Image: APA
BROWNSVILLE/ZURICH. 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. Since 1994 she has lived with the German music manager Erwin Bach – the “love of her life” on Lake Zurich, since April 2013 she has been Swiss. In 2017, Bach donated a kidney to her. He ended Turner’s years of dialysis treatment.
Tina Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock in Brownsville (Tennessee/USA) in 1939. 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.
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 album Private Dancer followed in 1984 and Turner became the first rock/pop musician to have a worldwide number one hit at the age of 44: “What’s Love Got To Do With It”.
13 years ago she said goodbye to the stage. “I didn’t feel like singing anymore and making everyone else happy,” says Tina Turner at the time.
Source: Nachrichten
