30th Anniversary: Let’s Stay Together enters UK charts

“In late 1983, Tina Turner and Roger Davies went back to Marty Ware and Greg Walsh from Heaven 17 who produced earlier that year Tina’s cover of “Ball of Confusion”. They were looking for some material for an upcoming European tour and maybe even a tune for a single. Time was tight and they were going to have to go with a cover tune. Ware kept bringing R&B tunes, Tina kept pushing for Rock. Finally the artist and her producers settled on a reworking of the Al Green’s masterpiece “Let’s Stay Together”…”

Celebrating the 30th anniversary of  “Let’s Stay Together”, which marks Tina Turner returns in the music business and the first impulse to the (then) upcoming Private Dancer album. Including rare audios and video.

“In late 1983, Tina Turner and Roger Davies went back to Marty Ware and Greg Walsh from Heaven 17 who produced earlier that year Tina’s cover of “Ball of Confusion”. They were looking for some material for an upcoming European tour and maybe even a tune for a single. Time was tight and they were going to have to go with a cover tune. Ware kept bringing R&B tunes, Tina kept pushing for Rock. Finally the artist and her producers settled on a reworking of the Al Green’s masterpiece “Let’s Stay Together”Ware was thrilled at the performance they got; as had been the case during “Ball of Confusion”, Ware and Walsh found Tina to be a consummate professional, a whole different class of performer. The vocal track, something that could have required umpteen takes and endless mixing-board doctoring afterward, took only two takes in the studio. Ware, Walsh, and Turner did it a few more times just to be sure, but the “X” factor had already been corralled. A soul tune done with a rock singer and synth band, and it turned out to be also a masterpiece”

Tina Turner “Let’s Stay Together” Live Playlist from 1983 to 2009.

“Let’s Stay Together” done in both 7″ and 12″ versions, was first released in England. It was, in Tina’s typical understatement, “a surprise hit”. The United Kingdom went bananas- Tina received a Silver Disc award there for sales in excess of a quarter million. And as Tina went ahead with her European dates (suddenly twice the event because of her hit single), the record snuck over to the dance clubs in the United States as an import. It wasn’t even going to be released there at first, but the sales of the import and the reactions in the influential clubs changed some minds.

When it hit Tina Turner’s homeland, it hit pretty bad. It became a number 1 dance chart record and a resident of the R&B Top 5, eventually selling more than one million copies all over the world.
Here, one of the first tv performance of Let’s Stay Together. From “The Tube” but this is an retake with Tina wearing a black skirt but still with “Marty & Greg” as backup singers!

More about Let’s Stay Together on “The World of Tina”