She was the only rock star whose poster I had in my bedroom in Kolkata. I can still see it in my head — Tina Turner, her skin glowing nutmeg brown against a white background, with that streaky shag hairstyle, in a black miniskirt, flashing those awe-inspiring legs.
I had found it in a magazine, a double-spread, and carefully taped it to my cupboard. The poster is long gone, though the ghosts of those tape marks still remain.
I was not much given to pop star posters but Turner was irresistible. At that time I only vaguely knew the backstory — a woman who had found fame with her husband Ike and later reinvented herself as “simply the best, better than all the rest”. But more than anything else it was that tornado of a voice — utterly unlike anything I was used to.
In India, female singers all aspired to sound like Lata Mangeshkar — pristine, sweet and bell-like. Mangeshkar’s voice was like crystal. Turner’s voice shattered crystal. She was the anti-Lata, anything but virginal in her sound, her appearance or her lyrics as she snarled “What’s love got to do, got to do with it? What’s love but a second-hand emotion?”
Those lyrics pretty much upended most of Mangeshkar’s oeuvre, in fact, they played havoc with the ethos of most Hindi film songs I knew and loved. Even Helen, the queen of racy cabaret songs, would not dare sing “I am your private dancer, dancer for money, any old music will do.” Loving Turner felt almost like an act of rebellion in our bhadralok society. When she sang “steamy windows coming from the body heat” I looked around nervously to see if anyone was listening. When her music videos played on television, I gaped at the lone woman dancing sinuously, sometimes in a denim jacket, sometimes in a beaded dress, with a “harem” of lithe, muscly men. She was a queer icon even before I knew what those words meant, a woman who had wrested her own place in a man’s world, proudly owning her sexiness, her sexuality and her wigs, unashamed to growl “we’re going to do it nice and rough”.
Good girls were not supposed to sound like that (or dress like that). Later I realised with a shock that she was already 44 when she released Private Dancer. She could have easily been my mother. By then it was too late. She had already become a pin-up on my cupboard. But that poster was a bit of a red herring, a misdirection. I didn’t want her the way adolescent boys wanted their sexy pin-up pop stars. I secretly wanted to be Tina Turner.
Later I discovered being Tina Turner had not come easy. She was no “overnight sensation”. She had walked out of her abusive, drug-riddled marriage with Ike Turner with only 36 cents and a petrol card in her pocket. She told People magazine “I didn’t fear him killing me when I left, because I was already dead.” When the Ike and Tina Turner story became the 1993 film What’s Love Got to Do With It starring Angela Bassett, she did not participate in the production, though she recorded some songs. According to the New York Times, she said, “Why would I want to see Ike Turner beat me up again?”
I didn’t know all those details when I pasted her on my cupboard. But at some subliminal level, you could sense those scars in her voice. The story that could have been one of victimhood became an explosion of gritty, guttural, growling power. I went to see Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome only for her. It made utter sense that in a post-apocalyptic Mad Max wasteland, someone like Turner would survive. And she would be wearing a chain-mail one-piece slit all the way up the side of those legs that went from here to eternity. I didn’t need another hero like Mel Gibson, I wanted more of Tina as Aunty Entity.
Tina Turner lived to see herself become a legend. A musical based on her life is currently on tour. In 2000, the Guinness Book of World Records said she had sold more concert tickets than any solo performer in history. Sadly, I never got to see her live. Perhaps I did not want to share my “private dancer” with thousands of screaming delirious fans.
Years after I had moved away from Kolkata, my little niece discovered her poster on my cupboard, pointed at it and said gleefully “Knees!” I realised a woman of Turner’s age flashing her knees was still a rarity in my niece’s world in Kolkata. And it filled me with joy that she was still shattering stereotypes in my bedroom in Kolkata somewhere beyond the Thunderdome.
The writer is a novelist and the author of ‘Don’t Let Him Know’
