1988 · Behind the Songs
A year before it became someone else’s anthem, she recorded it her way.
When people hear the opening piano figure of “The Best,” they picture Tina Turner in 1989. But the first major recording of the song belonged to Bonnie Tyler, who cut it in 1988 for her album Hide Your Heart and released it as a single months before Turner’s version existed.
The song came from two of pop’s sharpest writers, Mike Chapman and Holly Knight, and Tyler’s version was produced by Desmond Child, who gave it a polished, late-eighties rock sheen. Tyler sings it with a confidence that suits the lyric’s swagger — she had spent a decade being told her voice was too rough for the mainstream, and here she was, claiming the biggest song in the room.
The single did modest business; the album, released in America as Notes from America, kept her working but did not restore her mid-eighties chart heights. Then Tina Turner recorded “The Best” for Foreign Affair (1989), and the song became a global standard — a sports-arena staple and one of the defining singles of Turner’s second career.
Tyler has always been gracious about it, and she has reason to be: her version is the original document, the proof that the song worked before the world agreed it did. It remains one of the great “wait, she did it first?” footnotes of eighties pop — a hit hiding in plain sight on a Bonnie Tyler record.