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I saw Tina!, the fantastic Tina Turner jukebox bio musical, in Sydney over the weekend. It got me reflecting on the role Australia played in her long career.

I’m not thinking of the three obvious Tina/Australia connections, important though they are:

• Roger Davies, her Australian-born manager who helped guide her Private Dancer comeback and most of her subsequent triumphs;
• Her role as Aunty Entity in Aussie film classic Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome;
• Her lucrative promotional contract with the NRL – but hey, let’s throw in a video of that anyway. (This kicked off in 1989, so long ago that the competition was still called the Winfield Cup. Yuck.)

Instead, I’m thinking about how Australia was one of the key touring destinations for Tina during her commercial low point: the years between 1976, when she split with Ike Turner, and 1983, when ‘Let’s Stay Together’ reignited her solo career.

During this time, Tina’s income relied on performances in literally any venue that would book her. As she describes it in her second autobiography, 2019’s Tina Turner: My Love Story:

I had to work, and fortunately, I was able to convince [then manager] Mike Stewart to give me an advance to underwrite a proper act. [Tour manager Rhonda Graam] booked us in cabaret settings at hotels and casinos, venues that skewed a little older and tamer than I was used to, but I was thrilled to be back on stage with musicians and dancers.

One of the places where Tina often found herself on stage was Australia, where the “club circuit” was in full swing with what could very fairly be described as an “older and tamer” audience. ‘Nutbush City Limits’ had been a #14 hit in 1974, and ‘River Deep Mountain High’ charted in 1966.

Tina had toured Australia with Ike in early 1976, with performances in Sydney, Newcastle, Adelaide, Canberra, Melbourne and Launceston. The Brisbane show started 150 minutes late after one of the road crew was arrested in Stanthorpe on a drugs-related charge (per an AAP report sourced from, of all places, the Papua New Guinea Post-Courier on 21 January 1976). That kicked off a six-year period where Australia became one of Tina’s most dependable touring markets.

How were Tina Turner’s first Australian solo tours received?

In September 1977 Tina performed 7 dates in 5 states in mid-sized venues (think Festival Hall), presented by Paradine Paterson/ATA Promotions. In December 1979 she did a whopping 26 gigs at two clubs in Southern Sydney. She was back in 1980 for gigs in Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart. And in 1982 she returned for more club and pub dates across NSW and Victoria.

Initial promotion for the 1977 gigs highlighted that Tina was now a solo act. Here’s the Sydney Morning Herald from 4 Aug 1977, a month before her appearance:

A second Sydney show for 3 September 1977 was added in mid-August. An SMH report from 18 August notes that the support acts were confirmed as “Collision, featuring Dalvanius and the Fascinations”. (Nope, me either.)

Ike’s absence remained a focus when Tina gave a press conference on arrival in Australia, faithfully reported in the SMH on 1 September 1977.

“The sound of Ike’s guitar is missing now, but I couldn’t say the break is for the worst,” she told journalists. “I’ve been doing fine and I think I’ll continue to do fine.”

She was also seemingly fine with her raunchy reputation:

It has gotten through now that I am a sex symbol and I think that’s what people want to come and see. It helps me make a living, so I keep my thighs throbbing, or whatever.

But even at this point, she was eyeing off a film career and an easier life. “I don’t plan to keep doing this very long. I think my performances will always end as they do now, with a lot of energy. But I’m leaning more towards films, and once established, my performances will start out easier.”

Ahead of her first solo dates in in Melbourne, the Age ran an opinion piece on Tina’s solo prospects on 2 September 1977, under the headline ‘Typhoon Tina storms in alone’. It’s worth quoting at some length, since it sets the context for both her popularity and her (relative) lack of record sales down under:

Sunday night’s show here should be interesting. In Australia – perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, including the US – she is one of the most popular female entertainers.

In last year’s rock poll, for instance, (held through Australia’s national rock magazine RAM) she rated among the top five, right up there with Linda Ronstadt and Olivia Newton-John.

That result probably surprised a lot of people because she has never been heard a lot on radio and her peculiar, gritty brand of rock/soul/blues has never been particularly successful here.

The piece also noted that “opening night in Brisbane apparently went down
particularly bad, with parts of the crowd booing and shouting ‘rip-off””. Ouch.

