Why Tina Turner didn’t feel “comfortable” with the songs on her biggest album
One can imagine more than a small level of intimidation among the agents, executives, producers, and musicians tasked with convincing a 44-year-old Tina Turner – inarguably one of the best entertainers in the world – to try something very different on her next album.
Turner, who had all the gravitas of her feisty movie characters ‘Aunty Entity’ and ‘The Acid Queen’, if not more, was eventually convinced to try the new batch of songs that became 1984’s ultra-smash 1984 album Private Dancer. But she did so reluctantly, not remotely expecting that singles like ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It’ and ‘Better Be Good to Me’ would introduce her to a new generation and finally sever her career-long connection to her ex-partner Ike Turner.
In an interview with Knight-Ridder Newspapers that same year, just as the album was starting to climb the charts, Turner was candid about her doubts, admitting she’d been “uncomfortable” with the project at first. “The songs I like to do are very descriptive of my work: high energy,” Turner said. “I like simple rockers. The songs on the new album are very serious.”
For an artist who built her legend on stage in a blur of movement and electricity, this certainly made sense. Private Dancer was often slow, introspective, restrained—not to mention sophisticated and polished; a far cry from the pure joy and soul of ‘Proud Mary’.
And yet, that was kind of the whole point. After years of abuse, struggle, and financial uncertainty following her separation from Ike Turner, Private Dancer was strategically crafted as Tina’s reintroduction, and probably her last shot with the full push of a major label’s might behind her. Capitol Records executives and manager Roger Davies brought in a host of outside writers and producers to shape an album that would position Turner not as a nostalgia act, but as a modern pop star built for the 1980s.
The result was a global patchwork of collaborators. Producers included Rupert Hine, Martyn Ware (of Heaven 17), and Terry Britten, who co-wrote ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It’. Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits penned the title track, ‘Private Dancer’. Most of the music was recorded by session musicians in London and sent to Turner in Los Angeles, where she added her vocals. The album was hers, but also very much not hers, which might explain her mixed feelings at the time.
“‘I Might Have Been Queen’ was sort of written for me by Rupert Hine,” she noted in that 1984 interview. “It’s basically the story of my life…life is serious enough. The stage is a fantasy to get outside of yourself, to let go. My life is wonderful, fine, but I don’t want to sing it every night.”
It wasn’t that Turner disliked the music. It just didn’t reflect the raw, explosive energy and theatricality she associated with her identity as a performer, and she didn’t think it would resonate with her fans for the same reason. “I’m not the best judge of what’s going to be commercially successful,” she said, acknowledging that the unexpected success of Private Dancer had revealed “another side of herself”.
Ironically, it was the songs Turner initially felt least connected to that helped reshape her career. But it wasn’t necessarily the glossy pop sheen or outside collaborators that made Private Dancer a sensation. In the end, people were drawn in by the same things they always had with Tina: her voice, her charisma, her power. The songs and a more decade-appropriate production style had merely provided the best vehicle for people to discover those things again.
