Tina and Ike Turner perform on stage in 1966. Photograph: AP
There can be few performers who epitomise the uneasy rapport between art and artist quite like Ike Turner.
As a musician, his influence was nothing short of cataclysmic. He lays fair claim to being the driving force behind the first ever rock'n'roll record, Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cat's Rocket 88. Through the 1950s, as a recording scout and A&R man, he was instrumental in getting the likes of Howlin' Wolf and Elmore James signed, while participating in landmark recording sessions with B.B. King, Bobby Bland and Otis Rush. With Tina Turner, he forged a blueprint for the classic R&B duo. Together, they went on to become one of the most innovative and popular soul acts of the 1960s, unleashing that decade's most explosive pop single, River Deep Mountain High.
That he was some kind of musical genius is not up for debate. Also beyond question is that, as a man, he was grotesquely flawed.
As someone who married no less than 14 times, Ike Turner was no stranger to making mistakes. But, right up to his death yesterday, he always maintained that his biggest error of judgment was to hand the makers of the 1993 film What's Love Got To Do With It? unconditional authority to portray him as they wanted. In the movie, he is depicted as a drug-crazed control freak who used women (wives, mistresses and back-up singers) as slaves and regular punch-bags. Turner was hardly the first musician to be accused of behaving appallingly. But the evidence against him was particularly damning, proving ruinous to his career and his reputation.
So which Ike Turner should we be remembering today? The visionary architect of rock'n'roll or the demonic misogynist? Or do we simply abandon the attempt to distinguish between the music and the man and find some meaning in the lines spoken by Marlene Dietrich at the end of Touch Of Evil. As her fortune-telling madam says about Orson Welles' seedy but compellingly human Hank Quinlan, "He was some kind of man ... what does it matter what you say about people?"
· Read Ike Turner's obituary here.