Despite that, in 1979, Tina was back. The Sydney Morning Herald on 16 September 1979 reported that she would embark on an “all States tour of Australia in November”, with John St Peters as the support act.

Clearly the plan changed. By 28 October, the same paper noted that Tina was now booked for December 16, 17 and 18 at the Revesby Workers Club. On this tour, she never left New South Wales.

And the next week, advertisements for 2 weeks of shows from December 4-15 at St George Leagues Club appeared.

If you’re wondering, $8 for a ticket in 1979 would be equivalent to about $43 in 2022 (figures from the RBA inflation calculator).

Clearly the shows were popular. In his SMH ‘That’s Showbiz’ column for 18 November 1979, Don Groves interviewed Tina and reported that more than $50,000 in tickets had already been sold, with 18,000 people able to see Tina perform over the 20 shows at St George. (Revesby did not rate a mention; there was a rivalry between the two clubs, which were only a few kilometres apart.)

Tina reiterated that she wanted to break into movies, but said the roles she’d been offered so far hadn’t appealed.

Most were for hooker parts. I’m not opposed to those roles if they’re good and they have some meaning, but I don’t want to be seen just as that. I’m sure a role will come along that will enable me to prove myself, and that will open doors for me. I’ve already broken the ice on stage by doing some ballads. People realise now that I have some talents other than screaming and dancing.

Tina arrived for the tour on 3 December, a day before the shows started. While a press conference had originally been planned for 4 December, the SMH reported that it had been cancelled because Tina “does not usually get up until 3pm”. With two shows a night, she clearly needed to preserve her energy.

The SMH‘s Don Groves gave the show a rave review in the 9 December 1979 paper:

Tina was back in 1980 for another St George/Revesby season, plus some additional dates, this time with four dancers and five musicians in tow (including her younger son Ronnie). The Herald reported new dates at St George Leagues Club on 23 October 1980, making the very improbable claim that Tina was “still missing Ike”.

Tina arrived in Sydney on Friday 14 November 1980, and then headed to Hobart for four dates at the Wrest Point Casino and the same number in Melbourne. The Age briefly previewed those dates on 21 November:

Sydney still got the largest number of shows, with Tina performing two shows a night over 10 dates at St George, plus an additional four dates with double shows at Revesby on her nights off from St George. For 14 straight days she did two shows a night.

Tina explained her motivation in an interview with Stuart Coupe for the Sydney Morning Herald on 7 December 1980.

“”Well I find the contracts so I just do it,” she said matter-of-factly. “Sometimes I’m really exhausted. After about five nights I know it’s time for a night off because my body starts really screaming and yelling.”

Tina’s 1980 visit to Sydney was also marked by a number of celebrity guest appearances. She appeared on stage at an Elton John gig, and then Bette Midler popped up for guest vocals at one of her shows. Remarkably, Sydney was the first place they met, as Tina explained:

Bette’s been a fan, as she says, for many years and says that I inspired her career and her to even start singing. We’ve always been running around in circles and she’s been at one end of the world when I’ve been at the other. People say, ‘Bette would love to meet you, she loves you’ and I went to see Elton and someone said that Bette was giving a birthday party so we went along and I met her. At the show the other night I literally dragged her on stage. She wanted to but she was a bit afraid because she never does that sort of thing.

Speaking of famous folks, it seems a safe bet that it was during this 1980 visit that Tina and her team became familiar with John Farnham’s slowed-down arrangement of the Beatles’ classic single ‘Help’, which had been a hit for him in Australia earlier in the year. Tina’s own 1984 recording, included on Private Dancer outside the US, echoes that arrangement closely.

Tina’s final Australian tour in those lean years took place in 1982, taking her back to her familiar haunts of St George and Revesby, plus a handful of venues in Melbourne.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this trip was her appearance on the 18 July 1982 episode of top-rating pop TV show Countdown.

First up, Tina did a performance of ‘Nutbush City Limits’, a song which was then eight years old. Countdown generally insisted that artists perform current tracks, but in this case an exception seems to have been made.

Disappointingly, despite the fact that the ‘Nutbush group dance’ had already become established in Australia at this point, the choreography wasn’t reproduced.

