One of the most shared images since the evening of May 24, 2023 is the black-and-white photo in which Tina Turner and David Bowie are drinking mouth to mouth from a bottle of champagne at the same time, kissing “inevitably” while Tina is tenderly kissing puts her hand on Bowie’s cheek.
Next to him is a seemingly pouting Keith Richards with his own bottle of Jack Daniels. It would have been difficult to imagine a “threesome”. At parties, only one person can get the girl. John McEnroe is still somewhere on other recordings of this moment in music history. A historical, boozy and top-class backstage feast in the first cabin, around 1983/84, judging by Bowie’s hairstyle, which is always a good time indicator.
And yes, Bowie got her, Tina. Into the studio. And once even on stage. First, Tina Turner covered Bowie’s “1984” on her career-defining album PRIVATE DANCER from the “eponymous” year. An obvious and coherent choice, because Bowie’s DIAMOND DOGS homage to George Orwell is lyrically dystopian, but musically it is characterized by soul rhythms and disco wah-wah guitars. Strictly speaking, it is the song that marked Bowie’s “plastic soul” phase heralded and marked the final farewell to his glam era.
In 1984, Bowie began to make a professional compromise between commerce and artistic aspirations, a balancing act that was to end in a creative hernia with the GLASS SPIDER fair. A year after he had ruled the charts and the world with LET’S DANCE, TONIGHT was released, an album which at the time neither sworn fans nor the general public could relate to and which consisted largely of highly polished cover versions, after which Success of “China Girl” again with a co-composition of his roommate Iggy Pop, the title song. Bowie deliberately left out the original, spoken prologue, because ATTENTION, this supposed love song is about a man whose girlfriend is dying of an overdose in the original version of Iggy’s LUST FOR LIFE from 1977: “I saw my baby, she what turning blue!“. The only blue on TONIGHT is Bowie’s face on the cover.
Even if Turner had her experiences with drugs and domestic violence (there was a good reason why she played the acid queen in Ken Russel’s wacky film version of TOMMY more than believably), it wouldn’t have suited her new, clean and reborn image. But maybe you were just a coward. So a drug nightmare farewell song from dark seventies Berlin became a radio-friendly white reggae to sway along to, more UB40 than The Stooges. And here Bowie and Turner sing harmoniously in a duet, simultaneously with each other and not alternating against each other, as they did three years earlier on “Under Pressure” when Bowie dueled Freddie Mercury. Everyone loves each other here.
So also at Turner’s concert next year in Manchester. Perfectly staged and illuminated, Bowie appears at the finale and strides down the show stairs, freshly blow-dried, with a starched stand-up collar shirt and bow tie complete with a white jacket, like a dream ship head waiter who has got lost in the ZDF hit parade, somewhere between Roland Kaiser and Scott Walker. And then they sing and sway around each other and somehow it seems like the term “cringe” was coined at that very moment – and the last thing on your mind is that they’re singing a song about an overdose. But somehow it’s also sizzling and sexy and at the same time so uncomfortable, like catching your parents french kissing while having the blues.
What Bowie whispers to his hostess and then makes her laugh has been taken as explicit lewdness by lipreaders worldwide, but the fact that Bowie turns consciously to face the camera at that precise moment suggests his usual provocative calculation. Give the people what they want to believe. One would like to call out to you: “Hey, take a room!”. So much for “private” dancers. Turner’s facial expression when a groupie tries to snatch Bowie from her and is dragged away is priceless, even if in retrospect this action seems suspect and rehearsed, similar to Bowie’s following sentence about standing next to Turner “is about the hottest place in the universe”. !
Turner’s duet was hot, too, a few months later, when Mick Jagger ripped her leather skirt off for the world to see at the “LIVE AID” performance in Philadelphia in a far more skillful and unembarrassing way than Timberlake and Jackson’s “Nipplegate” did in 2004. Everything just been there. Then in 1986, Bowie borrowed Turner’s haircut for his goblin king in the Muppet extravaganza LABYRINTH, giving her “Girls,” a co-editing with Erdal Kizilcay that, along with a few gaffes in the ’80s (“Too Dizzy” anyone? ) was also to produce the great album THE BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA.
On “Girls”, which appeared on Turner’s BREAK EVERY RULE in 1986, there is not only an allusion to Rutger Hauer’s legendary “Tears in Rain” death monologue from “Blade Runner”, Phil Collins also plays the drums on it – what in that respect is significant for Bowie to later derogatorily refer to the mid-difficult 80’s as his “Phil Collins phase.” And then there’s THE commercial, which features Bowie as a mad and pigtailed scientist using a computer, a high-heeled boot, a picture of Botticelli’s Venus (he’s always been into art and fashion), and a spilled bottle of Pepsi Tina Turner created in the lab. God may have created man, but Dave created Tina.
In addition, the two strut in a shower of sparks in an aesthetic inspired by Joel Schumacher’s fever dream and sing a rewritten version of “Modern Love”. Later, Turner would sing for Pepsi again with Rod Stewart and Bowie would do a commercial for Vittel mineral water. Is anyone surprised that Helene Fischer can be seen on Lidl posters?
Anna Mae Bullock and David Robert Jones were two kindred spirits from different worlds who helped and supported each other in the 80’s. Whether it’s for love, friendship or calculation, it doesn’t matter at all, just as who benefited more from whom. And did the two ever have duets other than musical ones? Who cares? Both have made this world a better place. “Girls, they come and they go. Like spirits, they vanish at dawn…”
PS:
1. There is a certain irony in the fact that Keith Richards is the one in the photo who is still alive and, despite all the sadness, also makes the author of these lines smile.
2. Tina Turner not only sang with David Bowie in 1984, she can also be heard on the song “The Sound of a Gun” on Chris de Burgh’s 1984 album MAN IN THE LINE. Bowie and De Burgh in one year! Who can say that about himself?