A redemption song, conventionally sung: Sky’s Tina reviewed

It has never been easy for women in the music industry. Once upon a time the evidence was largely anecdotal. Now it’s being recorded for posterity, frame by frame. Recent documentaries about Britney Spears and Demi Lovato exposed the trauma inflicted on post-millennial pop stars. Two new portraits of Anna Mae Bullock and Marianne Elliott-Said, better known as Tina Turner and Poly Styrene from punk group X-Ray Spex, ponder the price paid by their forebears.

Turner’s story feels archetypal, a tale extracted from deep within the DNA of showbusiness. An abandoned child — ‘my mother didn’t like me’ — from a poor Tennessee background, the opportunity to fulfil her gifts came with the classic caveat: subjugation by an older, controlling man. Rock’n’roll pioneer Ike Turner romanced her while she was still at school. Furs on Saturday night, church on Sunday morning, arithmetic on Monday afternoon. So it goes.

She rose to fame in the late 1960s in the Ike & Tina Turner Revue, the lit fuse at the centre of a powder keg of supercharged R&B.