A flawed personality, but a musician with an unusually keen vision, Ike Turner will be remembered as much for his sins against his wife and musical partner Tina Turner as for his undeniable contribution to the development of modern popular music.

Born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, he began his musical career at the age of 8, working as an assistant to the DJs at his local radio station WROX. He learnt piano and played in bands from his early teens, where he also took on guitar, singing and even occasional drumming duties. He developed a forceful style, based on the blues, but with an ear for broader developments in pop, soul and R’n’B. In 1951 with his group the Kings Of Rhythm, he wrote and recorded the song Rocket 88, a hard-driving boogie-woogie, blues tune that was one of the first harbingers of rock’n’roll.

Towards the end of the 1950s he spotted a teenaged singer called Anna Mae Bullock from Nutbush, Tennessee, whom he renamed and recruited to form the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. The period of success that followed remains the cornerstone of Ike’s legacy.

Over the next decade the duo enjoyed a string of hits including It’s Gonna Work Out Fine, Proud Mary, Nutbush City Limits and I Want To Take You Higher. Although it wasn’t a hit in America at the time, the Phil Spector-produced River Deep Mountain High remains arguably the duo's greatest achievement, although ironically Ike had little to do with the making of it.

What he did do was steer the Ike and Tina Turner Revue to new heights of theatricality and showmanship, raising the bar for live performance in general and contributing to the invention of the “soul revue”. While Tina was the star of the show at the front, Ike took care of the songwriting, the musical directing, the hiring and firing of personnel, including horn sections and backing singers (The Ikettes) and masterminded the choreography and other elements that set new standards for live performance in the 1960s and 1970s. But thanks to spiralling excesses of ego and cocaine, his talent for organisational detail gradually turned into control mania, particularly where his wife was concerned, and in 1976 Tina jumped ship to start a solo career.

As her career took off, so Ike’s went into decline. The nadir came in the mid 1980s, when he found himself languishing in a California state prison, convicted on drug offences, while his former wife was touring the biggest stadiums in the world. Not only that but the publication of her autobiography, I Tina, later turned into a movie, What’s Love Got To Do With It?, cemented an image of Ike as a drug-crazed, wife-beating, gun-wielding control freak. The impression was not altogether contradicted by Ike himself when he eventually got to tell his side of the story in his autobiography Taking Back My Name. “Sure I’ve slapped Tina,” he wrote. “There have been times when I punched her to the ground without thinking. But I never beat her.”

It is probably best not to dwell on the dark side of the man, but to remember instead the tremendous zest of his performances and the great catalogue of songs bequeathed by an all-round musician with as good a claim as any to be considered one of the godfathers of rock’n’roll.

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