Turner performed “Private Dancer” on the American Music Awards where she won two awards, including “Favorite Black Female Video Artist”. Within two months of its release, Tina Turner — Private Dancer made Billboard history as the first video to top the trade magazine’s brand new Top Music Videocassette chart (30 March 1985). The video drew enough attention that even The New York Times reviewed the four-song “Video 45”, writing that “Tina Turner’s self-possessed sexiness is so phenomenal that watching her perform in any setting can be mesmerizing” (26 May 1985).

‘Private Dancer’ — The Concert and the Impact

Private Dancer was headed towards quadruple platinum on the evening of 26 February 1985, the 27th annual GRAMMY Awards. Months earlier, the album held the number three spot on the Billboard 200 for nine consecutive weeks, shielded from the top only by Prince & the Revolution’s Purple Rain (1984) soundtrack and Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. (1984). Both albums were contenders for “Album of the Year” alongside Private Dancer, Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual (1983) and the category’s victor, Can’t Slow Down (1983) by Lionel Richie.

Springsteen and Richie were among those who stood and applauded after Turner’s performance of “What’s Love Got to Do With It” on the telecast. Critics contended that it wasn’t a matter of whether or not Turner would win GRAMMY Awards that evening, but how many? The singer was duly fêted with “Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female” (“What’s Love Got to Do With It”), “Best Rock Vocal Performance, Female” (“Better Be Good to Me”), and “Record of the Year” (“What’s Love Got to Do With It”), an honor she shared with producer Terry Britten. For an industry that, only a few years earlier, had dismissed Turner’s viability as a recording artist, the awards represented powerful vindication.

Less than a day after sweeping the GRAMMY Awards, Turner hopped a plane and began the European leg of her 1985 Private Dancer tour. In the meantime, David Mallet was commissioned to direct Turner’s two-night stand at the NEC Arena in Birmingham (UK). Three years after filming her concert at Hammersmith Odeon, he was now documenting Turner at the height of her commercial renaissance. “The personal significance for me was the fact that here’s this woman who’s as good years later as she was 20 years earlier, who was actually better, maybe,” he says. “She was a phenomenon in ’65 on TV and she was a phenomenon in ’85.” For the US market, Tina Live — Private Dancer Tour (1985) was slated to premiere on HBO in June 1985, followed by a videocassette release two months later.

Mallet orchestrated an elaborate setup for the shoot, coordinating a team of no less than 15 camera operators stationed throughout the arena. “We filmed that over two nights,” Mallet recalls. “We shot that on 35mm film, which was unheard of in those days because the reels last nine minutes. Then you have three minutes with nothing going on while you change the reel. It becomes the most impossible thing to do. In those days, there weren’t many camera operators that could shoot rock ‘n roll. We had to plunder the documentary business and the film business. I got lucky there. All but two were good — two were worse than useless! The good ones are still, right up until this year, shooting AC/DC with me. I found lots of really good people that night.

“There were more than 15 cameras because what I said was if the bloody thing runs out and you’ve got three minutes without a camera, grab another camera and let them re-load it for you. I couldn’t believe that nobody had thought of doing that! ‘We can’t afford another camera!’ I said, ‘It’s cheaper than another camera operator.'”

Tina Turner at the American Music Awards [28 January 1985]. Copyright: Ralph Dominguez/MediaPunch. MediaPunch Inc / Alamy Stock Photo.

Turner’s NEC concert followed standard pre-production protocol. “It was the same as any other concert I’ve ever shot, which is sheer hard work on the way in and then once it starts, there’s nothing you can do about it,” Mallet explains. “Nobody can hear a damn thing, nobody can see a damn thing, so you’ve got to have worked it all out in advance and then let it rip. All this business that you can tell someone to pick up the lead guitar on the first bar of the fourth solo is all rubbish because by the time they’ve been swamped by fans and hit on the head with a bottle and all that, they’re not gonna count bars. You just need to set it up in the best possible way for every position for every camera so that wherever they point, they can’t lose. You’ve got to set a winning position for every single one of those cameras.”

