7 hours ago
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In a world where august artists’ back catalogues have become big business, the music industry has become impressively adept at convincing people to shell out for yet another version of albums they already own. The deluxe edition has been supplanted by the super-deluxe edition. Once, albums were merely remastered to sound better, but now they’re entirely deconstructed then reassembled in surround sound, ultimate mixes, even – in the case of John Lennon’s Mind Games – as a beatless ambient aid to meditation.
Accordingly, you might have thought that the sessions for Tina Turner’s 1984 solo breakthrough Private Dancer had been thoroughly ransacked a decade ago, by a 30th anniversary edition that appended 15 extra B-sides, out-takes, live recordings and adjacent songs to the original album. But that would underestimate the indefatigability of record companies when it comes to parting fans from their cash. For Private Dancer’s slightly belated 40th anniversary – its first major anniversary since its author’s death in 2023 – the album is expanded to a mind-boggling five discs of material, the attention-grabbing jewel among which is a hitherto unknown track from the archives: Hot for You Baby. But unlike Face It Alone, the previously unreleased song appended to the similarly extensive “collector’s edition” of Queen’s penultimate album The Miracle in 2022, Hot for You Baby doesn’t seem to have been left unfinished and subsequently polished up.
The work of Australian duo Vanda and Young – former members of 60s rockers the Easybeats and new wave duo Flash and the Pan, authors of John Paul Young’s deathless 1977 hit Love Is in the Air and sometime producers of AC/DC – it has a more straightforward rock direction than anything that made it on to Private Dancer. Its closest equivalent on the album itself might be Steel Claw, which is similarly decorated with distorted guitars – but that song’s post-new wave chug sounds far more of its era than Hot for You Baby. Private Dancer achieved its aim of catapulting the down-on-her-luck Turner into the upper echelons of rock aristocracy, but it really isn’t impossible to imagine the heraldic chords that open Hot for You Baby emanating from a much scruffier figure, the Clash’s Mick Jones in the late 70s.
That said, absolutely nothing else about it recalls the Clash, as befits a song intended for an album that noticeably dialled down the experimental edge of Turner’s previous release (a cover of the Temptations’ Ball of Confusion that featured post-punk hero John McGeoch providing abstract, feedback-laden guitar). It’s glossy, clearly performed by crack session musicians and features a guitar solo that suggests someone was keeping an eye on current developments in the US hard rock scene as hair metal took flight, or had at least clocked Eddie Van Halen’s contribution to Michael Jackson’s Beat It.
Turner’s vocal is reliably fantastic: there’s an authentic rawness to it that makes everything else in earshot sound a little polite, widdly-woo metal solo or not. But it isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, a lost classic – and if you want to hear what Turner could really do with rock-adjacent material, you’d be far better served listening to the heavy guitar southern soul hybrid of 1972’s Upin Heah or 1974’s Sweet Rhode Island Red.
But it has definitely got a potency that would become noticeable by its absence on Turner’s subsequent albums: after Private Dancer’s success, gloss was trowelled on until gloss was all there was, which admittedly never stopped them selling millions. There’s no way a track such as Hot for You Baby would have made it on to 1996’s Wildest Dreams or 1999’s Twenty Four Seven. Then again, it didn’t make it on to Private Dancer either.
