Tag Archives: rock’n’roll

Tina Turner: legendary rock’n’roll singer dies aged 83
25
May

Tina Turner, the pioneering rock’n’roll star who turned a pop behemoth within the Eighties, has died aged 83 after an extended sickness.

She had suffered in poor health well being in recent times, being identified with intestinal most cancers in 2016 and having a kidney transplant in 2017.

Turner affirmed and amplified Black ladies’s formative stake in rock’n’roll, defining that period of music to the extent that Mick Jagger admitted to taking inspiration from her high-kicking, energetic dwell performances for his stage persona.

After twenty years of working with her abusive husband, Ike Turner, she struck out alone and – after a number of false begins – turned one of many defining pop icons of the Eighties with the album Non-public Dancer. Her life was chronicled in three memoirs, a biopic, a jukebox musical, and in 2021, the acclaimed documentary movie, Tina.

In a press release on Wednesday night time, her publicist Bernard Doherty mentioned: “Tina Turner, the ‘Queen of Rock’n Roll’ has died peacefully at this time on the age of 83 after an extended sickness in her dwelling in Kusnacht close to Zurich, Switzerland. Along with her, the world loses a music legend and a task mannequin.”

Tina Turner performs in Cologne, Germany, in January 2009.
Tina Turner performs in Cologne, Germany, in January 2009. {Photograph}: Hermann J Knippertz/AP

In 2018, scholar Daphne A Brooks wrote for the Guardian: “Turner’s musical character has all the time been a charged mixture of thriller in addition to gentle, melancholy combined with a ferocious vitality that usually flirted with hazard.”

Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock on 26 November 1939 and raised in Nutbush, Tennessee, the place she recalled choosing cotton together with her household as a toddler. She sang within the tiny city’s church choir, and as an adolescent talked – or somewhat, sang – her method into Ike’s band in St Louis: he had declined her request to affix till he heard her seize the microphone throughout a Kings of Rhythm efficiency for a rendition of BB King’s You Know I Love You.

After her vocal abilities turned obvious, Ike gave her the title Tina Turner – and trademarked it in case she left him and he needed to interchange her in his act. He rapidly turned abusive: when Turner tried to go away the group early on after having received a way of his mercurial character, he hit her with a picket shoe stretcher.

Tina Turner performs with Beyoncé at the 50th Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, February 2008.
Tina Turner performs with Beyoncé on the fiftieth Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, February 2008. {Photograph}: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Pictures

“My relationship with Ike was doomed the day he found out I used to be going to be his moneymaker,” Turner wrote in her 2018 biography My Love Story. “He wanted to manage me, economically and psychologically, so I might by no means depart him.”

She made her recorded debut below the title with the Ike and Tina Turner single A Idiot in Love in July 1960, which broke the US High 30 and began a run of respectable chart success. However it was their dwell performances that made them a sensation. Ike toured the Ike and Tina Turner Revue aggressively on the Chitlin’ Circuit – together with in entrance of desegregated audiences, such was their business energy. In 1964, they signed to Warner Bros imprint Loma Data, which launched their first album to chart: Reside! The Ike & Tina Turner Present.

Within the second half of the 60s, the duo had been courted by lots of rock’s largest names. Phil Spector produced the 1966 single River Deep – Mountain Excessive; they supported the Rolling Stones within the UK and later the US, and stars together with David Bowie, Sly Stone, Cher, Elvis Presley and Elton John got here to their Las Vegas residency.

Tina Turner performs at the O2 Arena in London in 2009.
‘I used to be simply bored with singing and making all people glad’ … Tina Turner performs on the O2 Enviornment, London, in 2009. {Photograph}: Stefan Wermuth/Reuters

They had been a chart-making, Grammy-winning power within the Seventies – a run that got here to an finish when Turner left Ike, who had been constantly violent and untrue, in 1976. Her final single with the group was Child, Get It On, from the 1975 movie adaptation of the Who’s rock opera Tommy, through which she starred as Acid Queen, a personality of the identical title of her second solo album.