A suspended flying camera system called the SkyCam captured Tina Turner with one of the film industry’s latest innovations. “In those days, it was the most amazing invention,” Mallet says. “It wouldn’t go fast enough, so I said, ‘It’s 110 volts, put it on 220 volts’— this is English voltage — ‘Get rid of the transformers.’ They did, and it flew at double the speed, but it blew up after about 40 minutes. It was worth it. It looked great when it was going! If you look carefully, it disappears after forty minutes.” For those 40 minutes, the SkyCam soared through the arena like a comet, magnetically pulling the crowd’s energy towards Turner.

“I want to sing songs from my album Private Dancer for you,” Turner told the audience after opening the show with an explosive rendition of “Show Some Respect”. It marked the first filmed concert where Turner performed songs that she’d popularized as a solo artist, not just “Proud Mary” or high-octane covers of the Rolling Stones and Rod Stewart. Even an album track like “I Might Have Been Queen” sparked the same roar of audience approval as the LP’s biggest hits.

The concert proceeded with Turner amplifying nearly every track off Private Dancer for arena-sized impact. Holding court in a variation on the denim jacket-mini skirt ensemble from “What’s Love Got to Do With It”, Turner summoned Bryan Adams from the wings for “It’s Only Love”, a duet that Adams wrote specifically for Turner on his Reckless (1984) album. “Bryan’s not taking a step back,” says Nina Blackwood. “He’s just him, with that twinkle that he’s got in his eye. Tina seems equally charmed by him. He’s a little mischievous!” The two artists generated undeniable heat, and would subsequently win an MTV Video Music Award for “Best Stage Performance” (1986) after MTV began airing “It’s Only Love” on the network.

youtube

David Bowie furnished the big surprise of the concert, joining Turner on the title track to his Tonight (1984) album. The two longtime friends radiated a sweet affection as they danced center stage. “I’ve seen Tina so many times over the years and this is a privilege to be on the same stage as you Tina,” Bowie said. The duo closed the concert with a medley of “Let’s Dance”, both the ’60s classic by Chris Montez and Bowie’s chart-topping hit.

“I don’t think any of us knew that it was going to take off like that,” Mallet says about Turner’s chemistry with Bowie. “It was Bowie that wanted to do something with her. Anytime Tina did anything with another artist it was almost always because that other artist, whoever it was, wanted to do something with the great Tina Turner.”

“Ms. Turner is a magnificent whirlwind, coming on full blast,” The New York Times raved just before the concert’s HBO premiere in June 1985. “With a career going back to the 1950s, she is still sizzle incarnate. And she still commands riveted attention” (18 June 1985). “America loved it,” says Mallet. “America got hip a lot faster than Britain. Everybody in England hated it. They said that the cutting was far too fast. At one stage, they refused to broadcast it unless I re-edited it. That was another thing — I edited the whole thing myself. I think you’ll find that the cutting pace is faster than anything that had ever been, in terms of a rock ‘n roll concert.”

Sony Video Software prepared Tina Live — Private Dancer Tour for release on videocassette in August 1985. Within weeks, it sold more than 150,000 units, the standard for platinum sales in the home video market. “Anyone who has even the slightest history of heart trouble should steer clear of this live Tina Turner tape,” the Daily News quipped. “The twelve-song program is exciting enough to make almost anyone’s arteries burst” (1 September 1985). Months later, the Recording Academy nominated Tina Live — Private Dancer Tour for “Best Music Video, Long Form” at the 28th Annual GRAMMY Awards, while Tina Turner — Private Dancer also received a nomination for “Best Music Video, Short Form”.

However, Turner’s biggest video victory arrived at the Second Annual MTV Video Music Awards in September 1985 when she won “Best Female Video” for “What’s Love Got to Do With It”. The video’s director was thrilled. “Tina hit it out of the park,” says John Mark Robinson. “She was fantastic. I worked with Dylan, the Ramones, the Pretenders, and Bob Marley. Tina was the hardest worker of anybody. It was unbelievable how ready she was, her attitude. She was like a workhorse. I was so proud to be involved with that song. I know that video was running every ten minutes. It became the backbone of MTV for awhile.It’s one of the greats for that period, not to mention it revived Tina’s career, which is another whole fantastic piece of the story. Her re-birth was fabulous. It’s a heroic saga.”

