Tina Turner - TV Inteview 1987

ah thank you thank you oh that's fantastic okay thank you you must be getting dozens and tons of these awards but they still are important to you are they yes because it it it's telling me first thing i ask is that sales and it is so that means that the people like it because that's what i made it i made that album for you know the people and so collect them and is not it's not egotistical we're talking about we're talking about that i have pleased my fans they like it they're buying it so it's fulfilling in the program the making of uh we are the world jane fonda says and i quote here they met the living legends of rock and roll ray charles bob dylan bruce bringston michael jackson and tina turner have you come to terms with yourself as a legend well i've been around a long time huh uh i don't think i think about it you know i uh i'm totally aware of the fact is that my career started way back when but i really don't think a lot about legends and power and people following what i do i think it's because i don't write songs i don't produce myself i think if i was in the production end of it but i'm performing you know it's just performing and enjoying my work so i don't think so much about titles i've just read your book uh i time tina and it's certainly it's not a book about sort of somebody who thinks of herself as a super mega star legend to me it's a very private and warm and in many ways shocking book what made you write it i was really every press conference was asking me about my past yeah i it was beginning i was becoming angry i didn't want to i didn't want to talk about something that i was trying to finish or that i had finished or and um i almost just tying me to a life that i finished already i finished that phase of my life so i felt there were two other books written before this one and i felt that it wasn't really accurate it was just clips taking taken from other magazines and all then just thought it was time well maybe if i write the book and really let everybody know how it was if that get off my back about singing that music going back and you know my goodness how much can you give to the people so i just thought it would stop the questions because there it would be and then they wanted to know why so yeah you can't wait but no we're not going to go into details about your married life you were married to ike turner for 16 years and he mistreated you uh but i have to tell you that after i read the book i went back and saw some recordings of the two of you and i personally started hating this guy what has used him to be having a good time with him on stage can you explain or describe the mixed emotions you must have had well look what you've done to yourself you're going way back in the time getting upset at you [Laughter] uh it wasn't it's like now it's almost as if you had a boss and you were going into work every day and he frustrated you and but you needed the work so you worked under stress you cried or you did whatever you had to do that was how it was just years and years of that [Music] it's a it you know becomes almost like a way of life until you find the way out it was sort of like a lot of people i'm sure in one way or another still doing it but not under a marriage basis but on the basis of a job or just you know in such any given situation it's not sometimes just to the marriage those things happen they happen in almost everyday life in different forms it comes in different forms those those situations depression and anger and and you know frustrations and hate have you ever considered how you as an artist but also as a private person may have influenced other women of today well let's see now what do i think about that i don't do a lot of thinking about influencing people and all of that you know i think i don't do a lot of thinking about it because my basic um uh reputation is raunchy rock singer what woman wants to be a rancher rock singer first so you you're not thinking that you're influencing anyone there because everybody wants to be glamorous and beautiful on stage and i'm just the opposite of that so i didn't put much thought into influence in that sense um i think now that this book said to the people well here's another one that's going through the same problems you are this is what she did and so it's just a matter of like thinking what you want for yourself and your life and don't give up on what you want that's what basically if you read the book you would think and she's still going so that's what i think basically the influence on women is now is to say like just stop thinking about age and and all the things that's been done already you can't do anything about what's been done it only takes time and stress just get out and start your life and try to still enjoy it so i think that's the influence from the book yeah that's you as a private person but even as a stage performer you are you are unique and you always have been but without you they couldn't have been like it was like janice joplin i think because you sort of broke the rules all the time you i mean you are warm sexy and rough but you are not sort of uh playing on the feminine part of yourself no i'm just a real natural person you know i i don't really get caught up in a lot of things that bother other people um my attitude about the life is that you should try to enjoy it as much as you can because the world within itself is one big school and one big education and you have to try to make the best of it i went through my times in my life and guys when i'm on the stage i'm working i'm i'm trying to give a i'm thinking things like i was standing on stage mick jagger came once to uh to see the production and what was happening in the in my work and he decided to come on stage you know and you're on stage you're thinking about your work and what you want to do and i'm thinking what do i want out of my career and i said well i want to pack the football stadiums like bowie and like jagger and like these people right springsteen so if you if you're gonna think that you're not thinking