How should we best measure the success of a public entertainer? In Turner’s case, the box denoting sheer scale — she sold over 100 million records worldwide — clearly gets a tick. The style box gets ticked as well, because of the nonstop oomph of her live performances, with their generous quota of flashing video screens, fast-changing lights, lashings of dry ice and other effects, along with the skimpily glittering outfits favored by the artist herself. Also to be considered is sheer resilience: whatever you may think of Turner’s music, it took guts for her to bounce back to the top as she did in her mid-forties, quite apart from her inspirational example to other domestic-abuse victims.

Turner’s influence was also unusually broad, and extends beyond the obvious candidates like Madonna, Lady Gaga and Beyoncé, the last of whom she performed with at the Grammy awards in 2008. The young Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, who spent hours watching in the wings as the Ike and Tina Revue, with their somehow familiar-seeming double act of the gyrating singer and the stony-faced guitarist, went through their paces. Jagger may have enjoyed an even closer relationship even than this with his primary role model. The Rolling Stones’ first tour manager Tom Keylock assured me that he’d once “tripped over Mick and Tina in an extremely relaxed pose backstage at a concert in England.” It may well be true — this was the Sixties — although it would have taken a brave man to risk the wrath of Ike Turner, an artist who once recorded a song which contained the line “Things go better with cocaine” (he died of an overdose in 2007, at the age of seventy-six), and who was at one time arrested for shooting his newspaper delivery-boy for having allegedly kicked his dog.