Heaven 17 have been talking about their part in reviving Tina Turner’s career in the early 1980s, when they produced her version of Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together, the first single from her Private Dancer album.
In a new interview with The Telegraph, Glenn Gregory remembers performing the track on stage with Turner for Channel Four’s The Tube in November 1983. The performance alone played a crucial role in the song becoming a hit at the end of that year.
“I don’t really get nervous going on stage,” the Heaven 17 singer says. “But at The Tube, I was honestly shaking. She was in that kind of cavewoman outfit, doing her dance with a big wig and the two (backing dancers) going at it. I’m like: ‘This is really not me.’”
“Oh, it’s a spectacular performance,” his bandmate Martyn Ware concurs. “(Turner) came into the dressing room half an hour before the live performance and says to me: ‘Martyn, when we get to the middle eight, I’m gonna have my dancers run their hands up and down you and Glenn’s legs.’ I’m going: ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea – we don’t want any embarrassment on live television, do we?’ We were terrified.”
Let’s Stay Together came about through Heaven 17’s prior project, Songs Of Quality And Distinction. Years ahead of its time, this was a covers album in which Ware, Gregory and their colleague Ian Craig Marsh were essentially a production team, acting in the same way the likes of Massive Attack and Leftfield later would in the 1990s.
The album’s cast of guest singers was a motley crew that included Billy Mackenzie of the Associates, Paula Yates and a pre-fall Gary Glitter, but its star was undoubtedly Turner who sang a version of the Temptations’ Ball Of Confusion.
Turner only joined the project due to a chance meeting at Virgin Records on Portobello Road, after the group’s first choice to sing the track, James Brown, fell through. Ware explained to Super Deluxe Edition in 2014: “I was just hanging out there and feeling quite sorry for myself and trying to think, ‘oh my God, I just need to do this one track just to finish it and who can we get to sing it?’
"As it turned out, Ken Berry, who was the financial controller of Virgin Records at the time, happened to walk past and he said, ‘I’m going out to LA on Sunday, what do you think about Tina Turner, she’s a mate of mine’. I went, ‘yeah’.”
Turner said yes, met Ware and Gregory and got on and came over to EMI studios to record the track. Ware: “The classic story is – which I have told many times – is her and Roger Davies (Turner’s manager) turned up to the studio and said, ‘where’s the band?’ because she is used to recording with band, and we pointed at the Fairlight and said, ‘well here it is’. And they just stood with their mouths open.”
Ball of Confusion proved that Turner could still be a current artist. She signed to Capitol the following year and when her first album for the label was being A&Red, Heaven 17 were asked if they would write a song.
“To be honest, we were a bit confused as to… I mean, we’re not really soul writers,” remembers Ware. “Whereas we love soul music and we grew up with it, so I turned around to them and said ‘no, but I would really like to do as we did with Ball Of Confusion.’
"I thought it was very successful (so I said) ‘I would really like to do a cover version for that album’. They said, ‘Can you come up with a shortlist of potential songs’ which I wish I still had, actually, because there’s some really good songs on it, but the one that I really wanted to do was Let’s Stay Together.”
“The way I explained it to her was that she needed to embed herself into the public perception as being one of the great soul singers of all time. She kind of turned her back on it quite a lot because she wanted to be a rock singer, essentially. She didn’t make any bones about it.
"You can’t alter the fact that you are born with this God-given talent. I said, ‘I think it’s a good idea to do a reinterpretation of a soul record in a new way’. I asked what her influences were when she was coming into the business and she was saying Sam Cooke, basically and Otis Redding and some gospel as well.
"I thought we could really make this work. She immediately latched onto Let’s Stay Together and said, ‘I love this song’.”
![Tina Turner - Lets Stay Together (Official Music Video) [HD Upgrade] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/4rFB4nj_GRc/maxresdefault.jpg)
With Greg Walsh in the producer’s chair alongside Ware, the group decided to do create a synth/soul hybrid. “We wanted to use the programmed drums because we that was the way we worked at the time,” says Ware.
There was also that memorable opening – a sustained ‘frozen’ chord. “It is actually a piece of equipment called a Quantec Room Simulator which has a thing called a freeze function on it, which of course is quite well known now, but in those days it was the first machine that could do it.”
“So you would take a reverb of a complex chord, for instance, press freeze and it would keep all that in its memory, so you play things into it and it would just create this kind of cloud of sound, which is the opening and I think sets the scene.”
Meanwhile, Turner cut her vocal in a single take. Ware later told the Guardian of the recording: “The only way I can describe those experiences is that it was like hearing a record you already knew well being made – she was that good. You just knew, oh, we’ve created something here that will live for ever. That’s never happened again in my life.”
Released in November 1983 and boosted by The Tube performance, Let’s Stay Together entered the UK chart, peaking at Number Six over Christmas. It was the key to her comeback.
The rest of the Private Dancer album was recorded in the New Year, in London with a diverse cast of British talent in writing and production roles, including Terry Britten, John Carter and Mark Knopfler who, feeling that it didn’t suit Dire Straits, gifted Turner the title track.
Private Dancer went on to become one of the biggest albums of the 80s, shifting over 16 million copies, and Turner became a mainstream solo star. She would team up again with Heaven 17 on a further Music Of Quality and Distinction album in 1991 and Ware himself has nothing but fond memories of working with the singer.
“I just thought she was a complete… if there was such a thing as a gentlewoman, as opposed to a gentleman; she was that,” he told Super Deluxe Edition.
“A very decent, honest, open, incredibly talented person. I suppose the most magical thing was the first take of her singing Let’s Stay Together.”
“I often say, particularly to young singers, I tell them this story and say ‘don’t assume that you can just turn up in a recording studio and everything that comes out of your mouth is going to sound great’.
"It’s like doing revision for an exam really. She had nailed her interpretation of that song before she came to the studio. So, therefore, all she had to do was relax and then sing it.”
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