“It was midnight, backstage at some pop awards. I'd had a few glasses of wine, so I was feeling a little gregarious. A gentleman said to me, "Are you Duncan? I'm Roger, Tina Turner's manager. I just wondered if you have any ideas on how we could photograph Tina in a different way?"
I jokingly said, "Would you like some really different pictures that would be published all over the world? Let me come to Tina's hotel at 7 a.m. I will wake her up and I will photograph 'a day in her life' from dawn to dusk, and I will shoot it for free."
He laughed and said he didn't think that was going to happen.
Two days later, Tina Turner's publicist, Bernard, rang me on Sunday afternoon and said, "Tina likes your nutty idea to photograph a day in her life, so what are you doing tomorrow?"
The next day, I was having breakfast with Tina, and we then flew to Paris on her jet.
It was all so surreal, and there we were, just a few hours later in Paris at the 5-star Ritz hotel. At lunchtime, Tina said, "Fancy a trendy snack? Let's go to a patisserie!" And there I was, walking the streets of Paris with Tina, and she bought French baguettes and some cheese, and then we went shopping for clothes.
Back at the hotel, I asked her to dance around the room - and there she was, running around the room trying on different outfits with me running backwards and falling onto a sofa.
We then jumped into her limo to rehearsals for her latest album, ‘Wildest Dreams’. As Tina was belting out a song, I could see a set of portraits - so I used a long 400mm telephoto lens to knock out the background.
Because I was using a fast black-and-white film in very low light, these portraits have a very grainy effect, which gives these pictures that extra gritty rawness that captures the energy of the fabulous Tina Turner.”
-Duncan Raban