Once upon a time in Tennessee, there was a little white girl called Puddin’ who enchanted a little black girl called Anna Mae Bullock. “Puddin’ was a perfect, pretty little girl — blonde, with a clean nice dress. And she was friendly. She would always speak to us.”
Anna Mae was friendly too, an energetic tomboy, but she was the unwanted child of a wrecked family. Puddin’ was, to her, everything that was sweet and harmonious. Later, Anna Mae was to see the same harmony in Jackie Kennedy. “Jackie O! I was totally enthralled by her manners, where she came from, where she studied and how she travelled. That was my first claim to want to be a lady.”
Much later, Anna Mae, now known as Tina Turner, is sitting opposite me in the bar of the Aldwych Theatre, London. She is wearing a funky black and gold onesie and what looks like a dagger — a bejewelled cylinder — at her waist. “It’s Armani. I bought this because it looks like a sword. It’s just a piece of jewellery.” So the dagger’s a kind of baroque belt buckle. There’s a serious point to these fashion notes.
“I want this kind of wardrobe for openings and stuff, because I don’t want to move too far away from how people remember me on stage — and if I start being really elegant, it wouldn’t work. Did you see Beyoncé at the Grammys? She looked beautiful, but if I went on stage looking like that, they’d say, ‘Oh, she’s in another world now.’”
She is drinking tea. “I like it straaang, I like to taste it.” Much of her Southern accent is intact, as is her eagerness to talk. Her face is mobile, her smile spectacular; her laugh is a hoarse boom.
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She’s 78 now — married, Buddhist, living in Switzerland. I tell her I have a theory about why she’s living there — it’s because the rivers are deep and the mountains high. She gives me one of her finest hoarse booms.
She still can’t be Puddin’ or Jackie, she’s got to be in a black and gold onesie, not a ballgown. She once said nobody could ever call her classy — respectable, maybe; classy, no. But, she added: “If I had been that kind of person, do you think I could sing with the emotions I do? You sing with those emotions because you’ve had pain in your heart.”
She has had a lot of pain in her heart recently, because she has been helping to create a new musical for the Aldwych about her life, based on her songs and directed by Phyllida “Mamma Mia!” Lloyd, with a book by Katori Hall. Tina the Musical stars Adrienne Warren, in her West End debut, and is a project Turner has been giving a lot of time to. It means she has been having to trawl through some terrible memories, “stuff you don’t like to think of sometimes and, once you start remembering, it’s like throwing up. More and more is coming up now. How do you stop it?”
Her parents were already splitting up when she was born. She was passed round the family. As a teenager, she started looking for the love she had been denied. There was Harry on the school basketball team. “That was love at first sight, and it was, like, ‘Whoom!’” She clutches her stomach at the memory. They went out for a year, then he started seeing other girls. “All of my relationships in the early days were broken hearts. I had a hard time.”
By the age of 16, she was living in St Louis with her sister, Aillene. In a club, they saw a band, Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm. One day he grabbed a mic and sang, and he took her into the band and, after a while, seduced her, in spite of the fact that she didn’t fancy him at all.
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“I felt awful. I didn’t know how to say no, because I needed the work. I think I wasn’t educated to handle that.”
They married in 1962, and she suffered years of violent abuse. But Ike made her a star. When he released Tina singing A Fool in Love in 1960, he unleashed one of rock’n’roll’s greatest stars on the world.
She sang and yelled through Ike’s arrangements, often with a black eye or a busted lip, or even worse. On stage, she was the most powerful creature anybody had ever seen; off stage, she was enslaved.
“There was violence, because he had this fear that I was going to leave him. The other women, because I didn’t love him that way... the other women weren’t so bad, but it was the constant, constant ill treatment.”
She felt she had to stay with him, partly because she had promised Ike, but also because he was her career. Or at least he was until, in 1965, in a place just off Sunset Boulevard, she found herself being watched by a little guy in a cap: Phil Spector.
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Spector paid Ike $20,000 to stay out of the studio. Then he gave Tina a song. He said, cut out all the Ike-ian yelling and shrieking, and just sing the melody. He laid her vocals on top of his orchestral “wall of sound”, and there it was: River Deep — Mountain High, a track so thrilling, it still gives me shivers.
“‘Oh,’ I thought, ‘I get to sing again.’ I had the pleasure of finally singing, letting my voice show itself. It was the peak of his productions. He wanted a voice that would stand on top of the arrangement. It was an adventure, actually.”
She had always sung as a child. “When I grew up in high school, my musical teacher had me singing opera, believe it or not, and I was used to properly singing things. I would hear things on the radio, and I thought, ‘I could sing like that.’ But that’s not what Ike wanted as a producer.”
Oddly, RDMH wasn’t that big a hit in America. “It wasn’t R&B enough for the black market and it wasn’t poppy enough for the white market.” It was better received here than there. Over time, she developed a special fondness for the way the British bands took American forms and mixed them up.