Those who appeared in the video for “What’s Love Got to Do With It” also celebrated how Turner’s success reverberated across the industry. “Even though I didn’t have a big part in it, people remembered that video,” says Jay T Jenkins. “As the video blew up, I definitely understood and appreciated Tina’s impact on rock ‘n roll and music videos, and especially for people of color. Through her, it gave permission for the Black Rock Coalition to come out. Corey [Glover] and Vernon [Reid] and everybody was like, ‘We can do this! We can get out here and make some noise!'”

Tina Turner and Lionel Richie at the GRAMMY Awards, Los Angeles, CA [26 February 1985]. Copyright: Ralph Dominguez/MediaPunch. MediaPunch Inc / Alamy Stock Photo

Ming Smith adds, “Tina gave everything to her artistry. The video was a real statement from being in a relationship and now she’s going out on her own. It took courage. You see the struggle and you see the success. Unfortunately, that video changed my life because right after that, the AIDS epidemic happened. The whole artistic community, from designers to agents … It was devastating.” Ed Love, Angelo Colon, and Toyce Anderson — Smith’s cadre of friends who were so integral to the choreography, style, and casting of “What’s Love Got to Do With It” — all passed away within years of the video’s release. Their contributions remain indelibly etched in the video’s allure.

Elsewhere, the video for “Private Dancer” brought Arlene Phillips her second VMA nomination for “Best Choreography”. Beyond Phillips’ talent and creativity, the nomination was a testament to her winning rapport with the singer. “I think Tina’s an artist that is more sure of herself than any other female diva that I’ve worked with, and I’ve worked with many,” she says. “Tina was kind and generous and warm because she was confident in herself. She was sure about what she was doing. It made her one of the easiest people to work with that I ever worked with.”

Turner also secured a VMA nomination in the “Best Stage Performance” category for “Better Be Good to Me”. “Tina’s energy was so powerful that it really was above and beyond the fashion or whatever was going on in the ’80s,” says Cy Curnin, who notes how the Fixx found even more fans after working with Turner on “Better Be Good to Me” and “I Might Have Been Queen”. “The cross-pollination of that period was great for us. I was so proud to have been on that project because it pushed our world into another market. I think people were maybe aware of the human aspect of her story and were championing not only her survival but her newfound wings and glorification of somebody who’s gone through hell and gone beyond. To me, she was ageless, almost like this Greek goddess or some kind of character from a Marvel comic.”

Turner’s popularity with MTV’s audience proved that seasoned acts were relevant and dynamic forces on television. “Tina was older than most of the artists on MTV,” says Nina Blackwood. “I don’t mean that negatively. She had a history behind her. She wasn’t hatched in the video age. She is truly in a league of her own all the way around.” Turner’s autonomy, and the way her success defied music industry conventions, resonated with younger viewers, in particular, seeking to establish their own identity and independence.

Following the release of Tina Live — Private Dancer Tour, David Mallet would direct no less than seven additional concert films for the singer, from Break Every Rule (1986) through Tina Live (2009), a CD/DVD commemorating her 50th Anniversary Tour. “There are, in the world, very few artists,” he says. “There’s plenty of singers. There’s plenty of acts, but artists you can almost count on two hands, since the beginning of rock ‘n roll. She’s kept it going for 50-plus years. That’s not a bad run. That’s the difference between an artist and a singer, a major property. They are very rare.

“I remember making a commercial for Pepsi-Cola with her in LA [1986]. She turned up absolutely on time. She had to do, I think, fifteen different versions of that bloody film, duetting with a different person from God knows where. They were all late and hungover and this, that, and the other. Tina walked in and said, ‘Tell me where to stand, tell me what to do, and I’ll do it. I trust you.’ That commercial was in the biggest film studio you’ve ever seen in your life. She wasn’t expecting that. She was expecting to sit on a stool and talk to some local singer. She had just a great energy to overcome it.”

