Russell Baillie is the Entertainment Editor for the Listener.
I first encountered Tina Turner in a Whangārei nightclub in the early 1980s. At first I thought she was a man. And an angry one too. That’s because she was singing Nutbush City Limits in a voice of such paint-stripping quality it possibly explained the decor. The place was called Henry VIII. Its décor and sound system were from the late-Tudor period. Its playlist was pre- and mid-disco. Nutbush, the long five-minute version, was on high rotate.
From the song, I assumed those limits were to a big, bad, dangerous city, not the cotton-pickin’ tiny Tennessee town from which a young Annie Mae Bullock staged the first great escape of a life that ended last month at the age of 83.
But it was all there in her lyrics, some of the few Turner ever wrote herself. “A church house, gin house/A schoolhouse, outhouse. On highway number nineteen …”
I got to know the song very well. I was the mid-teens member of a New Wave-ish covers band of older guys playing occasional nights at Henry’s. At the end of each set, on would come the disco, the DJ seemingly mocking our dance floor-emptying skill with each groovy hit. His secret weapon was Nutbush City Limits, already an oldie but a goodie from way back in 1974.
So after us giving a Cure or a Stranglers song the wimpy last rites, out would come Nutbush, powered by – as I later found – Ike Turner’s scritch-scratch guitar and Tina Turner’s full-throttle voice. Down would go the pints of Leopard and Rheineck. Up would come the dancers. Sometimes I’d join them.
Yes, Tina Turner could blow you off stage just by having someone playing one of her old records through cruddy speakers. It was a song that made me wonder if there was more to music than whatever moody English blokes were on Radio with Pictures that week.
Yes, there was Proud Mary, River Deep, Mountain High and other songs before the Turner jukebox was restocked with all those post-Ike, shiny 80s pop hits, the big anthems that television news rolled out to mark her passing. But Nutbush was a song about where she was from and the sound of where she was heading. It had a big synthesiser solo. Funnily enough, moody English blokes with synthesisers were to play a big part in her 1980s reinvention.
Nutbush was the last song Turner played at her first New Zealand show in the Auckland Town Hall on September 12, 1977. She had left Ike the year before and the Australasian tour was her debut foreign solo excursion. Her band were in dinner jackets. She was wearing, as Auckland Star reviewer Phil Gifford noted, not a lot.
“Last night she burst on stage singing Turn It Up as near to naked as any rock performer would dare. Two rows of fringe over a minimal body stocking offered only partial covering of a dancer’s physique which belies the fact that she is at least 40.”
Actually, she was 37. But it seems local media were writing a solo Turner off. A New Zealand Herald story from a press conference held between her getting off the flight from Sydney and that first show concluded: “She freely admits that her husband was behind her success as a rock, soul and blues singer.” But then came Private Dancer, her era-defining 1984 album, spearheaded by new manager Roger Davies, an Australian who had started out with Sherbet and Olivia Newton-John. These days, he has Cher and Pink among his clients.
Turner would play Aunty Entity in 1985′s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and sing its hit theme song. She was on its poster and at the end of 1985, on the cover of rock weekly Rip It Up and the NZ Woman’s Weekly.
After getting the full celebrity pōwhiri at Ōrākei Marae, she played to 30,000 at Mt Smart (then Ericsson) Stadium on December 7 in what was her 170th show of the Private Dancer World Tour.
Turner returned to New Zealand for full national tours in 1993 – in the wake of What’s Love Got To Do With It?, that year’s hit biopic based on her 1986 autobiography I, Tina – and in 1997.
The latter New Zealand jaunt was eventful. There were bomb scares in Wellington and Palmerston North and weather hazards in Christchurch. You might think that’s why, even though she kept touring until 2009, Turner never came back.
I interviewed her ahead of both of those tours, the first time backstage after a Sydney concert. As I waited, I chatted with Davies, who said he was keen to see Hammond Gamble, Turner’s New Zealand opening act. Another client, Joe Cocker, had recorded a Gamble song years earlier. Maybe Tina could do one, I suggested, putting in a plug for Whangārei’s greatest musical export. After all, before departing for Auckland and band Street Talk, Gamble had possibly played Henry’s too.
Turner arrived refreshed after her stage workout in a black suit. Up close, she seemed smaller than her stilettoed stage presence suggested, and softly spoken. She looked about 37. “My legs, the movie, Ike … I guess anything else I can stomach,” she replied when the television interviewer ahead of me asked if anything was off limits.
But camera and TV lights off, Turner visibly relaxed. She was engaging, gracious and funny. Of course, she was well practised, having become one of the most interviewed women on the planet. We talked about her hopes for a film career (“I’m getting a lot of scripts for hooker parts and nothing parts”), a life after music, how she saw herself among contemporaries such as Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight and Patti LaBelle. “They stand on their feet and sing. I can’t stand there and sing.”
Eventually, I steered the conversation to Nutbush, asking her about the last time she was there. She said she’d been back only twice in her life since leaving. Her relatives had mostly died, the houses were gone, so there was no reason to visit. She laughed when I suggested you could hit “play” on the town’s theme song entering those city limits and be up to only the first chorus by the time you were out the other side.
Talking to her on the phone in 1997, I asked whether she could ever do a show in trousers and sensible shoes (“No … I tell ya, I have to show the legs at some point”) and what she heard in her voice if she heard it on the radio. “I guess it’s like the designer who never really dresses up. I do know I have an unusual voice. I remember years ago, I heard Private Dancer on the radio and thought, ‘Who is that?’
“It’s an unusual-sounding voice. It sounds more like a male. It’s not a pretty voice, I think. It just has an attitude.”
