Whoever thought putting Elton John and Tina Turner together in a pressurised environment, and thinking it would end in anything other than fireworks, seriously needs their head wobbled.
This is not to say that they were somehow awful people, or that their talents were completely obscured by the blinding lights of ego, but there was no getting away from the fact that, at both of their respective heights, they were a pair of pretty fiery personalities. Of course, John himself has become famous for many of his illustrious friendships in the music industry, both old and new – but don’t be fooled. Particularly back in the day, the claws could come out just as easily as the roses.
It should be stated that John and Turner started out, and ultimately ended, as firm friends, but there was a lot of muddy water for them to wade through first in order to get to that point. Indeed, in 1997, the pair had even planned to go on tour together – but the whole thing managed to go up in flames.
After all the trials and tribulations that each of them had endured to get to that stage in their careers, you’d think they’d let some of the smaller details slide under the radar – but if anything, these minute issues were only what made them more tense.
In some ways, the issues were stacked from the get-go. John recalled in his autobiography Me that when rehearsals for the tour had only just begun, Turner called him up to complain about his hair, the colour of his piano, and his clothes. “You wear too much Versace, and it makes you look fat – you need to wear Armani,” she charmingly proclaimed. The tensions then simply continued to pile up, until the breaking point when Turner told John that he wasn’t playing ‘Proud Mary’ correctly.
He told her to stick it where the sun don’t shine – or words to that effect, it may have been more explicit – and with that, the dreams of the tour were left in ruin. Yet the real nail in the coffin of this whole affair was when Turner played the dirty tactic of taking the feud public, which John felt the need to come to his own defence.
“I wanted to settle a few scores and I did with Tina Turner,” he wrote in the book. “I have nothing but love for Tina, but when she roasted me on The Oprah Winfrey Show – she roasted me uphill and down – it wasn’t fair, although I never said anything at the time.”
Of course, there is a lot to be said for them being two of the most famous rock stars in the world, as well as the thankless work of their long-suffering publicity managers behind the scenes, that they did eventually kiss and make up. Although the notorious joint tour in the late 1990s ultimately never came to fruition, John and Turner remained close friends over the course of the rest of her life, and the ‘Rocketman’ was quick to pay a poignant tribute to her when she passed away.
A lot of this was down to their abilities in life to look at the bigger picture, but let’s also not kid ourselves. Despite all the pretences that he put up – and even in the face of her slightly body-shaming comments – John knew when to be moved into his place by a powerhouse when he saw one. There was no one quite like Turner, who’d quite literally move mountains to achieve her goals. No matter how famous you were, hell mend the person to stand in the way of that.