Tina came closer to contemporary with her other appearance on the same episode. She performed the Temptations cover ‘Ball Of Confusion’, the first track she ever worked on with the British Electric Foundation, who would go on to produce the all-important ‘Let’s Stay Together’ the following year. The BEF album Music Of Quality And Distinction had been released in Australia in May 1982.

However, Tina missed the chance to perform a song with a clearer Australian connection. In 1982, she recorded two songs for the soundtrack of romcom Summer Lovers. One was a cover of Robert Palmer’s fantastic 1980 track ‘Johnny And Mary’.

The other was ‘Crazy In The Night’, a cover of a much-more-obscure 1981 single by Australian group The Sherbs – who remain much better known by their original name of Sherbet (yep, the ‘Howzat’ guys with Daryl Braithwaite). ‘Crazy In The Night’ had been released as a single in March 1981, but didn’t chart.

Tina regularly performed the song in concert, and it shows up on her 1982 video Nice ‘N’ Rough. Alas, it didn’t show up on Countdown. To be fair, the film itself didn’t open in Australia until December 1982.

Tina was doing the song on tour though, as Sounds host Donnie Sutherland confirmed in his newspaper column on 20 June 1982:

Tina also popped up on The Don Lane Show on 14 June 1982, but no clip seems to have surfaced so far.

How much money did Tina Turner make from these Australian dates?

At first glance, you might think Tina’s pattern of tour dates suggests a steady decline, with the 1977 tour in larger venues while the 1979 and 1982 stints were club dates. But those club concerts were potentially very big business.

A Sydney Morning Herald article from 14 March 1981 profiling Henry Hess, the entertainments manager at Revesby Workers Club, gives an insight:

This year’s biggest hit was probably Tina Turner. A talent like that could cost the clubs $30,000 for a weekend’s contract. This includes payments to supporting acts and musicians,

Other sources give similar figures. In his official history of the Revesby Workers Club, True To Our Traditions, author Gary Lester says Tina was paid $10,000 per show for each of her 6 gigs in 1979.

I, Tina notes that by 1979, Tina owed around US$200,000 to Mike Stewart from bankrolling her tours, and a similar amount to the IRS. $260,000 from those 1979 Sydney gigs (based on the lower Revesby figure and 26 separate shows) would have helped put a big dent in that debt, even after paying for the band and dancers.

By 1982, the SMH was reporting that six shows at Revesby had cost Henry Hess $80,000. No wonder Tina left a note for Henry Hess reading “To Henry, love always”.

Tina Turner’s Australia-only singles

Notably, even after Tina lost her recording contract with United Artists in 1978, she still had a deal down under. As her first autobiography, 1986’s I, Tina noted:

EMI, convinced that local fans would always buy her records, decided to keep Tina under contract for the British market. Festival Records in Australia maintained a similar commitment.

That arrangement meant some Tina singles appeared in Australia but nowhere else, including ‘Under My Thumb’ in 1977 and ‘Love Explosion’ in 1979. The motivation for those releases, fairly clearly, was the touring she was doing at the time.

However, the most notable Australian disc of this period was ‘Are You Breaking My Heart?’, a non-album track that was only ever a single in Australia and New Zealand. Tina even performed it on Countdown on 23 November 1980. (The show was filmed in Melbourne and this coincided with Tina’s 1980 tour dates to the city. The same goes for her 1982 appearance.)

Even that prime time slot didn’t help to push it onto the charts. A genuine rarity, copies trade hands for hundreds of dollars on Discogs.

(Harking back to the earlier Sherbs mention: Sherbs also appeared on the same episode of Countdown, though not with ‘Crazy In The Night’.)

Tina Turner Australia tour dates 1977-1982: Full list

These are the key dates when we know Tina was performing in Australia between 1977 and 1982. The 1977 and 1982 dates are largely drawn from the Australian Concert Tour Database.

For 1979 and 1980 I’ve compiled the information directly from contemporary newspaper advertisements and reporting (the Database has many incorrect dates for 1979 and doesn’t list 1980 at all). For Melbourne 1980 the dates represent an educated guess – they could potentially fall at any point between 23 November and the end of the month.

I’ve also added missing dates using newspaper sources for the 1982 tour. Given the gaps, it’s quite possible that there were additional dates on this tour.

