Tina Turner: ‘Ike took me to sex show on wedding night’

Legendary American singer Tina Turner has described how she was forced to watch a live sex show on the night she married blues musician Ike Turner.

She told the Mail on Sunday the “experience was so disturbing… I suppressed it, scratched it out”.

Tina was 22 when she married Ike, and they went on to become a famous husband-and-wife R&B act.

But she later revealed she had suffered years of abuse at his hands. After they divorced she had a string of hits.

As a solo artist, Tina Turner has sold more than 200 million albums and singles worldwide.

Now aged 78, she lives in Switzerland, having married her long-time partner, music producer Edwin Bach, there in 2013.

Ike Turner died in 2007 at 76. He had struggled for many years with drug addiction.

Tina Turner told the Mail that she was afraid to turn down a marriage proposal in 1962 from Ike – who was seven years her senior, had discovered her and made her the singer of his Kings of Rhythm band.

There would be no fancy wedding though. Instead, he drove them from California across the Mexican border into Tijuana to find “the Mexican version of a justice of the peace”, she told the Mail.

But the day got worse and she described being miserable and close to tears throughout the sex show.

“People can’t imagine the kind of man he was – a man who takes his brand new wife to a live, pornographic sex show right after their marriage ceremony,” she said.

But she said she then presented an image of the happy young bride when they returned to Los Angeles.

As a musical duo, they had a string of hits throughout the 1960s until their split in 1976 and subsequent divorce two years later.

In her autobiography, I, Tina, in 1986, she revealed how he physically abused her throughout their marriage. He acknowledged some of it, saying in his own autobiography: “Sure I’ve slapped Tina. There have been times when I punched her to the ground without thinking. But I never beat her.”

Tina Turner’s life has been immortalised in the hit West End show Tina: The Musical.

source: BBC