When the late great Tina Turner played Brighton - what makes a legend a legend

Turner, whose death was announced yesterday, was at the Brighton Centre on March 11 1985 on her Private Dancer Tour – a night when she opened with the Prince cover Let's Pretend We're Married. Fourth number was the all-time classic River Deep, Mountain High and the set continued with What's Love Got to Do With It, Nutbush City Limits, I Can't Stand the Rain, Better Be Good to Me and then the hit that gave the tour its name, Private Dancer.

And just the name of the song underlines the sheer power of music. Just the name of that song and I am right back in France, living – for a year – just north of Paris. Tina Turner was probably at the absolute height of her fame back then. And Private Dancer was massive. Just about any supermarket you wandered into, Private Dancer was playing in the background. Just about any café. Just about any restaurant.

And that’s the power of these legends of music, isn’t it. We appropriate their music and we map it onto our own lives. Sadly, inevitably, some songs are wrapped up in our own misery, forever connected with the difficult moments we pass through. But for me Private Dancer sums up a blissful year teaching English in a massive comprehensive school half an hour north of the capital. I was massively under-used and was massively over-paid, the joys of being what they called then (and maybe do still now) an English language assistant. I had the money and the leisure to strut the boulevards and frequent the cafes of Paris. It was exciting, it was energising, it was fabulous – and the song Private Dancer evokes those days like nothing else.

And of course, later in the year, we had Live Aid which Tina Turner absolutely stole with my great god and idol Mick Jagger, of the Stones. They duetted – and wow, can you ever imagine a duet between two more charismatic, mesmerising performers? They kicked off with State Of Shock (not such a great song) and followed up with It's Only Rock 'n' Roll (absolutely a great song). But it was the fizz between them that burnt itself into memory – the total chemistry, the thrilling electricity. You could almost see it sparking in the air between them as they did what Mick does and what Tina did. They gyrated, they twisted, they turned, they were in each other’s faces, they were wrapped around each other. If they’d had sex right there on stage, it probably wouldn’t have been an awful lot more intimate than what they were actually doing.

And that’s what these gods of rock give us. Memories. Such fabulous, cherished memories…

Oh, and for the record, Tina’s Brighton set that night continued with Let's Stay Together (Al Green cover), Help! (The Beatles cover), It's Only Love (Bryan Adams cover), Proud Mary (Creedence Clearwater Revival cover), Legs (ZZ Top cover), Tonight (Iggy Pop cover), and Let's Dance (David Bowie cover). Don’t you wish you were there…