so much about what other women thinking of you thinking of like where you want to go with your career and when mick walked on stage we did we were in a very sort of remote place in america and we thought well maybe they might not know what's happening because i mean it's not build mcjagger so we said okay if when we start the music if they sort of don't really know i'll just sort of go you know what okay forget it it was one of those nights when you figured oh goodness he would have been here tonight because the crowd was they just came to see and they were wondering and they were sort of sitting it wasn't bad but it wasn't happening they came on stage that whole place went wild and i said all right there it is you know you think what do you want to do you're not thinking so much about what people think of me and i you're thinking what do i want to do what do i want to get what do i have to do to pack a stadium what am i going to do with this career of mine in terms of leaving some mark it's like aretha franklin could have done could have packed those stadiums or whatever and she didn't we're talking about if you're gonna do it see what that feels like to walk out on the stage with millions of people there they really came to see you i get just a rush from that from singing all those years and seeing the other guys do it and then wondering then what it would be like you know so i don't think about i the woman and what what the other women think about me i'm thinking about where i'm going and what i want to do i still enjoy doing that yes i still cover on stage yes it's it's like listen to the radio you don't just listen to one artist and when he's off you turn the radio off you listen to all the music i like to sing all the music and i say mine and everybody's you know so that's sort of my attitude about the singing yeah that's performing yeah that's performing i really feel that a lot of people feel they have to do everything themselves yeah this is my music this is what i have to offer you this is my work oh fine give me yours i'll take it and uh great because i i like to sing i like to sing other people's work you know you don't get a chance to record it because they they're keeping it for themselves fine if they could give it to me i'd love to sing it but since they don't then i just go on stage and do it yeah like awesome um let's stay together and even back to proud mary you made it your song you made proud mary your song even though it was huge it just became a style i i wasn't a recording artist so to speak i didn't write my own hits i covered and people liked it and uh and people still do like it and still expect it a bit you know it's just that i guess when you get a certain place in the world society is like once you start getting um hit albums and all the sort of like not the proper thing to do is to cover you know christ i'm saying but the people don't care you know they want it they want to hear it they want to see it you know yeah yeah i don't worry about a lot of things that people do worry about i'd like to talk a bit about uh filming movies it was tommy that got you going was it yes yeah queen yeah and that is not i mean the acid queen is totally opposite to your attitude towards drugs in there you know what to tell you about how i think i didn't even know it was that's not that was her name and i know she was promoting it as it was i didn't think i thought that was her name i thought it was a gypsy yeah that named herself as a queen for some dramatic reason you know i mean i'm always in fantasyland i'd rather like myself though i mean so i think it's how i am anyway i was on the set and it became even more magic was this huge machine that that i got to turn into right then all of a sudden after one week of shooting we got to this area where this set of twins came with this pink pillow with this needle and i went it's drugs and okay so they made a cut and we laughed about it and i went well after all of this acting okay and so because i thought that people's gonna thought that was gonna think that i was doing drugs i was promoting drugs you know i didn't didn't like that but it was okay yeah it was a movie what you get out of acting film acting that you sort of don't get out of performing on stage [Music] pretending being something else being not myself acting is to me pretending to be something else or or someone else on stage i also pretend to be someone else through the songs whatever the words are it doesn't mean that i'm the woman that would physically walk off stage and start doing a lot of things that i'm singing but it means i get to pretend to be that character that would do that so i play with acting in my in my work like people watch people and write songs well that's not a fortune of mine so i watch people and perform and i play with that creatively how did you feel about shooting mad max ah it was wonderful i love that character [Music] yeah i wanted to actually i wanted to fight mel i wanted to do something down in thunderdome you know just i felt we should have i think the people expected it you know but um they were they was basically cleaning up the concept of mad max you know they're really trying to get the attention of the academy and all and i enjoyed doing it but i i really wish it had been like you know matt maxx 2 because that is what i was really attracted to but just being there and acting and and the whole getup of the costume and um being on a movie set but doing something as dramatic as that pretending to be an old queen that built up a town oh that was wonderful you are a success in whatever you're doing dancing singing even acting but you have no sort of proper training in any of these fields too just my life always watching movies and pretending to be the stars and uh list always watching and listening i was a very curious young girl always watching people and so i think the acting comes from not from a school necessarily but just watching and seeing how it's done it's all it's all just pretending and being something else you know really becoming something else [Music] is it true that you turned down the the main character in the color purple was it the main character or some other character yeah i turned i didn't take it it wasn't right a singer i'm singing on stage every night why do i want to sing in a movie i mean you know it's there's more more much more exciting things out there than to go on the movie and say i want to i want exciting parts um in my in my work and and acting i i like you know like terminator and and how you call um a lot of the scientific exciting parts i don't like common i don't want to do a common role i can watch them and watch someone else play the part and enjoy it but i don't want to do it that's not what i want to do so i wouldn't enjoy it now let's return to performing live on stage because i have this feeling that the stage is where your home and your heart is it's true and after more than 25 years on the road you still have all the energy in yeah you keep going yeah you know it's what how can i explain what you like to do when you enjoy doing something i've been singing and dancing all my life and i've enjoyed it all my life i'm always still kind of singing and dancing in in everyday life as well as so onstage has become something just really natural and just like a glove that fits you know i think the view that the people get is because it looks like it's such hard work well it is hard work but it's also fulfilling and it's also fun and i don't think i could do it continuously if i didn't enjoy it now and i think if i didn't enjoy the people would know and i also think that instead of filling halls now they would be getting less a few years ago i did make the statement that i don't perform physically and verbally to men i don't like to try to invite that from the opposite sex years ago when i started to do that i found that there would be a woman negative looking at me like they didn't like me and i started working to the woman because i was basically saying i'm not here as a threat i'm here to perform you know and then eventually through the course of the evening they would start smiling became a psychological thing of like working in a way to the women because you know like the guys are the guys and they're basically there but the women could be more critical than the guys so it's a psychological play that i do now i don't think it's as obvious now in these days because i have been accepted but in the earlier days i did use that strategy and it was something that worked you know people ask me all kinds of things why do i wear fishnet stockings if i don't think i'm sexy and i said gosh i'll bet you when those people designed those stockings they weren't thinking about sex they they were just thinking about the design you know i wear my clothes because they're practical it's like you don't get runs and stockings you don't have no problems with the fishness they're like iron you know and leather and all of that stuff doesn't show perspiration you think you're thinking practical but people don't think you think practical on stage they think that you're up there showing off gosh i'm on stage i'm working with the band i'm i'm keeping tempos under control i'm doing so much everybody's looking right past that they're thinking that i'm posing and then i'm you know up there one hour we're just playing and posing and so it's it's not a pose at all it's like a lot of work i think it all comes through what you're doing you don't have to be con you don't have to work at doing anything if you got good music you've got good songs you simply perform it and the people are going to read through whatever they need to read through to get so i don't think i don't need to i can't say for somebody else maybe they need to do that pretending you know to the feminist moves and they're playing i don't need to do i like the dancing and the running and the singing rather than the posing in the you know the other it's just my style of what i like because i'm honestly having a good time one thing that's quite unique about you is that you've performed with so many other artists on stage i mean you've been there with mick jagger paul mccartney eric clapton david bowie who have you brian adams rod stewart even and margaret well you can go past landmark and go back to james brown ray charles um there were there were quite a few artists in the earlier days that i worked with also it's always been that way because when i started i started with it was all male singers when i got started i mean there were very few female singers so i think it became habit of being with the guys the only girl with the guys you know and um so when i started continuing my career i was attracted more to the style of how the fellas were because it's almost like a tomboy you're always out there with them and so you just latch on you know are there any favorites in in this slot i think the jagger is still my favorite because we are alike in our work we enjoy it we play with it and we know what we're doing we're enjoying it and we know what we're doing in terms of not having to to really pretend at being anything except enjoying the music and enjoying the moment and the word is that you taught him to dance no he hates that anymore he says his mother told him mick started to i i would say like i am influenced by his music he was influenced when i worked with him in 66 and he saw girls dancing it gave him an idea oh yeah dance because he was playing tamarind you know and i think it was an influence but it wasn't i was like he was in the dressing room and we were dancing and carrying on and then he started to do it because he wanted to do it but it wasn't like really teaching most of these people that i mentioned the recent times are british artists and it seems to me that the british people and certainly the british artists have always been very close to you if you think about the music now they they the british and the european people study the american music like history i mean they can tell me interviews today and people are telling me things that i had totally forgot it's that opposites attract i think