The superstar who invented Girl Power before the Spice Girls were even born! Tina Turner had her first hits in the 60s but her marriage became a nightmare of abuse. She survived and became hailed as the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll, writes RICHARD KAY

From her towering stiletto heels to the body-hugging, thigh-skimming miniskirts, the rasping, husky voice and raunchy energetic stage shows, Tina Turner, who has died aged 83, was the undisputed queen of stadium rock.

That she became one of the best-selling female singers of all time, with record sales of over 100 million, overcoming not just a dirt-poor upbringing in the cotton fields of America’s Deep South but a violent and abusive marriage, was as remarkable as any of the success that turned her into a musical colossus and global icon.

Hers was a life of extraordinary contrasts: huge fame matched by the brutal years she spent married to the monstrous Ike Turner, who first changed her name, then made her a star — but did so by beating her, controlling her and humiliating her.

It took courage and many years for her to break free of his coercive, manipulative grip. But when she did, she went on to have even greater musical success, elevating herself into the pantheon of rock ’n’ roll greats.

No wonder her death at her home in Switzerland triggered an outpouring of tributes not just from fellow artists but from the White House to the West End, where Tina: The Musical is running in London’s theatreland.

How far away this must have seemed when she picked cotton in the fields surrounding the nondescript town of Nutbush, Tennessee. She was then Anna Mae Bullock, a girl who distracted herself from the degrading work by fantasising about a life of glamour and fame.

It must have seemed a hopeless dream. She had been raised in a broken and violent home by parents who both abandoned her.

Indeed, suffering from overpowering insecurity and self-doubt, the country girl seemed destined for a life of domestic drudgery in the impoverished and then racially segregated Southern state.

But she had one outstanding quality: a voice so strong and so commanding it could drown out the choir at the Baptist church where she sang.

In her triumph over so much adversity, she became the restless superstar who invented girl power long before the Spice Girls were even born.

When her life story was turned into a stage musical in London, she made this enigmatic observation: her story, she said, proved that ‘it is possible to turn poison into medicine’.

This was barely an exaggeration, for there are few rags-to-riches stories as dramatic or as poignant as hers.

She was born in 1939 into a desolate community of sharecropper farmers. Her father, Floyd, was an overseer and could afford a house big enough for the children to sleep in separate rooms. But Floyd and his wife Zelma spent their time fighting.

Turner was convinced that having already had one daughter together, Tina’s sister Alline, neither parent wanted a second child and never showed her any love. She was three when her parents went to work at a wartime defence facility in Knoxville, leaving her to be brought up by her strict, religious grandparents in Nutbush, the town she later celebrated in the 1973 hit Nutbush City Limits.

The family were briefly reunited when World War II ended in 1945, only for Zelma — desperate to escape her husband — to walk out when Turner was 11 years old.

When her father married again — to a woman who repeatedly stabbed him in their vicious fights — he also deserted Tina and her sister.

They were passed between various relatives until, at 16, Turner rejoined her mother, who was living in St Louis, Missouri.

One night, her sister took her to the Club Manhattan, where a band called Ike Turner And The Kings Of Rhythm were playing. The effect on the teenage Tina was instant. ‘I went into a trance,’ she once recalled.

As for Ike Turner, she noted: ‘I couldn’t help thinking, God, he’s ugly. I was definitely in the minority. Most women, black or white, found Ike irresistible because there was something dangerous about him.’

Captivated by the music, she began going to the club regularly. ‘Back then I was a skinny 17-year old schoolgirl . . . I doubt that Ike ever noticed me at all.’ But one night, when she grabbed a mic that was floating around the audience and joined Ike in a song, her voice astonished everyone with its raw power — including Ike Turner.

‘He was visibly shocked when he heard my big voice,’ she later said. ‘It didn’t seem possible it could come from such a slip of a girl.’

She joined the band while still at school and gave up wanting to become a nurse.

She had an affair with the band’s saxophone player and became pregnant by him. In 1958, aged 18, she gave a birth to a son but the boyfriend vanished.

By then Ike, a local celebrity and inveterate womaniser, had become her mentor. He bought her pretty clothes and taught her how to sing even better on stage.

At first they were friends but, as she put it: ‘One night we crossed the line. We were both surprised, even uncomfortable, but it seemed easier to remain lovers than struggle to recapture our friendship.’

Seeing her as his route to the stardom he craved, Ike gave her a racy onstage image, making her wear short skirts to flaunt her shapely legs and insisting that her singing voice should be as raw and as sexy as possible.

Then, in 1960, she became pregnant for a second time — but she was carrying Ike’s child.

‘That’s not what doomed me,’ she recalled. ‘The real trouble started when his record company told him to make “that girl’’ the star of his act.’

