The legendary Tina Turner has passed away at the age of 83. The following titles from her illustrious career are available in Wellington Libraries.
Private dancer / Turner, Tina
Still arguably the greatest comeback in pop music history. Assembled quickly with a variety of producers, Private Dancer is a slick pop confection, decidedly different from the gutsy RnB that she initially became famous for with the husband Ike. Turner is in fantastic voice, bringing a survivor’s maturity and grit to the material. The Grammy winning “What’s Love Got to do With It” and the Mark Knopfler penned title track were the big hits, but sparkling covers of David Bowies “1984”, The Beatles “Help”, and Al Greens “Let’s Stay Together” round out a fantastic pop album that still sounds great today.
Break every rule / Turner, Tina
Sticking with the successful format, this again featured the song-writing of Terry Britten and Graham Lyle, the team behind “What’s Love Got to do With It”. Their contributions, “Typical Male” and “What you Get is What You See” kept Turner riding high in the charts. Less well-known highlights include the power ballad “I’ll Be Thunder” and the Bowie cover “Girls.”
Foreign affair / Turner, Tina
Tina would return to her blues roots on this 1989 set with a couple of scorching Tony Joe White covers, “Steamy Windows” and “Undercover Agent for the Blues”. The former would prove a sizeable hit, as would adult contemporary ballad “I Don’t Wanna Lose You” and one of her best-known recordings “The Best”, since immortalised by its use as a promotional tune for the Australian National Rugby League.
The collected recordings : sixties to nineties / Turner, Tina
All the best / Turner, Tina
Both fine compilations. The Collected Recordings, released in 1994, offers a superb introduction to Turners Sixties work with Ike Turner, from early hits like “A Fool in Love” and “Proud Mary” to the Phil Spector collaboration “River Deep, Mountain High”, which Spector considered his greatest recording. It also includes often
overlooked period between her split from Ike and her spectacular comeback in 1984. All the Best focusses solely on her post-1984 period but includes several quality tracks from the mid-to-late nineties not represented on the earlier compilation, most notably one of the all-time great Bond themes “Goldeneye”.