of like how we the americans think and write and sing our songs and it's for what reason that it influenced the uk i don't know but they love that music you know so i like how they changed it you know so that's the attraction we talked a bit about the lyrics earlier on and obviously you say that they're important to you do you think that uh too many artists do not pay a lot of attention to uh to what they're singing i don't know i don't don't know the mentality of what happens when i sometimes they probably don't even care as long as they can get a hit record i get to be a star i think it could be a number of things but see then look at what you're talking about you're talking about professional people you're talking about natural performers you talk about people that's not really posing that's really into what they're saying the music and so forth you know there's a lot of temptations in the music to want to get into the business you know sometimes i think people might not really care that much about as long as they can learn the words and get the melody down and get someone to record them i think that's a practical way of like looking at what happens with what people say but then some people write rather abstract as well because that's who they are and that's what they like and so i think there's a number of reasons you know but that just means that we just don't you and i won't go out and get those right we'll have to go over and get something that we can communicate with i think the music artistically just moves like any form of art and i think people do it for many different reasons for liking it or for not liking enough for the success or the need of the desire the lyrics uh to to people is a fairly romantic description of of relationship does this mean that you yourself are romantic um two people i thought that was an extremely romantic song and uh that's another one that teased terry on two people i thought it was a cutesy song again you know and i i could see people going oh i really like that song you know uh i didn't get that involved with that particular song i'd like to paradises here in terms of that type of ballad that was one that i took i liked it but it wasn't my type of ballot so to speak in that sense still like it still do it still enjoy it but we're talking about um it meant it had no special significance except that i could relate to that you know the story because it was well written i have been told that you have converted to buddhism now how did this religious development come about i've been practicing 10 years when i started it was just being introduced for two years so that was like 12 years ago that it started in california and uh there was a girl working at the recording studio that was talking about it and she told me about it and i decided to test it to see because my religion was baptist and which was given to me by my parents because they were basically baptist background but this was one i made the decision for because it's like after becoming a woman your views and things are different so i liked the i liked how do you call the scientific view as for my life it made sense to me it taught me something different that uh baptists had not taught so that was comfortable for me and i started practicing would you say that this religion now is the most important factor in your life a part of my life it has become a part of my way of thinking a part of how i live and from that practice i'm becoming happy how does it affect your daily life a way of thinking less stress blame like i think if i read this book i wouldn't become angry at this person because i have a different view of how the life goes now and what would obviously be happening with these two people's lives maybe there was something that had to be lived through so to speak it's a another entirely way of thinking and living from the oriental view i mean you know it came from the orient so sometimes we just think our world is the only one and this is the only way of thinking but there are other people in the world that have other um concepts of life and so this is there's a world that believe this way part of the world and it made sense to me so i started to practice you partook in band-aid and live aid for africa in 1985 has this movement do you think altered the attitudes towards rock artists i i very i thought for many years because i never did drugs i never drank and i never smoked and i've always thought that people put rock and roll people down simply because of um the reputation of other people in other words it was like rock and roll people aren't intelligent they're not real people or good people or whatever you know and i think that that got the people to stand up and listen and say hey these are people that pack halls football stadiums these are people that are successful and there are people that like what these people do and then when that happened then all of a sudden they said well maybe there is a possibility that these people are all right cruel but that's the world and that's the life i always knew that there were a lot of good people in rock and roll music i'm in rock and roll music i've been there forever there are a lot of wonderful people but they are not classical singers they're not uh they're rock and roll they're free music loving people you know and they live their life a bit more freely so i think that's why i was basically put down i think more and more now a lot of the people are coming out of themselves to make that kind of statement i certainly have by writing the book and saying well here i am i'm a rock and roll person i know i'm respectable you don't think so but this i think i am and i haven't done anything that i feel is disrespectful so more and more people are getting a little bit of a different view because of that and people of the rock and roll people are feeling a little bit more freer to to show that they do have the tenacity to make some statement

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Length: 25min 2sec (1502 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 16 2020