• Thu 1 September 1977: Civic Theatre, Newcastle, New South Wales
• Fri 2 September 1977: Hordern Pavilion, Moore Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Sat 3 September 1977: Hordern Pavilion, Moore Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Sun 4 September 1977: Festival Hall, West Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria
• Wed 7 September 1977: Apollo Stadium, Richmond, Adelaide, South Australia
• Sat 10 September 1977: Perth Entertainment Centre, Perth, Western Australia
• Tue 4 December 1979: St George Leagues Club, Beverley Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Wed 5 December 1979: St George Leagues Club, Beverley Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Thu 6 December 1979: St George Leagues Club, Beverley Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Fri 7 December 1979: St George Leagues Club, Beverley Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Sat 8 December 1979: St George Leagues Club, Beverley Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Tue 11 December 1979: St George Leagues Club, Beverley Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Wed 12 December 1979: St George Leagues Club, Beverley Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Thu 13 December 1979: St George Leagues Club, Beverley Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Fri 14 December 1979: St George Leagues Club, Beverley Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Sat 15 December 1979: St George Leagues Club, Beverley Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Sun 16 December 1979: Revesby Workers Club, Revesby, Sydney, New South Wales
• Mon 17 December 1979: Revesby Workers Club, Revesby, Sydney, New South Wales
• Tue 18 December 1979: Revesby Workers Club, Revesby, Sydney, New South Wales
• Mon 17 November 1980: Wrest Point Casino, Hobart, Tasmania
• Tue 18 November 1980: Wrest Point Casino, Hobart, Tasmania
• Wed 19 November 1980: Wrest Point Casino, Hobart, Tasmania
• Thu 20 November 1980: Wrest Point Casino, Hobart, Tasmania
• Sun 23 November 1980: Billboard, Melbourne, Victoria
• Mon 24 November 1980: Billboard, Melbourne, Victoria
• Tue 25 November 1980: Billboard, Melbourne, Victoria
• Wed 26 November 1980: Billboard, Melbourne, Victoria
• Tue 2 December 1980: St George Leagues Club, Beverley Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Wed 3 December 1980: St George Leagues Club, Beverley Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Thu 4 December 1980: St George Leagues Club, Beverley Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Fri 5 December 1980: St George Leagues Club, Beverley Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Sat 6 December 1980: St George Leagues Club, Beverley Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Sun 7 December 1980: Revesby Workers Club, Revesby, Sydney, New South Wales
• Mon 8 December 1980: Revesby Workers Club, Revesby, Sydney, New South Wales
• Tue 9 December 1980: St George Leagues Club, Beverley Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Wed 10 December 1980: St George Leagues Club, Beverley Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Thu 11 December 1980: St George Leagues Club, Beverley Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Fri 12 December 1980: St George Leagues Club, Beverley Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Sat 13 December 1980: St George Leagues Club, Beverley Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Sun 14 December 1980: Revesby Workers Club, Revesby, Sydney, New South Wales
• Mon 15 December 1980: Revesby Workers Club, Revesby, Sydney, New South Wales
• Thu 17 June 1982: St George Leagues Club, Beverley Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Fri 18 June 1982: St George Leagues Club, Beverley Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Sat 19 June 1982: St George Leagues Club, Beverley Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Sun 20 June 1982: Parramatta Leagues Club, Parramatta, Sydney, New South Wales
• Tue 29 June 1982: Penrith Leagues Club, Penrith, Sydney, New South Wales
• Thu 1 July 1982: St George Leagues Club, Beverley Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Fri 2 July 1982: St George Leagues Club, Beverley Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Sat 3 July 1982: St George Leagues Club, Beverley Park, Sydney, New South Wales
• Fri 9 July 1982: Revesby Workers Club, Revesby, Sydney, New South Wales
• Sat 10 July 1982: Revesby Workers Club, Revesby, Sydney, New South Wales
• Sun 11 July 1982: Revesby Workers Club, Revesby, Sydney, New South Wales
• Tue 13 July 1982: Astrodome, Traralgon, Victoria
• Wed 14 July 1982: Billboard, Melbourne, Victoria
• Thu 15 July 1982: Collendina Hotel, Ocean Grove, Victoria
• Fri 16 July 1982: The Venue, St Kilda, Melbourne, Victoria
• Sat 17 July 1982: Waltzing Matilda Hotel, Springvale, Melbourne, Victoria
• Sun 18 July 1982: Dorset Gardens Hotel, Croydon, Melbourne, Victoria

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