The Australian tours she undertook in those years were not glamorous events. They were working gigs in a market that could support her while the American market’s interest was dormant. She performed at clubs and medium-sized venues, doing the work of a professional entertainer who understood that the business of performing was the business of showing up and delivering.
What Australia gave her, practically, was continuity. The years between 1978 and 1983 were not years of inactivity; they were years of work in whatever markets would have her. The Australian audience maintained a relationship with Tina Turner as a performing artist during the years when that relationship was harder to maintain in the United States. When the American comeback happened, the Australian audience simply continued what they’d already been doing.
Davies’s understanding of this dynamic was part of his overall assessment: Tina Turner had not stopped being good. The market had stopped looking. The job was to make it look again.
The cabaret circuit she played in the late 1970s and early 1980s was, in the short term, commercially limited. But it kept her in front of live audiences, kept the skills current, and generated the performance continuity that meant that when she eventually found herself in a London studio with a deadline and a song that didn’t immediately feel right, the ability to inhabit it quickly and fully was there because it had been exercised continuously for years.
A performer who had been inactive for five years doesn’t find their footing in the studio in a matter of sessions. A performer who has been on stage constantly, who has been delivering night after night in environments that ranged from enthusiastic to indifferent, carries a kind of readiness that can be pointed at whatever material arrives. Tina Turner in 1983 was not coming back from inactivity. She was coming back from sustained work in smaller contexts. The Private Dancer sessions were, in some sense, the payoff for years of work that the American recording industry had declined to notice.