Tina Turner – Whatever You Want

Tina Turner opened her 1996 comeback with the most expensive-sounding record Trevor Horn had made in years

By 1996, Tina Turner had nothing left to prove and made a record that sounded like it anyway. Whatever You Want — the lead European single from her ninth solo album, Wildest Dreams — arrived draped in one of the lushest, most elaborate productions of Trevor Horn’s career, a wall of orchestration and studio craft built around a voice that had already outlasted three decades of pop. The Guardian called it epic and named it Horn’s finest, most expensive-sounding work in years. Turner made it the opening number of her world tour.

Keep watching: More Tina Turner on MVC

The song came from an unlikely trio of writers: producer-remixer Arthur Baker, keyboardist Fred Zarr, and the pop singer Taylor Dayne, who had scored her own run of late-1980s hits. What they handed Turner was a straightforward song about devotion — plainspoken, direct, unafraid of its own sincerity — and Trevor Horn treated it like a blockbuster. Horn had spent the 1980s building some of the decade’s most ambitious productions, and here he poured that same maximalism into a single meant to announce that Tina Turner, at 56, was still operating at the top of the game.

It was part of a deliberately grand album. Wildest Dreams had already produced GoldenEye, the James Bond theme written by U2’s Bono and The Edge, and would go on to feature guest turns from Sting and Barry White. Whatever You Want was the record’s second act — released as a single in March 1996, reaching the UK top 30 and the top ten across several European countries, though, like the album’s European campaign generally, it was never issued in the United States.

Live on Dutch television, 1996

The performance on this page captures Turner promoting the single on Dutch television in 1996, the song fresh out and the Wildest Dreams Tour about to open with it. She was decades past the point where most performers slow down, and it doesn’t register on screen — the voice is full, the command total, the presence exactly what had made her one of the most electric live acts in the world. Turner would tour into the next decade before stepping away, and she died in 2023, one of the most beloved figures in popular music. This is a glimpse of her in a late, confident chapter, taking a brand-new song and singing it like she’d owned it for years.