Welsh pop singer Bonnie Tyler, known for her 1980s power ballads such as Total Eclipse of the Heart and Holding Out for a Hero, has died aged 75.
Tyler died “unexpectedly” at a hospital in Portugal where she was being treated for an illness, her family said Thursday local time in a statement on its website.
In May she was hospitalized in Faro, where she had a home, for emergency intestinal surgery and later fell into an induced coma.
“Bonnie’s family and team are heartbroken to announce that Bonnie passed away unexpectedly last night in hospital in Portugal as a result of an illness for which she was being treated,” her family said.
Bonnie Tyler performs her song Believe in Me during the rehearsal for the final of the Eurovision Song Contest in Sweden on May 17, 2013. ( AP Photo: Alastair Grant)
Tyler has received three Grammy nominations, represented the UK at the Eurovision Song Contest 2013, where she finished 19th, and was awarded an MBE for services to music by Queen Elizabeth II in 2023.
The total eclipse of the heart has been broadcast more than 1 billion times, aided by real eclipses in 2017 and 2024.
The song spent four weeks in first place, and the number of views of the music video exceeded 1 billion.
“An extinction-level event presented in musical form,” Stereogum declared in 2020.
“This is pop music as a heartbreaking, chest-pounding, hemoptysis, sky-high explosion of passion. It’s quite a spectacle. These are fireworks, lasers, lightning and thunder. It soars, dives and rolls barrels.”
early life
Tyler was born Gaynor Hopkins. She was a miner’s daughter and grew up in a state house with an outdoor toilet in Skewen, Wales, about 10 kilometers from Swansea. She had three sisters and two brothers.
She loved the Beatles and her first album was A Hard Day’s Night. The first song she bought was “Hippy Hippy Shake” by Swinging Blue Jeans at 13, and she watched Top of the Pops religiously, according to her memoir Straight From the Heart.
She recorded Top of the Pops on a two-track reel-to-reel tape recorder and wrote down the lyrics to songs she liked. Her favorites included songs by Janis Joplin, Nina Simone, Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding.
“I spent hours humming them into my hairbrush and that’s how it all started for me,” Tyler wrote.
“I fell in love with singing just because of this. Looking back, I realize that even then my voice was hoarse, but I didn’t think much of it. I thought everyone’s voices were different.”
Bonnie Tyler sings at the Maison de la Chimie in Paris, December 17, 1984.AFP: Philippe Voyaser)
In 1976, she had to have surgery to remove nodules from her throat, leaving her with her signature vocals.
Changing her name to Sherin Davis, she was the lead singer of a soul band when she was discovered by talent scout Roger Bell and brought to London for demo sessions. She then waited for a label until RCA expressed interest.
Under her new RCA-sanctioned name Bonnie Tyler, her debut album The World Starts Tonight in 1977 contained her first chart hit, Lost in France, and she was nominated for Breakthrough Artist at the Brit Awards.
She then had a number three hit in 1978 with It’s a Heartache, but it soon fizzled out.
She then signed with Sony and saw Meat Loaf perform Bat Out of Hell on the BBC. Impressed, she asked to work with Meat Loaf songwriter and producer Jim Steinman.
“Total Eclipse of the Heart”
Steinman introduced her to his song Total Eclipse of the Heart, which became the debut single from her fifth studio album, Faster Than the Speed of Night.
He borrowed one of the lyrics – “Turn around, bright eyes” – from his 1969 musical Dream Engine, written while a student at Massachusetts Amherst College.
Tyler performing at Buttes Chaumont in Paris during a program on French radio TF1, March 2, 1988. (AFP: Georges Bendricham)
“Jim liked to lay down a basic rhythm track, do nine takes of the song, pick the best one, and then put the kitchen sink in there, like Phil Spector did,” Tyler told The Guardian in 2023.
“He gave me the tape to listen to at the hotel and we both preferred two takes.”
Total Eclipse, featuring E Street Band members Roy Bittan on piano and Max Weinberg on drums, is a meditation on lost love: “Once there was light in my life / But now there’s only love in the darkness,” she sings.
The video, which became a staple of early MTV broadcasts, was filmed in a creepy, gothic former asylum in Surrey, where guard dogs apparently did not enter the rooms below where they used to give people electric shocks.
Visual effects included slow-motion tossing pigeons, candles, dancing ninjas, dancing greasers, Tyler in alarmingly large shoulder pads, fencers, gymnasts, wind machines, and shirtless boys in swim goggles being doused with water.
“Faster Tha Speed of Night” was nominated for a Grammy for Best Rock Vocal Performance, losing to Pat Benatar’s “Love Is a Battlefield,” and Tyler won another award for “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in the Best Pop Vocal Performance category, losing to Irene Cara’s “Flashdance – What a Feeling.”
After “Eclipse”
Tyler never reached such dizzying heights again, but remained on track with such movie soundtrack singles as “Holding Out For a Hero” from 1984’s Footloose and “Here She Comes from Metropolis,” also in 1984.
Her 2019 disc Between the Earth and the Stars featured duets with Rod Stewart, Cliff Richard and Status Quo’s Francis Rossi, and she ended that year with a performance at the Vatican Christmas concert for Pope Francis.
Tyler performing at the First Harald Glookler Charity Gala in Berlin on October 31, 2006. (Reuters: Tobias Schwarz)
In 2013, she switched gears to record a country album in Nashville, Rocks and Honey, which included the Vince Gill duet What You Need From Me and the short ballad Believe in Me, written by American songwriter Desmond Child and British songwriters Lauren Christie and Christopher Braid.
“Believe in Me” was chosen to represent the UK at the Eurovision Song Contest in Sweden.
“It was an absolutely wonderful atmosphere,” she told the San Francisco Examiner in 2023.
“I was being interviewed every 15-20 minutes and when I walked on stage under the British flag I thought I was going to lose my mind! It was amazing, simply amazing!”
In 2017, she joined Joe Jonas’ band DNCE to perform on the Oasis of the Seas cruise ship as part of the Total Eclipse Cruise. As the moon passed in front of the sun, they played “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”
Tyler was married to real estate developer and former Olympic judo competitor Robert Sullivan.