Similar to Mallet’s tenure with the singer, Toni Basil is one of the few individuals who’s worked with Turner consistently over the span of decades, before and during the Private Dancer era, through choreographing the singer’s video for “Love Thing” (1991) and her last concert tour in 2008-2009. “Tina liked my dancing and I loved her,” says Basil. “It was a great collaboration. Her work ethic was of the highest caliber that you could ever imagine, as is Bowie, as is Bette Midler. These people are not major stars because they’re lazy or they’re not paying attention.

“Before Bette and I embark on every concert that I’ve ever done for her, we go through all of Tina’s stuff. Of course neither of us can dance like Tina but it’s just so inspiring. Even on the last tour, Tina still danced as good. The singing was as good, if not better, because she had become a really good actress. She was a diva and a queen and yet, she’s in the dressing room working with the girls, making sure the weaves and the wigs and the wardrobe and all of that was right. She was very down-to-earth.

“You can talk about her singing and you can talk about her dancing but her walking on that cherry picker arm, like a tight rope? Every time she’d do a show, I would close my eyes. It made me ill and she knew it! When she’d walk that cherry picker, even in rehearsal, it was terrifying. It’s scarier when there’s no audience because there’s just this stone floor underneath her. I remember one rehearsal in Kansas City, she smiled and started to do little James Brown steps on it just to torment me!”

Director David Mallet, choreographer Arlene Phillips, and director Brian Grant at ‘Private Dancer’ video shoot [1984]. Courtesy of Arlene Phillips.

Turner might have retired from the stage after her 50th Anniversary Tour, but she didn’t retreat from the public eye for very long. Beginning in 2009, she recorded a series of albums for the Beyond interfaith project, celebrated the West End and Broadway premieres of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, and authored three books, including a new memoir My Love Story (2018), a lavishly designed coffee table book celebrating her eightieth birthday Tina: That’s My Life (2019), and a book that explores her spiritual practice and philosophy, Happiness Become You (2020).

“There’s no nonsense with Tina, at all,” says Brian Grant. “That comes from years and years of the stuff that she’s been through. She had a career in the ’60s, she went through some horrendous things with Ike and her career plummeted after that, and suddenly it all came back. She becomes a bigger star the second time around. It’s about being grateful for that second chance I think. She’s got this amazing energy. It flows out of her. She laughs a lot. She’s very funny. She was always absolutely amazing onstage. She’s a great performer and that’s what comes across always.”

Over the years, Turner herself has written about the process of rebuilding her career. “My success as a solo artist came after many recalibrations and hard-won victories — nothing was easy — and took a long time,” she wrote in Happiness Becomes You. “But when the breakthrough came, it was seismic. Suddenly, seemingly overnight, Tina Turner was everywhere. On the radio, on MTV, on talk shows, in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, at concert stadiums, in magazines …” At a time when Turner’s story of survival is the centerpiece of Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin’s Tina documentary, it’s important to consider just how much resistance Turner faced to achieve that breakthrough, successfully conquering racist, sexist, and ageist attitudes that are deeply embedded in the music industry.

“I knew that Tina was going to be a huge star again,” says Ann Behringer, who danced by the singer’s side during her ascent back to the top. “This is what I always knew about Tina when I started working with her. I knew it. I didn’t have any doubt in my mind. Tina’s one of the strongest women I’ve ever known, and LeJeune too. We all three came out of a lot of adversity. Tina taught me that I am capable, if I put my mind to it, of doing anything, no matter what, in any kind of adversity.”

Turner’s triumph over adversity just happened to play out across a 24-hour cable music channel, where she became the first artist of her generation to boldly reinvent herself for the music video age. “The video directors had a lot to do with changing the persona of artists, but Tina changed her persona herself,” says Gale Sparrow. From the Brooklyn Bridge to the Rivoli Ballroom, Tina Turner proved that love had everything to do with it.

‘Private Dancer’ video shoot [1984]. Courtesy of Brian Grant and Arlene Phillips.

#interview #pop #r&b #rock #soul #tina turner #popmatters #christian john wikane #Youtube

0 notes