Within the divorce, finalised in 1978, Turner got here away with simply two automobiles and the rights to her stage title. “Ike fought just a little bit as a result of he knew what I’d do with it,” she mentioned within the documentary Tina.

Turner, who had already launched two solo information, continued pursuing a solo profession, although it could take till she launched her fifth album, 1984’s Non-public Dancer, for her to supplant the previous picture of the shimmying rock’n’curler – and escape untimely relegation to the oldies circuit – with one in every of a robust, mullet-sporting, leather-clad pop icon.

Tina Turner performs in March 1987 in Paris during the first concert of a world tour.
Tina Turner performs in March 1987 in Paris throughout the first live performance of a world tour. {Photograph}: Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty Pictures

Within the documentary Tina, she described Non-public Dancer as her debut. “I don’t think about it a comeback,” she mentioned. “Tina had by no means arrived.”

Turner credited Buddhism and notably the observe of chanting with positively affecting her life within the Eighties. Outdoors music, she starred in Mad Max Past Thunderdome reverse Mel Gibson in 1985. She revealed her first memoir, the worldwide bestseller I, Tina, in 1986, which was later tailored in to the 1993 movie What’s Love Bought to Do With It? starring Angela Bassett as Turner. In 1995, she sang the theme tune to the James Bond movie GoldenEye.

Turner introduced her retirement in 2000, a yr after releasing her ultimate solo album, Twenty 4 Seven, although she would return to the stage in 2008, performing on the Grammy awards with Beyoncé, and for a ultimate tour to mark 50 years of her profession.

That was conclusively the top. “I used to be simply bored with singing and making all people glad,” she told the New York Times in 2019. “That’s all I’d ever finished in my life.”

Turner collaborated on the musical Tina with Phyllida Lloyd, which premiered in 2018 and gained Laurence Olivier and Tony awards for its respective West Finish and Broadway runs. “This musical isn’t about my stardom,” Turner mentioned of the manufacturing. “It’s in regards to the journey I took to get there. Every night time I would like audiences to remove from the theatre which you can flip poison into medication.”

Turner usually mentioned she didn’t relate to the “invincible” persona that others placed on her. “I don’t essentially need to be a ‘robust’ individual,” she advised the New York Instances. “I had a horrible life. I simply saved going. You simply hold going, and also you hope that one thing will come.”

In 2020, a remix of her 1984 hit What’s Love Got to Do With It? by the Norwegian producer Kygo made Turner the primary artist to have a UK High 40 hit in seven consecutive many years. In 2021, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Corridor of Fame as a solo artist, 30 years after Ike and Tina Turner’s induction.

Turner is survived by her second husband, German music govt Erwin Bach. They married in July 2013 after 27 years collectively and lived in Switzerland. In 2013, Turner renounced her US citizenship to change into a Swiss citizen.

Her first youngster, Craig Raymond Turner, died in July 2018. Final yr, Turner mentioned that following her different son Ronnie’s loss of life on the age of 62 that he “left the world far too early”. She is survived by two of Ike Turner’s sons, Ike Turner Jr and Michael Turner, whom she adopted.

In 2020, Turner advised the Guardian that regardless of having some critical well being issues, the final 10 years of her life had embodied her very best imaginative and prescient of happiness.

“True and lasting happiness comes from having an unshakeable, hopeful spirit that may shine, it doesn’t matter what,” she said. “That’s what I’ve achieved, and it’s my best want to assist others change into actually glad as nicely.”

Ghost evaluate – rock’n’roll pyro pantomime is hellishly good enjoyable
11
Apr

It’s some feat bringing corpse paint to the mainstream, however Ghost have carried out it: the Swedes arrive for the opening evening of their first UK tour in three years having seen their new album Impera attain No 2 within the charts final month.

The band’s identities had been as soon as completely secret, and though the remainder stay nameless – known as Anonymous Ghouls, and carrying headgear that’s half steampunk, half Tom Hardy’s Bane – Ghost are a much less mysterious proposition now that the theatrical Tobias Forge is called their frontman. Not that this has had any impression on their symphonic, pop-savvy metallic. What began as a doomy occult band has morphed right into a blockbusting enviornment act, like a spooky Def Leppard with out the flowing locks.

