Rest in peace, Tina Turner

I am saddened to hear about yesterday's news that American-Swiss singer and actress Tina Turner had passed away at age 83 at her home in Zurich. Having started her career in the late Fifties as part of a rock and roll duo with her eventual first husband Ike Turner, she gave such hits such as "Proud Mary", "Nutbush City Limits", "River Deep - Mountain High" and "It's Gonna Work Out Hits" as well as her acting debut as the Acid Queen in the 1975 film adaptation of The Who's rock opera Tommy before divorcing Ike in 1978 after a complicated 16-year marriage in which she suffered emotional and domestic abuse.

Following her divorce, her career had gradually been relegated to performing in hotels and so on before her cover of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" in 1983 marked the beginning of her comeback, which occured in form of her fifth album Private Dancer and proved that she could succeed without her now ex-husband and it was actually "What's Love Got to Do with It" that proved to be her biggest hit, topping the American charts and peaking at number three in the UK.

With that, her success would continue with her critically-acclaimed role as Aunty Entity in 1985's Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, in which she did the soundtrack and scored the hit "We Don't Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)" along with the albums Break Every Rule (1986), Tina Live in Europe (1988) and Foreign Affair (1989), which gave us arguably her second biggest hit, a cover version of Bonnie Tyler's "The Best" and cemented her status as the Queen of Rock and Roll.

As the Nineties went on, she would record the soundtrack to 1993's What's Love Got to Do with It, which was a biopic based on her life starring Angela Bassett as the singer, followed up with Wildest Dreams (1996), which scored the hit single in form of the GoldenEye theme tune the previous year and her final studio album Twenty Four Seven (1999).

After the release of Twenty Four Seven, Turner semi-retired from recording as she would record new songs for her greatest hits albums All the Best (2004) and Tina! (2008), though she continued doing live performances until retiring in 2009, following the end of her 50th anniversary tour, which the Arnhem performance was released as Tina Live the same year.

Despite not releasing a new solo album during the last 24 years of her life, Turner would be part a spiritual music group with her friends called Beyond from 2007 before leaving in 2020. The last hit single in her lifetime would be a reworked and remixed version of "What's Love Got to Do with It" with Kygo in summer 2020.

Having been living in Switzerland since 1994, she would renounce her American citizenship in 2013 and became a Swiss citizen. She is survived by her second husband Erwin Bach and two sons from her first marriage Ike Jr. and Michael, while her other sons Craig and Ronnie predeceased her in 2018 and 2022 respectively. She'll sadly be missed and her legacy as one of the greatest musicians as well to both rock music and black music will live on. Simply the best.