Photo: AP Photo/Chris Pizzello
One of the biggest stars of rock and roll passed away at the age of 84, and on Wednesday, when I learned of her death, the moment from 2006 when I met her in a Zurich restaurant and addressed her two most important sentences just crossed my mind
For more than half a century, she has been glowing and setting fire to the world rock scene. She sold 200 million albums. She won 12 Grammy Awards, and in 1988 she performed at the Brazilian "Maracana" in front of 180.000 people.
Tina Turner passed away peacefully and quietly on Wednesday, May 24th at the age of 84, after a long illness and surrounded by the people she loved the most. First of all, with the support and love of Swiss Erwin Bach. If anyone deserved love and a beautiful life, it was Tina, who climbed to the throne of the queen of rock and roll harder than anyone else in the history of modern music.
That's why her death hit me. More than some others. The last time I felt this empty and sad was when he left David Bowie. There is no need to play her songs in the following days and watch the movies "What's love got to do with it" or the documentary "Tina". Whoever loved Tina knows everything about her and does not need reminders or the worst reason to listen to her again.
Scout
I met Tina Turner way back in 2006 when I was in Switzerland as a sports journalist at the preparations of the Brazilian national team in the village of Vegis. OK, I was delighted with Kaka, Ronaldinho, Roberto Carlos, Dido and Žuninja, who wouldn't be, but the information that I would be in Zurich for a few days and that Tina Turner and her husband lived there, in the town of Kisnacht, did not give me peace.
I managed to have a few words with the biggest stars of "carioca" in Vegis, Kaka even greeted the readers of the media I worked for (which delighted me of course) but I was thinking of Tina all the time.
I knew that it was an impossible mission to do an interview with her, but I knew that she was somewhere-in-Zurich and that I only had to inquire about the best place to approach her. Experienced older colleagues taught me a long time ago that a good journalist is one who never gives up and who will do everything, without violating ethical principles, to reach an interlocutor who is worth talking to.
And I wanted to meet her, shake her hand, thank her for a nice upbringing in elementary school with the monumental album "Private Dancer" and ask a question or two, so where did it go?
Returning to Zurich from Vegis, I received information that on Fridays and Saturdays he goes to one of the two famous Italian restaurants with his wife. Even then it was clear that she was no longer interested in tours and that she was leading a secluded life. What Switzerland is ideal for. No one is hanging around your neck, the paparazzi don't touch you, the people are discreet and considerate to the point of God.
I went first to one, and then, seeing that she was not there, to another restaurant. "Neue Forch" is called, and still is, one of the most acclaimed restaurants when you leave Bellevue inland. I was in the company of people who had long been used to my radar scans of famous people when I'm in a public place, and they sharpened their senses in the meantime and were the first to notice - Tina.
One of us
She was sitting with her husband and another friend. Realistically, who could not notice her with her recognizable styling and deep, strong, "smoky" voice.
I approached the head of the restaurant first, asking him how to address her. That's how it goes there. At first he told me not to do it, but when I explained why this was a "once in a lifetime" opportunity for me, he walked over to her and pointed at me. She invited me to come over.
I was asked not to take her photo or ask for her autograph, but to be able to shake her hand and ask a polite question. All kinds of things went through my head then, but I just said "Thank you for everything" and "Do you know how big an army of fans you still have in Serbia?".
Husband Erwin smiled at this, raised a glass of wine to toast the fans, while she said that the love of her fans will always come first in her life. We exchanged a few formal sentences and I left them alone to enjoy their dinner.
And in this example, and I have had many of them in the last twenty years, I became convinced of the well-known paradox that the bigger the interlocutor is a world star, the more normal the person is.
Although she lived for years on a 5.000 square meter property named "Algonquin" after her Native American grandmother and despite the large sums of money at her disposal, Tina was and remains one of us. Normal.
Three years after I met the queen of rock and roll, she gave her last concert in Sheffield.
"That's it." The end. There's no way I'm going back after this," Tina told everyone around her in Sheffield and she kept her word.
"I want to be at home, surrounded by the people I love and live normally," she added. That's exactly what she did until her death.
Tina Turner. Simply the best.
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