Did You Know Tina Turner’s ‘Private Dancer’ Was Originally A Dire Straits Song?

Tina Turner’s debut album of original songs, Private Dancer, was a smashing success, one of the biggest albums of 1984, and one of the greatest comeback albums ever. I say it was her debut of original songs because she had released a solo album in 1974, Tina Turns The Country On, which was an album of country and folk covers, so that doesn’t count in my book.

What I didn’t know until recently is that the title song from the album, Private Dancer, is actually a Dire Straits song, and includes most of the band on the recording too.

Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits had recorded the song for their 1982 record Love Over Gold, which featured Telegraph Road and Industrial Disease. Some say Private Dancer even shares the same tune as the title song Love Over Gold. You can listen to both below and decide for yourself.

When Dire Straits was finished with the song Mark Knopfler listened back to it and decided that the lyrics didn’t fit a man singing the song, in his opinion, so the band never released the song. Mark’s manager knew Tina’s manager and thought it would fit Tina’s voice. She was originally going to just lay her vocals over the original Dire Straits recording, but legal issues stopped that from happening. So Tina got almost all of Dire Straits to re-record the music while she sang the words over essentially the same song, with one notable exception. Jeff Beck did the guitar solo in what Mark Knopfler once said ruined the song due to “them drafting in Jeff Beck to play the world’s second-ugliest guitar solo”. He’s not wrong.