“When I heard Honky Tonk Women by the Rolling Stones, I thought, ‘That is country and western.’ If you ever did take a good look at what they did with the music” — she sings Keith Richards’s riff, “Dah dah, dah-dah” — “they got another feeling to the music with that style of singing.”
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Then, one day in 1976, she turned up at a Ramada Inn in Dallas wearing a blood-stained white suit. She had finally left Ike. He died in 2007, insisting to the last that he hadn’t treated her that badly. “Sure, I’ve slapped Tina,” he said. “There have been times when I punched her to the ground without thinking. But I never beat her.”
Can she now forgive him? “As an old person, I have forgiven him, but it would not work with him. He asked for one more tour with me, and I said, ‘No, absolutely not.’ Ike wasn’t someone you could forgive and allow him back in. It’s all gone, all forgotten. I don’t know what the dreams are about. The dreams are still there — not the violence, the anger. I wonder if I’m still holding something in.”
Professionally, she fully recovered from the Ike years with an astonishingly inventive comeback in the 1980s, with songs such as Private Dancer, What’s Love Got to Do with It and The Best. It is with this return that the Aldwych show ends — on a high, the way Tina Turner likes her music. Unlike Ike.
“I didn’t like the blues because I didn’t like what they were singing about. The blues can bring you down a little. I like to be a little bit up, and as soon as I left Ike, I never sung heavy, heavy rhythm and blues any more. I Can’t Stand the Rain was a blues song, and also the songs of Tony Joe White were blues, but an up-tempo, fine kind of blues. That was the change in my life, to enjoy singing.”
So what does she call her mature post-Ike style? Pop? “No. What’s Love Got to Do with It was a bit pop, and Private Dancer, but with my voice, it became a bit more middle of the road. What was Elvis Presley? He was rock’n’roll — the rock’n’roll style of Elvis, I think that is where my music took me. I like the style of Jagger and those guys because they used the blues, but the music took it somewhere else.”
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Through it all, she said she avoided the usual rock drink-and-drug excesses. This is impressive, not just because of the world in which she lived, but also because of the endless losses she had to endure. To cap them all, her beloved elder sister, Aillene, died aged 74.
“I put her away nicely, and I made a nice speech about it. Aillene had a good life, everybody liked her. But she loved her daughter too much. Her daughter had five children and no father, so Aillene ended up taking care of the children and she never really took care of her health at all. She coughed horribly — she had smoked since she was a teenager.”
She says “yes” firmly when I ask if it was a life she avoided. “I didn’t drink or smoke. At the time there was no champagne, it was just those hard liquors, and I didn’t like the taste of those. The drugs I didn’t like, because when Ike started to do drugs, I realised he had no control, and I felt I needed all the control I could get, living in that environment. And I didn’t like how it turned people into zombies. I was in reality and they were in another reality.”
Perhaps Buddhism helped. She was brought up a Baptist and would recite the Lord’s Prayer like a chant to soothe her through the hard times. Then she stumbled on Buddhism. She acquired a scroll — an aid to enlightenment through prayer — and she chanted Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, as well as the Lord’s Prayer. Ike threw out the scroll but tolerated the praying, because, she says: “He thought it might get us a hit.”
She also occasionally visits psychics. She says one, in England, finally revealed to her the truth about being an unwanted child. She confronted her mother, who broke down in tears.
She has two boys — one with Ike and one from before they got together. She also brought up Ike’s two sons. She looks uneasy when I ask about them. There have been problems.
Now she is married to Erwin Bach, a German music executive. They met in 1985 and married in 2013. Nice bloke — he hovers like a kindly butler at the Aldwych. She also took Swiss nationality. How does she look back at America as a foreign national? She hesitates before turning visionary.
“I have to be careful what I say — I lived in America the first half of my life. It was a troublesome time. I felt Ike was a hold-back for me. There were times in America when it was really good, but I’m happy to have left. It seemed to me it was on a downhill. I’m wondering if it’s that time of change for America, if it’s going to go out to sea. I mean, look at the constant mudslides, fires. I wonder if I’m seeing something as an older person.”
And what — given her history of abuse — about the whole Weinstein thing? “That’s always been going on. I knew about that, back in my time. They were doing it back then, but somehow they were allowed because of their position. It’s not new, it’s just been brought to attention. And what I feel about it is, you never get by, it catches you sooner or later. When you do something wrong, if you do it long enough, it eventually catches you. I said to myself, ‘Well, finally, you get what you deserve.’ Even this abuse of children, that’s another thing that’s been going on and that came out. I’m pleased that they caught them, and I hope they get more.”
It’s time to wrap. Bach shimmers in and organises a phone photo of Tina and me. Who needs Puddin’, I think, as she puts her arm round me. Who needs Jackie O? I’ve got Tina.
Tina is at the Aldwych Theatre, London WC2, from Wednesday
