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Tina Turner died at the age of 83

Tina Turner died at the age of 83
Tina Turner performing in the Wiener Stadthalle in 2009
Image: (APA)

No solo artist has more tickets than she sells. Their albums sold 170 million times before music was streamed. Now Tina Turner has died at the age of 83. She died peacefully after a long illness in her house in Küsnacht near Zurich, Sky News quoted a spokesman as saying on Wednesday evening. She has lived on Lake Zurich with the German music manager Erwin Bach since 1994 and has been Swiss since April 2013.

Anna became Tina

Tina Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock in Brownsville (Tennessee/USA) in 1939 – at the height of the racist Ku Klux Klan that had regained strength. Her father worked on a cotton plantation. The girl sang in the parish church choir. After Anna’s parents separated, she moved to live with her mother and sister in St. Louis. In 1958 she met Ike Turner, and the couple had their first success in 1960 with “A Fool In Love”. From then on, Anna called herself Tina (“from then on I was Ike’s property”), and the two married in 1962.

The “Ike & Tina Turner Revue” celebrated great success with hits like “River Deep Mountain High”, “Proud Mary” and “Nutbush City Limits”, but the marriage became hell for Tina: Ike was a drug addict and violent. In her biography “I, Tina” she reported on multiple rapes. She left him in 1976 after he hit her before a performance. The divorce followed in 1978. She renounced alimony and the rights to the joint music. However, she insisted on being allowed to continue using her stage name. Ike Turner died in 2007.

First albums flopped

Her first solo albums flopped. David Bowie helped her out of her career hole by inviting important decision-makers from the record company EMI/Capitol to a performance by Turner in 1982. 1983 saw the release of the single “Let’s Stay Together”, a cover version of an Al Green song. The 1984 album Private Dancer followed (featuring the hit single of the same name composed by Mark Knopfler), and Turner became the first rock/pop musician to have a worldwide number one hit at age 44: What’s Love Got To Do With It”.

Turner has won numerous music awards. In 2021 she was inducted into the “Rock & Roll Hall of Fame” in Cleveland, USA. “If they’re still giving me awards at 81, I must have done something right,” she joked at the ceremony via video link from Switzerland.

Turner had two biological sons who predeceased her at ages 59 and 62. She herself had colon cancer and kidney failure. Her husband donated one of his kidneys to her in 2017. In the 2019 autobiography “My Love Story” she reported on many painful experiences in life, but honored Bach as her savior and the greatest love of her life.

Tina Turner said goodbye to the stage 13 years ago. “I didn’t feel like singing anymore and making everyone else happy,” says Tina Turner at the time.

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