Tina Turner: Live in Amsterdam

I grew up with Tina Turner's music and videos in the 1980s. I had no idea of her life before MTV. This concert is quite a spectacular all around. Her voice still soars like an angel. If you couldn't make the concert in Amsterdam, Holland, this DVD is the next best thing. Pay attention and watch the credits, she performs a finale song to the audience. The cast and the crew did a terrific job. Tina Turner is an American original icon, musical legend and performer. She can sing soulful like "Something Beautiful Remains" and "On Silent Wings," or she can rise with "The Best" and other of her classics. As Tina got older, she got better and stronger as a performer.

Powerful Tina music, just there is more to it than that.

The positive side is subjective, for me it gives the strongest and best performances of Giving It Up For Love and Better Be Good To Me that I have on disk. The down side, I prefer the mood of the Rio concert, its rough tough side is more about high energy music, this is mixed with bits of rough tough annoyed sort of stuff.

I note that the feature comes in a few durations, the DVD is 112 minutes, called USA in the IMDb page at July 2009, it is not the 120minute, European version. I do not know the difference between the versions, my guess is that it is likely to be about the gaps between songs, maybe the introduction too, though the 112 minute DVD does have a strong start, going straight into Whatever You Want.

From a net file of the play lists for the Wildest Dreams tour, the songs are from the third and final form of the set, which was used from September 1996 until the end of the tour. This concert being one of the first, maybe the first, to use this set. All of the concert's songs are on the DVD.

The concert is part of the promotion cum celebration for the Wildest Dreams CD and does not include all of the songs from the CD. It includes concert versions of seven songs, leaving out six. It misses out my favourite, Dancing In My Dreams, which in the two earlier play lists was the finale of the concert, the last of the encores. All of the tour concerts from the start of the tour to just before this recorded concert did include this song.

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The difficulty, for me, starts with song four, Missing You, which is re-interpreted in what I read as a rather angry way, someone is being missed and the memory of that one makes anger shine clear. The energy, that I do find to be incredible. There appears to be a vogue for 'Repay Her Doubled', a belief in vengeance, and as an underclass I have too much trouble from this to consider it to be worthwhile. For the many who consider such acts of RAGE to be the way then this could be an anthem. The CD version of the song is a polar opposite to this particular concert version, warm memories, nice. I personally would prefer this song jumped over when I play it. Or not listen to the words, just listen to the really amazing music. I do find it to be amazing as music.

On the path through the concert it is only song eleven, Undercover Agent For The Blues, where I again notice this theme as destructive. That is a hot song, except that as a long term underclass I consider the symptoms in the agent to be a typical product of popular forms of error correction, silent wings. The song treatment, to me it can occasionally feel fun despite that, but the visual treatment, how the film-maker interprets it, no. I would really prefer to play this with some of the visuals substituted by Mona The Vampire. Or not at all.

The last difficult part, for me, is near the end, what the DVD presents as the final song before the encore. On Silent Wings. The concert draws this out as a spiritual song, a belief in the spiritual, and the Making Of colours that with Sting and Gore Vidal. As an underclass I do not do so well by all sorts of spiritual. This is a song of its time, many will always have had faith such as this, me no. I personally would prefer this song jumped over when I play it. In the first play list this was performed just before Missing You and I can read that, the first half dozen songs maybe, as reflecting my qualms re that aspect of the spiritual.

So, the simplest solution with my particular qualms is skip songs / chapters 4, 11 and 20. These are all real quality as music, though, if meaning can be ignored.

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The DVD also has a 'making of', which lasts around 30 minutes. This talks about all of the songs on the Wildest Dreams CD, a massive plus for some fans, and ends with a video version of one of them. Whatever You Want. It starts by highlighting that the CD collection was started due to Tina's involvement with the 007 Goldeneye project. I can read the CD as a collection that was influenced by this start to become akin to a quiet pondering, the concert as taking that war theme to a Scary Movie level. The music video can say that prettily.

I had thought it strange, first times that I saw it. It seemed to be talking about the music in a rather different way to how I experience the concert. I first though that this was a case of performers preferring to perform, not liking to be too clear and up front about the realities of the music, not in descriptive words. I notice that sort of thing a lot in DVD commentaries.

Now I assume that the Making Of is comment on the CD versions and on the tour in general. The start of my difficulties with the concert, Missing You, is nothing like the CD or what Tina says about it. Different things.

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So, not a simple concert DVD, but very here and now and not glossing over everyday reality. I guess that I am likely to have preferred the earliest concerts of the tour. The first set included nine songs from the CD.