Trying...to listen to more Tina Turner

Hidden music! More Tina! Anyone else lost some tracks?

Remember the days when you only had a few tapes, actual cassettes in the car? Or at home stacked next to the hi-fi? I do and my mum’s car tape collection was small but perfectly formed - some would say: Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, The Beatles, Barry Manilow and Tina. Tina Turner that is - but she was always Tina to me and mum.

We hung and head-banged on that woman’s every word on our way to the butcher, optician and grandpa’s. Anywhere and everywhere. To the extent that when I met people in my younger years prior to getting married, I was convinced that my first song at my wedding would be The Best. It would also be my wrestler walk-in song and the soundtrack to any other seminal moment in my life. What other song would ever be ok? The Best, was well, Simply The Best.

“I call you when I need you, my heart’s on fire/You come to me, come to me, wild and wild.” Now, those are opening lyrics and a sentiment to beat.

“Give me a lifetime of promises and a world of dreams/Speak a language of love like you know what it means?” Oof. I can’t even.

It was so much my anthem that the song merited it’s only special mention in a complaint-log (the shame and the pride) my friend’s neighbour kept over three months during her late night parties back at her flat as we always played it post the club and started sofa dancing. Hard. And it brought out the best in all of us - men and women alike.

My husband simply wouldn’t entertain it when it came to selecting our first dance at our wedding - but by this point - I didn’t really mind. (His loss. You Got the Love took the spot in case you are interested - the original one by The Source.) That’s because what I had with Tina was mine and deeply personal.

From Proud Mary to Private Dancer - I knew every word and imagined every scene Tina took me too. I Can’t Stand the Rain was particularly poignant growing up in Manchester. God the news of her death hit hard. How could Tina Turner ever die? And after what she had had to live through - so brilliantly told in a film and the musical - the latter I have seen three times (which believe me for a woman who doesn’t much love musicals - I love theatre and find it hard to suspend my disbelief when during mid-script people break into son - is a lot). She is still gyrating in my mind.

So imagine my pure joy, in a week not particularly filled with the stuff - certainly if you read the news as my profession demands, to learn there’s only a bloody new song. A lost track by the legend that is. I am all here for Hot For You Baby and intended for the seminal Tina comeback album Private Dancer - it never made it on there and was presumed lost. But newly unearthed like the raw rock gem it is - I am reborn. Yes queen. It is so good to hear you again Tina and have something new to go off.

But this discovery reminds me of the genius of the album; a carefully curated experience one was to go through in its entirety. Especially when we had tapes and much less choice. But I still savoured the ritual of it with CDs. Unwrapping the plastic, taking in the coverwork, reading any information the band had deigned to share and then putting it on - from start to finish. Finding ‘my songs’ - my edit. But also taking into what had been put together and thinking about why. Like any playlist - if you knew an album like I knew Tina’s range, or Blur’s Great Escape or Lauryn Hill’s Miseducation - there are only certain songs I can think are always coming next due to the album order.

Moloko’s Things to Make and Do album terrified me - I still don’t know why. I still loved Indigo and Pure Pleasure Seeker but they had something of League of Gentleman about them - brilliant but dark. And I kept on listening; again and again.

But nothing terrified me like what happened when I had Robbie Williams’ Life Thru A Lens album on aged 12. It had finished, so I thought, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, nearly a full 10 minutes after the last track, Robbie started talking just to me from my Hi-Fi speakers. Or so I thought. Turns out it was a hidden song called Hello Sir. I had actually jumped out of my bed through fear and then intrigue. I thought it was only me for a while who had this extra bit of spoken Robbie. What a magic touch. I looked it up this morning on Spotify to check I hadn’t been imagining it and good and bad news: my memory was accurate. The bad? It is clearly labelled on Spotify as a hidden track. Well that certainly kills the buzz and mystique.

The album opened you up to where an artist was at that moment and you drained it for all you could. Now we usually pick what we think we want to hear - and I think we are all the poorer for it. We cannot know what we do not know. But then occasionally, even in this digital world of telling people about ‘hidden’ tracks, we can still sometimes be surprised, by newly unearthed songs.

Tina - I am Hot for You Baby. On repeat.