We’re two songs in and the prescient Rats already has a packed enviornment in raptures. Launched pre-pandemic, Forge sings: “In occasions of turmoil, in occasions like these / Beliefs contagious, spreading illness.” Take away the driving guitar chugs from Spillways and in one other lifetime it could possibly be an Abba staple, such is its outrageously catchy refrain – that plinking piano opening absolutely a tribute to Mamma Mia from their fellow Swedes.

“Do you want loads of oomph?” Forge enquires, earlier than the band launch into Mummy Mud. Its zany keytar solo isn’t fooling anybody: with hulking, Metallica-esque riffs, that is Ghost’s heaviest track. On the moody Cirice, Forge slinks throughout the stage carrying bat wings, earlier than funereal stomper Sq. Hammer evokes essentially the most frenzied singalong of the evening.

There are confetti cannon, costume adjustments, flamethrowers and different types of pyro, however the band is self-aware, stopping proceedings from ever getting too cartoonish. As one of many three guitarists relishes a solo spot on From the Pinnacle to the Pit just a little a lot for his liking, Forge playfully reprimands them with a wagging finger; that is pantomime as a lot as rock’n’roll.

Ghost have usually delved into historical past for thematic fare – 2018’s Prequelle drew on the Black Loss of life, Impera from Victorian empires – however they’ve at all times appeared one step forward throughout their sensational, transatlantic rise. Forge has stated that he’s already determined the title of Ghost’s subsequent album; one solely hopes that he’s not forgetting to take all of this in, as a result of his band have one thing magnificent to supply within the current.

Charlie Watts: the calm, sensible eye of the Rolling Stones’ rock’n’roll storm
25
Aug

By any requirements, Charlie Watts was an unlikely candidate for rock stardom.

He was quiet, drily humorous and unfailingly modest, traits theoretically higher suited to his preliminary occupation as a graphic designer than the scream-rent world of 60s pop. Moreover, by his personal admission, he didn’t significantly take care of rock’n’roll (“I didn’t know something about it … I used to hate Elvis Presley. Miles Davis – that’s what I thought-about somebody,” he advised an interviewer in 1993) and had initially needed to have the rhythm and blues so beloved of his bandmates defined to him: “I didn’t know what it was. I assumed it meant Charlie Parker, performed gradual”.

At first, not less than, the opposite Rolling Stones puzzled if Watts was even able to taking part in the music they wished to play, moderately than his beloved jazz. “Charlie swings very properly, however can’t rock,” wrote a annoyed Keith Richards in a 1963 diary entry. “Fabulous man, although.”

Because it turned out, Richards couldn’t have been extra flawed. Nothing if not a fast scholar, Watts not solely realized to rock, however got here to be hailed as one of many best drummers in rock historical past – typically the best of all – though he actually occupied a singular place inside that individual pantheon.

Charlie Watts: Rolling Stones drummer dies at age 80 – video obituary

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Charlie Watts: Rolling Stones drummer dies at age 80 – video obituary

He was not a flamboyant, risk-taking showman within the method of the Who’s Keith Moon, nor an exponent of pummelling uncooked energy alongside the traces of Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham, nor an skilled in tough time signatures like Rush’s Neal Peart. He actually didn’t go in for the form of elaborate tools – gongs and double bass drums – that rock drummers continuously use to attract consideration to themselves on the rear of the stage, preferring to stay with a 1957 equipment that was tiny by fashionable requirements.

There have been moments when Watts’ drumming may very well be showy – as on his thunderous efficiency on 1966’s Paint It Black – however often, Watts majored in much less apparent abilities: good timing, a swing to his taking part in rooted within the hours he’d spent drumming alongside to jazz information in his bed room within the late 50s, a specific brilliance with shuffle patterns, a capability to supply a rock-solid footing no matter whether or not they had been venturing into psychedelia, disco, reggae or funk.

