It looks like we’re about to enter a little period of Big Name Albums of the early Eighties; no obscure art-rock or difficult tracks for a while, unless there are a few hidden album surprises.
This is Turner’s break-out album for her post-Ike solo career, and contains a lot of her most famous hits – What's Love Got To Do With It?, Private Dancer, Better Be Good To Me, and covers of I Can’t Stand The Rain and Let’s Stay Together. There’s some heavy hitters behind the songwriting – David Bowie, Mark Knopfler, Chinn & Chapman, with covers of Al Green and the Beatles - all adding up to some very polished pop/rock/soul tracks that both sound very much of the Eighties but also timeless. This is the first time for a very long while that we’ve had an artist that doesn’t write their own material.
Turner’s voice is like a mash-up between Aretha Franklin and Janis Joplin, soul with grit, highly distinctive, capable of power and gentleness and, although it’s a very rich dish to be served, is balanced very nicely within the tracks such that it doesn’t get overwhelming as can often be the case.
The slowed down version of Help (not found on the US issue) doesn’t, for my money, work for Turner’s voice, but where she does shine is in the likes of the fast and rocky Steel Claw, or the medium-tempo What’s Love Got To Do With It, or on Private Dancer where she gets to give the full range of softness and power (probably the closest to a bit of art-rock that this album offers, the hand of Mark Knopfler clear when you listen to a lot of his other work).
One problem I have with this kind of album, as with Michael Jackson, is that a large number of the songs are ones that have never been off the radio in the past forty years and so familiarity breeds complacency. They’re pretty good tracks, and Turner’s talent is unmistakeable, but also, I’ve heard them loads of times before so I didn’t really get anything fresh and new to me from the album.
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