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By Caomhan Keane • May 6th, 2008 • Category: Caomhan KeaneSo Tina Turner is coming out of retirement.
Well whoopee-fucking doo!
Excuse me if my knickers fail to twist at the thought of another past it pensioner hogging her wares in arenas across Europe, but the return of Ms Turner fails to bring a tear to my leg.
Last seen shitting all over her God-given talent on Ally McBeal, Turner ignited the come back trail at last month’s Grammy’s, wheezing about the stage with Beyonce, looking like some kind of geriatric silvermint.
While Tina’s work with her ex-husband Ike raised my spirits, her solo output has raised, at the best of times, a wry smile ( Private Dancer, Golden Eye) . At her worst (When The Heart Ache Is Over, Typically Male) she has raised my stomach.
She’s far from the golden age of The Ike and Tina Turner Revue, where a combination of Ike’s menacing arrangements and Tina’s electrifying presence propelled them into the pantheon during Soul’s golden age. She was the steak to his t-bone, the juice from his bite. No one came close to matching the vigour of their music.
Now she just howls over the same monotonous backing track - silky smooth backing vocals, Casio keyboards and a drum machine skipping on the same repetitive beat - creating the bland, insipid sound favoured by the musically dense.
Perhaps she used up all her sass and smarts dramatising the domestic hell she went through during her 14-year “marriage” to Ike in What’s Love Got To Do With It. Or perhaps the men who filled his artistic shoes (Mark Knopfler, Bryan Adams) blunted the tools honed and sharpened by him.
Either way as her records sailed into the record books, her integrity sailed down the toilet.
So as Ms Turner kicks off her tour in Kansas on 1 October I’ll be kicking off my shoes and sticking Mr Turner’s final record Rising With The Blues in my CD player. A reputed monster of a man but a master of his craft, who had the good grace to bow out at the top of his game.
Caomhan Keane is a very angry young man. He is full of piss and vinegar, the condiments of life. If, like Annie, you're never fully dressed without a smile, he's willing to be naked the live long day.
Favourite place in London: The airport - so i can get out of this wretched place!
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The thought of Tina’s spandex clad front bottomed gyrations, caterwauling about a packed arena to the sadistic cries of the heaving bloodthirsty masses, has my lunch repeating on me in an imagined resonant manner. The ardent fan will no doubt label my take on this as cynical and callous, but I have considerable pity when likening her current circumstance to that of a beloved hunting dog; who’s pride surpasses her physical constraints, and when heavily medicated and locked up while the younger dogs are out, persists in heading out later with another of the pack in pursuit of elusive prey, only to return home more crippled than previous. While I admit M’elle Turner to be more aware of her limitations, I would relate the dog’s enforced locking up to a collective responsibility we both as informed discerning consumers and concerned loyal fans are subject to, and I appeal to this better sense of ours to discourage her from burning out whatever sputtering life may yet reside inside that fragile shell, and to cease from this destructive pursuit of trivial - at this point - self validation, for her, in the name of dignity, to bow out with a modicum of grace. Tina, I know you’re reading, put down the microphone, relinquish those leather breeches, you’ve etched an indelible mark on the contours of history, in the words of Avril Lavigne; Let Go.