With Memphis still buzzing from Tina: The Musical at the Orpheum Theatre (Read Alex Greene’s cover story), Music Video Monday is revisiting one of the strangest, and coolest, moments of Tina Turner’s career.
Tina Turner grew up in Nutbush, Tennessee, and found fame alongside rock and R&B pioneer Ike Turner. But her career didn’t fully flourish until after she left that abusive relationship and struck out on her own. Her single “What’s Love Got To Do With It?” was a massive hit in 1984. Tina’s comeback coincided with the golden age of MTV, but the song’s music video was, for the era, fairly subdued. It just featured the singer strolling around New York City, but Tina’s electric charisma is on full display, and that’s more than enough.
The video for the album’s title track, “Private Dancer,” is much more representative of the era’s visual excesses.
With her star in ascendance, Tina took a radical turn. Director George Miller was working on the third Mad Max movie, and after seeing Turner as The Acid Queen in the mid-70s film adaptation of The Who’s rock opera Tommy decided to write a part for her. Auntie Entity is the leader of Bartertown, the wasteland outpost where desperate survivors of the apocalypse have tried to re-create something like civilization. Turner, who had never done this kind of acting before, makes Auntie Entity one of the greatest sci-fi villains of all time. (In fact, I would argue that she’s not the real villain of the story. She’s just playing a bad hand the best way she can. The NAACP seemed to agree with me, because they awarded Turner the Image Award for Outstanding Actress for the role.) Watch as she asserts dominance at The Thunderdome.
Turner had two songs in the film. “One of the Living” was the first single from the soundtrack. The video, which premiered in 1985, plays up Turner’s rock star image, and cuts in altered clips from the movie. Say what you will about the filmmaking of the ’80s, but they knew how to use smoke and a klieg light.
The second video was for the theme, “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome),” and here we get Tina in her full Auntie Entity glory. The chainmail dress reportedly weighed more than 100 pounds. Watch for the cameo by saxophone hero Tim Capello.
