In one of the last interviews he ever gave, Ike Turner talked to Rob Hughes about his early blues days, the birth of rock'n'roll on 'Rocket 88,' Jimi Hendrix, and yes, even Tina Turner. Here's a little taste of the article.--Barney Hoskyns, Rock's Backpages

IN HIS 75th year, Ike Turner still has presence. In dove-white shoes, slacks, silver pendant slung 'round a charcoal sweater, he looks trim and dapper, hunched over a cup of coffee in our Camden hotel. Interviewing him, I'm told beforehand, can be a risky business. Catch him in the wrong mood and he's liable to cut out of there within minutes. Find him sunny-side-up and he'll talk like it's an Olympic sport.

There are, of course, certain things he's guarded about. Having read through a number of recent interviews, any enquiries about his relationship with Tina Turner are either ignored or swatted away with mild irritation. As it turns out, we find him in warm spirits, if a tad tired. He's happy to talk and quick to laugh. Only when the questioning veers anywhere near the most famous of his thirteen ex-wives do the defenses come down. The body language changes immediately, retreating into his chair, arms folded. Ike is a complex man, acknowledging his failures with harsh self-criticism, but he's rarely apologetic. It's the same mood that permeates his autobiography.

"I don't think anybody should be apologetic about nothin'," he confirms today. "If I sit here and start cussin' at you and you just sit listenin', then it's your fault for sittin' there listenin'. You could have walked out. So whatever happens in one's life, don't put the blame nowhere but on yourself."

The first girl singer Ike ever tried out was a sixteen-year-old from Tennessee by the name of Anna Mae Bullock. It was 1956. Suitably impressed, she became a mainstay of the revue and moved into Ike's house. They married two years later, Ike re-christening her stage name as Tina. After 'A Fool in Love' made #2 on the R&B charts in 1960, she became the centerpiece of the act. "People always asked what Ike Turner did in those shows. Well, all the stuff you saw everyone do on stage, it all came from me. Every word that Tina ever said, like 'Whaddya say?', all of her expressions. Those short mini-dresses they wore? That was my idea. That was the first time anyone ever wore a mini-dress."

At one point Ike took on a young guitar player called Jimi Hendrix. He didn't last long, Turner sacking him for overuse of feedback. "Well, he was doin' somethin' I'd never heard before," he laughs now. "I'd give him a guitar solo and he didn't have balanced lines. I told him about it three times. It was a case of three strikes and out. People say to me 'You fired Jimi Hendrix, how stupid can you be?' But I did it. I wasn't thinking in terms of his potential. I was thinking in terms of what I needed at the time."

So what's it like being Ike Turner in 2007? "A lot of new things have happened. You find out your brain is still six, but your body says no way [laughs]. I got the Grammy this year, but next year I'm really going for it again with a new song called 'Shouldn't We Try Love'. It's about working together instead of fighting wars.

Meanwhile, for latecomers to Ike's music, new LP Risin' With The Blues is as good a starting point as any. The guitar lines are by turns beautiful and nasty, broken up by the odd squeal of whammy bar that he'd first perfected in the pre-Hendrix days of 1962's 'Prancin''.

But it's 'Jesus Loves Me' that burns longest in the memory. "They made a movie out of me/And all of that stuff ain't true," he booms. It's Ike answering to no one but his maker. Does this song sum him up? "Yeah, because everyone thinks I'm a bad boy. I am a bad boy. I'll always be a bad boy. But Jesus loves me anyway, because I'm still here."

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