Tine Turner - Private Dancer

This was mostly written and in my queue to post when I found out that Tina Turner passed away May 24, 2023. She was 83. Hard to imagine that almost forty years had passed since Private Dancer was released.

It's always fun to revisit albums that you thought you disliked. I suppose the backlash was inevitable as "What's Love Got to Do With It" was pretty ubiquitous on MuchMusic and the radio for what seemed to be forever. I managed to keep up my dismissive airs for a long time, and even though I really liked "Better Be Good to Me" featuring the stellar guitar work of The Fixx's Jamie West-Orem and backing vocals of Cy Curnin. I stubbornly held my ground.

It didn't help that everyone was trying to make a then ancient in pop years Tina Turner who was all of forty five or six when this came out a sex symbol. "Look at those legs!" This was right up there with trying to ogle the church organist. I'm looking through the album jacket and liner notes I have to admit she looked pretty good, but more importantly she sounded awesome. I have never cared for any of the Ike and Tina songs I've heard, and I'm not much of an R&B fan so it's not so much a dig as it really just wasn't my thing. At all.

So I'd packed my prejudices pretty tight. The first break in my resolve occurred when I picked up Foreign Affair a few years later when I found it cheap, and it had "The Best" on it, a song I sort of liked. Did I mention it was cheap? While I honestly can't off the top of my head name any other songs off it at the moment, I did like it.

However, Tina had a set of pipes and by all accounts A&R guru John Carter, known as CARTER when wearing his producer's hat was instrumental in relaunching and rebranding Tina Turner. Private Dancer was her first album on Capitol after a near five year gap between releases. The team assembled here is all A list:

Rupert Hine who was riding a decent wave through the '80s producing artists as varied as SAGA, Chris de Burgh, Eight Seconds, and The Fixx.
Terry Britten who was behind some of Cliff Richard's best known songs in the '70s.
CARTER who was behind Bob Welch's French Kiss, and the last two disappointing PRISM records produced the title track.

For an album that was seemingly assembled together from a pastiche of various sessions and writers it is a surprisingly cohesive effort. Listening to this now the only song that didn't click with me was the Al Green "Let's Stay Together" and that's just because it's not in my wheelhouse.

That said, the number of killer tracks is surprising, and finding out that the kings of Glam Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman wrote my favourite song on the album "Better Be Good to Me" was just icing on the cake. I was surprised I didn't enjoy David Bowie's "1984" more than I did - it wasn't for lack of trying, but it just didn't click at all. Everything in '84 was under George Orwell's shadow. I guess going for the cultural heartbeat was cutting edge at the time, now it's just - meh. Maybe it was just bad luck the two songs I don't care for were produced by Martin Ware and Greg Walsh.

"Private Dancer" was a song that grew on me, and I knew it was written by Mark Knopfler, and I always assumed he played on the song. Nope. Most of the guys in Dire Straits were there, and on the other CARTER produced track "Steel Claw" and on those two songs it was Jeff Beck who played the guitar solos.

The album has held up remarkably well, and I will listen to the Terry Britten produced "What's Love Got to Do With It" and admit that is one hell of a song, and it rightly launched Tina Turner's comeback.

She was one of a kind.

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