Jesus fuck. It’s been a few days for people dying, hasn’t it? Now we can add Tina Turner to the list… we actually nearly lost her in 2016 due to kidney problems when her husband donated one of his own and basically bought her seven more years on Earth. Good man, Erwin. Ike would never have done that for her. And obviously her finally breaking away from Ike in the mid-70s was the best thing she could’ve done; I actually never realised until today that he owned her name. He not only renamed young Anna Mae (or was it Martha Nell?) Bullock, he trademarked the name Tina Turner so that if she tried to leave him he could just replace her and she wouldn’t be able to work under that name again. Just like KISS copyrighting the old makeup for Ace Frehley and Peter Criss so Paul & Gene can use it on whatever ringers they get to replace those two. She made a point of demanding the name in the divorce, and won it despite Ike’s efforts.
I had no idea in the 80s, cos I was still too young, to realise just what it meant for her to become big in the 80s; I don’t know if I was even aware that she’d had a career before that, or maybe I was dimly aware that Ike had been a thing but it was only a dim awareness if that… certainly I didn’t appreciate that this was her rebounding from years of abuse and lack of solo commercial success on her own by the end of the 70s, having a mega hit of an album released by a record label that hadn’t even wanted her… and that she was in her mid-40s by the time she was doing this. She’d undeniably earned it by then. Here she is in 2009, still having it at nearly 70: