In a world where august artists’ back catalogues have become big business, the music industry has become impressively adept at convincing people to shell out for yet another version of albums they already own. The deluxe edition has been supplanted by the super-deluxe edition. Once, albums were merely remastered to sound better, but now they’re entirely deconstructed then reassembled in surround sound, ultimate mixes, even – in the case of John Lennon’s Mind Games – as a beatless ambient aid to meditation.
Accordingly, you might have thought that the sessions for Tina Turner’s 1984 solo breakthrough Private Dancer had been thoroughly ransacked a decade ago, by a 30th anniversary edition that appended 15 extra B-sides, out-takes, live recordings and adjacent songs to the original album. But that would underestimate the indefatigability of record companies when it comes to parting fans from their cash. For Private Dancer’s slightly belated 40th anniversary – its first major anniversary since its author’s death in 2023 – the album is expanded to a mind-boggling five discs of material, the attention-grabbing jewel among which is a hitherto unknown track from the archives: Hot for You Baby. But unlike Face It Alone, the previously unreleased song appended to the similarly extensive “collector’s edition” of Queen’s penultimate album The Miracle in 2022, Hot for You Baby doesn’t seem to have been left unfinished and subsequently polished up.
