What’s Love Got To Do With It: Behind Tina Turner’s Universally Adored Anthem

Who sang the original What’s Love Got To Do With It?

Before Tina Turner recorded What’s Love Got To Do With It, the British group Bucks Fizz were offered the song. Unlike Cliff Richard, they did not reject it. It had been three years since their 1981 triumph at the Eurovision Song Contest, with Making Your Mind Up, and though Bucks Fizz had built a strong pop career from this initial success, the group were increasingly interested in recoding rockier material.

“I heard a very early demo of it,” Jay Aston, of Bucks Fizz, said in 2022. “I thought, Wow, what a great song.” Aston and Cheryl Baker, Bucks Fizz’s two female singers, wanted to sing it, but they were sidelined in favour of Bobby G when it came to recording; their producer told them “it’s obviously a male vocal”, an irritated Baker later recalled. But the Bucks Fizz version wasn’t released at the time because someone else had beaten them to it. And she was obviously not a male vocalist.

What did Tina Turner think of What’s Love Got To Do With It?

When Tina Turner first heard What’s Love Got To Do With It, her reaction was not positive. She felt that that it was “a pop song”, which wasn’t the direction she was aiming for. Yet Turner’s manager, Roger Davies, thought differently: he knew his client was perfect for it. The songwriters listened to Turner’s concerns, made some changes (including putting the song in a different key) and a compromise was reached. Turner was on board.

Britten, who also produced the song for Turner, worked with her in the studio to capture the perfect vocal performance. Two microphones were set up at different distances from Turner, giving her vocals both an intimacy and a sense of space; she was able to whisper and shout, imbuing the song with exactly what it needed at different times.

What is the meaning of What’s Love Got To Do With It?

As titled, What’s Love Got To Do With It doesn’t have a question mark at the end. It’s a statement rather than a question, its narrator not expecting an answer; she is content with the world view expressed in the song. Its lyrics denigrate love as a “second-hand emotion”, with physical sensation prioritised over romance.

This wasn’t an autobiographical sentiment. Tina Turner appeared on CBS News in 1984 to promote her single, and the interviewer put it to her that the song was about “a distrust of love, a distrust of emotion”. Turner can barely keep her face straight when she’s asked, “Does that at all reflect how you feel about it?”

“No,” she says immediately. “In my case, love has a lot to do with it. I’m sorry!”

Turner went on to explain that, although the song didn’t reflect her own attitude, she knew that others would relate to it. She said that women and men had changed a lot, and What’s Love Got To Do With It was particularly popular with “liberated girls” who would say to her, “Yeah, that’s right, Tina! What does love have to do with it, anyway?”

When did What’s Love Got To Do With It come out?

What’s Love Got To Do With It was the third UK single from Turner’s Private Dancer album. It was released in May 1984 and reached No.3 on the singles chart. “During the period when I didn’t have a record,” Turner told Terry Wogan in 1985, “all my British fans supported me.” She has always had an affinity with British musicians, including The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Rod Stewart and – into the 80s – Heaven 17’s Martyn Ware, who produced Turner’s 1983 cover of Let’s Stay Together.

In the US, What’s Love Got To Do With It was an even bigger success, becoming Turner’s first No.1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It sold in excess of two million copies worldwide and firmly established Turner as one of the key rock artists of the 80s.

As well as chart success, the song was awarded three Grammys (for Song Of The Year, Record Of The Year and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance). Its classic video also picked up a gong at the 1985 MTV Video Music Awards.

Why was the Tina Turner biopic called ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It’?

In 1993, a film of Tina Turner’s life was made. Also called What’s Love Got To Do With It, it was based on Turner’s 1986 autobiography, I, Tina – a book that detailed the star’s abusive marriage to her first husband, Ike Turner. The title seemed to perfectly evoke the absence of love in an abusive marriage, and worked in the film’s context, even if the song didn’t originally speak to this theme.

One of the movie’s lasting legacies was its soundtrack album>, also called What’s Love Got To Do With It. While many of the tracks on this collection were re-recordings of Ike and Tina Turner songs, allowing Turner to reclaim her own voice away from Ike’s control, What’s Love Got To Do With It appears in its original 1984 recording. This is understandable, as it was already associated with Turner’s liberty and rebirth – and her worldwide fame.

In 1984, What’s Love Got To Do With It was Tina Turner’s new horizon. It firmly established her as a rock star, and a modern force to be reckoned with. Rock music, to her, was “fun stuff and naughty stuff and the things that make you laugh or play around”, as she said in 1986. “That’s what I want to sing about.” She would build on this success throughout the decade, and leave the past firmly behind.

Buy the 40th-anniversary box-set edition of ‘Private Dancer’.