The Kings Of Rhythm became the Ike And Tina Turner Revue. ‘Why Tina?’ she asked. ‘Because it rhymed with Sheena, a name that he remembered from some TV series.

‘I dug in my high heels, telling him I didn’t want to change my name. That was the first time Ike hit me.’

He smashed her in the head with a wooden shoe-stretcher. It was ‘always the head’, she remembered. ‘I was so shocked I started to cry.’ Ike’s response was to insist that they had sex.

‘The very last thing I wanted to do was make love,’ she later wrote in her searing autobiography My Love Story.

‘When he’d finished I lay there with a swollen head, thinking: You’re pregnant, Anna, and you have no place to go.’

It was the moment Ike started to control her though fear.

Their first record, A Fool In Love, was a huge hit and Ike insisted they go on tour, leaving her elder son with a babysitter.

Ike controlled the music and, more and more, he controlled Tina too. On one occasion, when she attempted to be more expressive and melodic, he spat in her face for daring to express an opinion.

Two days after the birth of their son Ronnie, she was back on stage, and she and Ike married in a ten-minute ceremony in Mexico two years later. Tina was too scared to refuse. Many have wondered why she didn’t leave him. The answer, she suggested in a 1986 memoir, lay in her blighted childhood, which had left her with negligible self-esteem and a terrible fear of being abandoned again.

As for Ike’s savage treatment of her, she even looked for excuses. ‘As a boy, he’d watched his father die a slow, painful death after he was beaten mercilessly by white men who wanted to teach him a lesson for fooling around with a white woman,’ she wrote. ‘Ike held that deep hate inside him and never let it go.’

Tina fretted that leaving him would finish her career and it was only later that she realised it was Ike who was terrified of losing her.

He rarely let her out of his sight, gave her no money and refused to let her see friends. She lived in perpetual fear of offending him.

The savage violence was relentless, with Ike choking and beating her with anything that came to hand including phones, coathangers and the heels of his shoes. Turner merely needed to look at him the ‘wrong’ way to provoke him. Many nights she would appear on stage nursing a black eye or a swollen lip.

Their housekeeper once saw him push a lit cigarette up Turner’s nose, and she got third-degree burns when he hurled a cup of hot coffee in her face. On one occasion he broke her jaw, on another he fractured her ribs after attacking her in their dressing room.

He would later claim: ‘Yeah, I hit her, but I didn’t hit her more than the average guy beats his wife.’

When he wrote his 1999 memoirs, such twisted reasoning still held sway. ‘Sure, I’ve slapped Tina,’ he wrote. ‘There have been times when I punched her to the ground without thinking. But I have never beat her.’

He hardly bothered to hide his cheating from her. He had affairs with her backing singers, the Ikettes, and with their housekeepers, one of whom essentially became his concubine. When Ike built a recording studio, he included a sanctuary with steel doors and security cameras, where he could take women. Turner called it ‘the whorehouse’.

Ike started taking drugs heavily, first marijuana and then cocaine, and became even more paranoid. On ‘an ordinary day’ in 1968, she attempted suicide by swallowing 50 sleeping pills.

Why? She explained: ‘For starters there were three women at the house at the time, and Ike was having sex with all of them. Three of us were named Ann, which meant he only had to remember one name. One of the Anns was pregnant with his child — another insult to me.’

She only survived because her stomach was pumped.

The next day when she awoke, there was Ike. ‘You should die, you mother******,’ he spat at her.

A year later, supporting the Rolling Stones, she was in hospital again, with TB. The only flowers she had were from the Stones.

But while her husband’s behaviour became more erratic because of drugs, she described their sex as ‘an expression of hostility – a kind of rape . . . it began or ended with a beating.’

Amid the chaos, Tina turned to Buddhism and embraced meditation. Even so, it was not till 1976, after 16 years of marriage, that she finally plucked up the courage to begin divorce proceedings.

Warned by police that her husband had put a contract out on her, she started to keep a revolver in her handbag before returning to cabaret singing. In their divorce settlement she gave him everything they had, keeping little more than her stage name.

Her popularity in the U.S had waned but now a canny agent revamped her image. The sequins and lamé were ditched and in came tiny leather skirts and grittier rock ’n’ roll — and in 1984 the hits started rolling again.

The album Private Dancer sold 20 million copies, including her first number one, What’s Love Got To Do With It.

Appearing with Mel Gibson in the Mad Max franchise cemented her appeal as the sexiest woman in rock. And she met a new man, German music executive Erwin Bach. After nearly 30 years together, they married in Switzerland in 2013 in a Buddhist ceremony on the shores of Lake Zurich. The drug-addled Ike died in 2007.

For Tina Turner, the girl from cotton-picking country, met every challenge that life could throw at her. ‘It’s not what happens but how you deal with it,’ she said. How fitting an epitaph.