Tina Turner - Private Dancer

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NME.COM feature on Tina Turner - Private Dancer album including album review, artwork, tracks, listen now, tour dates, discography and more.

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Release date: 17 February 1997

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Tina Turner - Private Dancer: Wikipedia Album Entry

Private Dancer is the fifth solo album by Tina Turner, released on Capitol Records in 1984, which became her breakthrough solo album. Turner's success with the album came after several challenging years of going solo after a public divorce from husband and performing partner Ike Turner. It is her best-selling album both in the U.S. and internationally and propelled her back to superstardom during the year of its release.

The album was an outstanding success. Private Dancer has been certified 5 × Platinum (5 million) in the United States and sold around 250,000 each week for 2 months. Worldwide the album has been estimated having sold 14 million copies but also some sources estimating it sold over 20 million copies.

The album produced a number of highly successful singles including "What's Love Got to Do with It" which went to number one and stayed there for three weeks. At the 1985 Grammy Awards, Private Dancer won four of the six awards for which it was nominated. No less than seven of the album's ten tracks (nine in the U.S.) were released as singles; "Let's Stay Together" produced by Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh of British band Heaven 17, a UK Top 10 hit and a US Top 20 hit and the first sign of what was to come (1983), "Help" recorded with The Crusaders, Graham Lyle and Terry Britten's reggae-tinged "What's Love Got To Do With It", Holly Knight and Mike Chapman's "Better Be Good To Me", Mark Knopfler's "Private Dancer" with a guitar solo by Jeff Beck (1984) and "I Can't Stand The Rain" and "Show Some Respect" (1985). The preceding UK single "Ball of Confusion", a cover of The Temptations song which was Turner's first collaboration with the B.E.F. (British Electric Foundation)/Heaven 17 production team and part of their collaborative 1982 album Music of Quality and Distinction Volume One was not included on the Private Dancer album. A recording of Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come" from the same sessions would re-appear in remixed form on B.E.F.'s Music of Quality and Distinction Volume Two in 1991, and Turner also performed the track with this arrangement on her 1986/1987 Break Every Rule Tour, and it was later included on her 1988 live album Tina Live in Europe.

The Private Dancer album was a radical departure from the R&B and soul music Turner had performed with her former husband. The songs reflected a more straightforward rock sensibility, but mixed in elements of pop, R&B, and New Wave music and the album had an overall soundscape with prominent use of synthesizers and drum machines, especially on the tracks produced by Martyn Ware, Graham Lyle, Terry Britten and Rupert Hine.

Following the success of Private Dancer Turner released four further singles in 1984 and 1985, the first a duet with David Bowie called "Tonight" from his album of the same name, another duet in 1985 with Bryan Adams called "It's Only Love" taken from Adams' 1984 album Reckless, followed by two tracks in 1985 from the soundtrack album to the movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome in which Turner starred against Mel Gibson; "We Don't Need Another Hero" and "One of the Living". This meant that Turner within the space of some eighteen months had managed to release no less than eleven singles altogether - all commercially successful.

In 1998, EMI, the parent label of Capitol Records, released a digitally remastered Centenary Edition of the Private Dancer album on CD, then including four additional demo tracks recorded in late 1983 and early 1984 with the producer John Carter, first released as B-sides to some of the Private Dancer singles, as well as three extended 12" remixes.

Private Dancer remains the only Tina Turner studio album to have been re-issued in digitally remastered form.

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