Endless Love-Part XIV

I remember her from the "Proud Mary" days. That's 1968 for you youngsters out there. Although Proud Mary would remain her signature hit, she would have to wait nearly 25 years for her biggest success.

What's Love Got to Do with It is the second single (after Let's Stay Together) released from Tina Turner's fifth solo album Private Dancer. In Europe it was the third single following Turner's cover of The Beatles' Help!. What's Love Got to Do with It became Turner's most successful single.

Turner had previously released two solo albums while still with her husband and musical partner, Ike Turner. She split from him in 1976 and divorced him in 1978. Following the divorce, she released two more solo albums, both of which failed on the charts. However, What's Love Got to Do with It, from her fifth solo album, reached the top five in both the US and UK. The music video was directed by Mark Robinson. The song ranked #309 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. It also ranked #38 on Songs of the Century. It was the 17th best-selling single of 1984 in the UK. The song was originally recorded by UK pop group Bucks Fizz, but unreleased until 2000. In 1993, the song's name was used as the title for What's Love Got to Do With It, a biographical film about Tina Turner's life.

Up until the release of What's Love Got to Do with It, Tina Turner had not had a top ten single since the early 1970s. The single went to #1 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and remained there for three weeks, becoming Turner's first and only solo number-one hit in America. It peaked at #3 on the UK singles chart. Tina Turner, along with then-husband Ike, first charted in the United States in 1960 with the single A Fool in Love. What's Love Got to Do with It went to number-one in the US on September 1, 1984, making it the longest span between an artist's first charted song and first number-one song (a difference of 24 years). Another notable fact is that Turner was 45-years-old when the song hit number one, making her the oldest solo female artist to place a number-one single on the US Hot 100. (Grace Slick, who is older than Turner by about one month, hit #1 in 1985 and 1987 with We Built This City and Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now, respectively, but she was not a solo act on those recordings but instead a member of Starship). In 1999, Cher at age 53 became the oldest solo female to have a US number-one hit when Believe hit the top position in America.

The song received three awards at the 1985 Grammy Awards. The music video for the song claimed a prize at the MTV Video Music Awards in 1985 for "Best Female Video". The song received the following awards at the 1985 Grammy Awards: Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.

Watch Tina Turner perform her number one hit.