The “worst” song Tina Turner turned into a classic hit
The best songs for Tina Turner usually come down to messages that she could relate to the most.
While she was a brilliant singer in her own right, it was always about putting her entire soul into everything she sang. She did a brilliant job on nearly anything she touched, but that didn’t mean she had to be in love with every song she played.
Then again, Turner never was one to half-ass anything, even if she wasn’t completely sold on it. She knew that ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It’ was far from the greatest song she had ever heard, but listening back to the version that she performed on Private Dancer, she sounded like a woman reborn with every line. Comebacks from artists like her at that time seemed unheard of, but it only took a couple of verses for Turner to have the world wrapped around her finger all over again.
That’s because no matter what song she was singing, Turner was always going to make it her own. Everyone already had fond memories of her transforming tracks like ‘Come Together’ or ‘Proud Mary’, but her version of ‘The Best’ is one of the most glorious pieces of the decade, and even though ‘You Better Be Good To Me’ sounded more like a new wave song in its original form, Turner gives the kind of performance that could put Mick Jagger to shame whenever she sang.
But Turner couldn’t have reached those heights alone. She had an entire team working with her when staging her comeback, and getting people like Bryan Adams to work alongside her was a match made in heaven when they sang. Of all the artists that could have possibly made a song for ‘The Queen of Rock and Roll’, the guys from U2 felt like the last people qualified for the job when The Edge and Bono wrote ‘Goldfinger’.
Granted, it’s not like the idea didn’t have merit. U2 had already proven themselves to be chameleons whenever they made records, and if Bono was able to get the approval of everyone from David Bowie to Frank Sinatra to Johnny Cash, it wasn’t out of the question for him to add Turner to the list of living legends. When Turner first heard the song, though, she was less than thrilled with what the U2 frontman had come up with.
In its demo stages, Turner felt there was no way for her to do the song justice, saying, “Bono sent me the worst demo. He kind of threw it together as if he thought I wasn’t going to do it. This song, I didn’t even know what key to practice it in! It was unbelievable, what I was sent here. But, you know, you have to step into the shoes and learn it. And then I sung it how I would sing it, and even Bono was impressed.”
In all fairness, the idea of the person behind ‘One’ and ‘The Fly’ trying to channel Tina Turner is already going to sound awkward, but the beauty of Turner’s version is how much it doesn’t sound like the Irish legends. She took the skeleton of what Bono had done, and with only a few deft strokes, she had the basis for one of the greatest modern James Bond themes ever created.
Although there are pieces of the song that were just weird enough to have ended up on an album like Zooropa, Turner was not going to roll over and do a token U2 song for the masses. Bono may have written the basis of the whole thing, but Turner’s version is like rebuilding the song from the ground up and making a musical work of art.
