‘Is This Love?’: The metal song that was always meant for Tina Turner
Tina Turner achieved plenty of seemingly impossible feats over the course of her life and career, but mastering heavy metal might just have been a bridge too far.
That’s not to say that she wouldn’t have given it a go; after all, stranger things did happen, but in all the possible musical crossovers in the world, Whitesnake’s David Coverdale writing a hit for the ‘Queen of Rock and Roll’ seemed the most unlikely. This is, until it genuinely did almost come close to happening.
Everyone knows Whitesnake’s 1987 power ballad anthem ‘Is This Love?’ as a staple of the band’s most classic discography, but now imagine it being sung by Turner: not all that implausible, is it? That’s actually no coincidence, as frontman Coverdale had initially penned the track with that one special star in mind.
“The original idea was for Tina Turner,” he later recalled with regard to ‘Is This Love?’, “My friends and associates at EMI Records were looking for songs to follow up Tina’s astonishing story. The album with ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It’ was huge, global, and they were looking for songs.” Clearly following the suit of questions about love, Coverdale felt he had some possible tricks up his sleeve.
“They [the record label] knew I was going away to do the old correlation of song ideas and said, ‘If you come up with anything that you think might be good for Tina’, ’cause they knew I was a huge fan, ‘let us know’. So that was the idea—the original idea for ‘Is This Love’ was for Tina.”
The power ballad was her forte, at the end of the day, but when Coverdale and his guitarist John Sykes had headed to the South of France for their writing retreat, the band realised that what they had was too good to give away to anyone else, even a bona fide queen of the scene. Sykes came across Coverdale ‘tinkering’ with the tune one afternoon, but after explaining that it was intended for Turner, he sat down to play it, and that was the moment when things changed.
This hunch was confirmed by the record executive David Geffen, who told Whitesnake to rightfully keep the song to themselves after hearing the original demo. Earning some royalties and credits from what would have invariably been a Turner masterpiece would, of course, have been nice, however, there was frankly nothing better than keeping all of that pie to yourself.
‘Is This Love?’ went on to become a top ten hit for Whitesnake in the UK charts, while it was narrowly pipped to the post for the top spot in the US, eventually settling in the not unsuccessful number two position. It just showed that for a heavy metal band, switching gears into the somewhat softer side could occasionally be worth the gamble.
It was hardly as if Turner would have been cursing their names over the track, either; by that point in her career, she’d faced enough hardships and rejections that not receiving one song was ever going to be the most bitter blow. She already had more than enough acclaim from her own love-based hits, so it was time to share the romance.