Sometimes, his bandmates deemed it essential to remind the world how nice he was. “Charlie’s good tonight, innee?” supplied Mick Jagger, after a efficiency of Chuck Berry’s Little Queenie on the 1970 reside album Get Yer Ya-Yas Out!, whereas each Keith Richards and Ronnie Wooden urged the Rolling Stones merely couldn’t proceed with out him, a idea that’s presumably now going to be examined: “Charlie’s the engine,” stated Wooden in 2003. “And we don’t go anyplace with out the engine.”

With the Rolling Stones in 2002.
With the Rolling Stones in 2002. (L to R) Charlie Watts, Mick Jagger, Ronnie Wooden, and Keith Richards. {Photograph}: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Photographs

You would see why his fellow Stones felt the necessity to laud him. Definitely Watts – given to suggesting he was “not significantly proficient” however “very fortunate” – wasn’t going to attract consideration to himself. However his brilliance as a drummer didn’t really want underlining: it was already obvious to anybody with ears. Take heed to his taking part in on 1968’s Jigsaw Puzzle, which concurrently drives the music alongside and punctuates it with a sequence of apparently easy drum rolls.

Typically, his taking part in appeared virtually counterintuitive, at odds with all the things else that was occurring within the music. On the darkish, waning-of-the-60s masterpiece Gimme Shelter, he supplied a masterclass in restraint whereas Mick Jagger and the backing vocalists wailed about rape and homicide: the attention on the centre of the apocalyptic storm.

And typically, his taking part in appeared to point out an innate understanding of what the music was about. On Get Off Of My Cloud, he performs precisely the identical fill each two bars all through the music’s verses: there’s one thing relentless about it, which inserts completely given Get Off Of My Cloud is about annoyed anger.

1983’s Undercover of the Night time, in the meantime, is laden with then-hip studio results, in one of many latterday Stones’ common bids for contemporaneity, however Watts’s taking part in cuts via all of it. There was one thing very telling about that. For the reason that early 80s, the Rolling Stones’ more and more sporadic new albums have been desperately uneven, their recording continuously riven by character clashes and livid disputes about which musical route the band ought to take. The one factor about them that nobody ever appeared to criticise was Watts’s drumming: he appeared to stay fully unflappable, musically dependable when his bandmates had been something however.

His reticence additionally labored in his favour. Married since 1964, he appeared largely uninterested within the sorts of excesses that his fellow Stones tended to enjoy, whether or not chemical or sexual.

One well-known story from the early 70s concerned the band being invited to occasion on the Playboy Mansion: Watts slipped away and sequestered himself within the video games room for your complete evening. You may gauge the remainder of the band’s sense of shock when he did, briefly, succumb to drug habit within the early 80s from the truth that Keith Richards – of all individuals – felt impelled to intervene and inform Watts to cease it.

Essentially the most legendary story about Watts – the presumably apocryphal one about him dropping his mood when Mick Jagger referred to him as “my drummer”, punching him within the face and telling him he was, in actual fact, Watts’s singer – is famous as a result of it appeared so completely out of character.

Finally, his reticence grew to become one thing of what would now be referred to as a model, his unruffled, fantastically tailor-made calmness and detachment as attribute in its personal method as Richards’ dissolution.

Within the 80s and 90s, because the Rolling Stones’ excursions grew to become ever-more extravagant son-et-lumière shows involving pyrotechnics, big inflatables and cantilevered bridges, the huge screens along with the stage would sometimes give attention to Watts.

Virtually invariably stone-faced as he performed, he appeared to provide off an ineffable air of barely aloof bemusement, as if he thought it was all fully ridiculous and might need been extra content material pursuing his love of jazz, one thing he confined to downtime between grossing a whole lot of tens of millions on the earth’s arenas and stadiums.

It made for an ideal distinction with Mick Jagger’s showboating, even when the reality was that Watts clearly didn’t discover it that ridiculous, on condition that he was at all times closely concerned with the stage and manufacturing design for the Stones’ excursions. Maybe he was a extra sophisticated man than his low-key public picture urged. Both method, it’s onerous to see how the Rolling Stones will ever be the identical with out him.