Tina Turner remains one of the definitive survivors in music history. After years of abuse at the hands of her husband Ike, she made the decision to leave him in 1976. With less than 50 dollars to her name – despite their shared commercial success – she charted her own course. Unburdened from her abuser, she flourished.
As a solo artist, she scored a string of hits including ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It’ and ‘Simply the Best’. She may have been in her 40s when she finally found fame in her own right, but it scarcely mattered. With her fifth studio album, 1984’s Private Dancer, Turner established herself as a genuine icon. The multi-platinum record spawned ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It’ alongside her celebrated covers of Al Green’s ‘Let’s Stay Together’ and The Beatles’ ‘Help!’
Yet for all her pop crossover success, Turner was always a rock artist at heart. She had first found an audience with Ike through their covers of 1960s rock classics by Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Rolling Stones, and The Beatles – most notably ‘Come Together’, from the 1970 album of the same name.
It was a background that brought her into contact with the rock figures of that era. The most talked-about example came when she performed alongside Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger at Live Aid in Philadelphia on 13 July 1985. The performance was a highlight of the event, though it courted controversy when Jagger pulled off her skirt mid-set.
As Turner explained to Rolling Stone in 1986, however, there was more to the moment than it appeared. “He certainly wouldn’t have pulled off [my skirt] unless we’d talked about it before,” she said. “Mick said, ‘I’m going to change clothes’, so I said, ‘If you’re going to change clothes, you might as well take off my skirt’. It was just the spirit of the moment we were creating.”
Turner described Jagger as being like “a brother” – someone she knew well and, crucially, trusted. “He’s like a bad boy in school. That’s why the Stones are like boys to me, because I’ve raised sons. When you raise boys, you know how they play. With Mick, you always have to be on guard, because you never know what he’s going to do. But Mick is like a brother. It wasn’t as if some guy pulled off my skirt; it was like this boy I knew did it.”
