Anyone looking to be a true rock and roll performer should study the work of Tina Turner. While she may have come to the music world with her husband, Ike, at the beginning of her career, Tuner’s way of inhabiting every song she sang was unique to only her, either putting a swampy backbeat to The Beatles’ ‘Come Together’ or making pop brilliance on songs like ‘River Deep Mountain High’. By the time Turner started her own solo career, she admitted that one of her more notable hits threw her for a loop when listening to it for the first time.
When looking at her back catalogue, though, Turner would never back down from a challenge. Before getting the gig with Ike, Tina was known for being fearless whenever she stepped behind the microphone, igniting the audience into a frenzy every time she performed songs like ‘A Fool In Love’.
As Turner progressed throughout her career, many of her greatest songs usually had to do with bringing a rock and roll intensity to the traditional soulful songs. Even when she was making her own version of mellow songs like ‘Proud Mary’, Turner delivered it with the force of a freight train, even teasing the audience by playing the slow version before picking up the tempo for the back half of the song.
While the first half of her career would be marred by decades of abuse from her husband, Turner was ready to stage her comeback by the mid-1980s. Striking out on her own with albums like Private Dancer, Turner turned in one of the greatest comebacks in rock history, gaining massive momentum from songs like the title track and ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It’.
Although Turner was more than willing to keep the train rolling across albums like Break Every Rule, she also turned in time behind the camera. After making the greatest impression in the movie adaptation of The Who’s Tommy as The Acid Queen, Turner would turn in an equally showstopping role when working on Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.
Gaining the respect of both the film and music industry, Turner would get the opportunity to lend her talents to the Bond franchise with the theme from GoldenEeye. Although Turner could certainly sing any sort of Bond theme that was thrown at her, she admitted that she had to take a few leaps when learning the song.
Written with the help of Bono and The Edge from U2, Turner admitted that the song completely made her restructure the way that she usually sang, admitting in her biography, “After that, I actually liked the way that ‘GoldenEye’ transformed my singing. I had never done a song like that, and it really gave me a chance to be creative in terms of taking these rough fragments and turning them into a smooth and expressive song that worked for the movie”.
While the song was assembled for different pieces Bono and The Edge had assembled, Turner sings the song as if she had written it herself, complete with her magnificent delivery throughout the back half of the track. Although the Bond franchise may have had perfect marriages of song and movie before, Turner’s take on ‘GoldenEye’ deserves a spot next to the greatest blends in the franchise’s history.
