Private Dancer was a successful single in 1985 from a mega selling album of the same name released a year earlier. The album re-started the career of Tina Turner and she rode the wave for about 20 years after this. There are a few interesting facts about this song.
Firstly, it was written by Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits and was originally scheduled to be on their 1982 "Love over Gold" album, with the track being recorded without vocals. Mark then decided to leave the track off the album as he considered it would not sound right with male vocals!
Dire Straits recorded the Tina Turner version with her in 1984, bar Mark Knopfler, replaced by Jeff Beck. Knopfler has described the solo on this single as being one of the worst ever!
Tina had to change the line "American Express will do nicely, thank you" to "A few pounds sterling" for the BBC's Top of the Pops, due to a long-standing ban on the use of product names.
The album version is considerably longer than the single version, at over 7 minutes. This fits in much better with most of the songs on "Love over gold"so i imagine this is nearer Knopflers version.
The song reached number 7 on the billboard 100 but only made it to 26 in the UK.
Here's a great live version from NBC 20 years after the original, when Tina was 65. She has still got whatever it is that makes her such a special artist and I see she is planning to embark on another tour again later this year at age 68. Go Tina!!
Here's a version by Tina's number one fan, Donovan. Can you tell he has watched Tina a lot?!!
Totally unconnected to this song, but I had to include this concert footage of Tina inviting Donovan up on stage to dance along to "Proud Mary". It's a long one but a fantastic performance. Donovan is amazingly good and, apart from dear old Freddie Mercury, Tina must go down as being in the top few live performers - would love to have seen her!!
