Bonnie Tyler was born in a coal-mining town in Wales in 1951. But she was made on an operating table in 1977, when surgery to remove nodules from her vocal cords went a little awry – during recuperation, she screamed in frustration when she shouldn’t have, permanently altering her voice so it sounded like she’d swallowed a bag of gravel. And it’s that new voice – husky, howling, truly singular – that we tend to remember, and specifically on “Total Eclipse of the Heart”. It was the wildly maximalist Eighties power ballad that rescued her career and – via its bonkers video, filmed inexplicably in an old asylum – made us all forever scared of glowing children.
Tyler died on Wednesday (8 July) at the age of 75, two months after she was temporarily placed in an induced coma following emergency intestinal surgery at a hospital in Faro, Portugal, where she had a home. The radio silence surrounding her health in the interim was concerning, but mainly because Tyler typically seemed a bit superhuman. So many of her gig photos seem to capture her mid-bellow, mouth wide and trembling. Her records, too, tended to have titles that suggested action and resilience – Natural Force, Diamond Cut, Faster Than the Speed of Night, with its cover art depicting a laser beam quite literally shooting through her temples. And her vocals were so guttural and loud, as if the walls of the recording booths she was in were at constant risk of shattering.
“Total Eclipse of the Heart”, released in 1983, came to her at a professional lull – Tyler’s previous album, 1981’s Goodbye to the Island, was more of a goodbye to the charts, selling the lowest amount of copies in her career up to that point. And she had been fruitlessly struggling to match the success of 1977’s folk rock ballad “It’s a Heartache”, the first of her singles to feature her gritty new voice.
Tyler was determined to revamp her musical output, so sought the help of producer and songwriter Jim Steinman, who’d just collaborated with Meat Loaf on his blockbuster rock opera album Bat Out of Hell. You can see the connecting threads between that record and what would become “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, both of them titanic and theatrical epics that build and build until they basically explode.
“Total Eclipse…” had its origins in various loose ideas floating around Steinman’s brain in the years prior. Much of it stemmed – and I promise you that this is true – from a mooted Nosferatu musical that Steinman had been planning. “If anyone listens to the lyrics, they’re really like vampire lines,” he said in 2002. “It’s all about the darkness, the power of darkness, and love’s place in the dark.” The pretty refrain throughout the song, with background vocalist Rory Dodd crooning “turn around, bright eyes”, was also sourced from a 1969 Steinman-written musical called The Dream Machine. And, as if this story couldn’t get any weirder, was used to symbolise watching the unfolding of a nuclear apocalypse.
Meat Loaf has claimed that “Total Eclipse…” was originally written for him to sing, but Tyler would repeatedly dispute this. “Meat Loaf was apparently very annoyed that Jim gave [the song] to me,” Tyler said in 2014. “But Jim said he didn’t write it for Meat Loaf, that he only finished it after meeting me.”
The completed song is a grand exercise in power-pop melodrama, with Tyler pining for a lost love. It ultimately becomes a kind of musical cage-fight, as her vocal is endlessly threatened by the arrival of thrashing guitars, wailing background singers, brash synthesizers and hypnotic reverb. But Tyler keeps getting louder and louder, willing the rest of it into submission. The song clocks in at just under seven minutes long, which is basically the length of an entire PinkPantheress album. It was snipped to four minutes for radio, with the video adding an extra 60 seconds.
And speaking of that video, where to bloody begin? Directed by Australian filmmaker Russell Mulcahy, who’d go on to direct the Sean Connery fantasy film Highlander and chintzy B-movies like Resident Evil: Extinction, it’s as if every Eighties pop video cliché collided at once, then got hit by a tornado. It sees Tyler being terrorised through an old boarding school by boys who sing, wreak havoc and/or fly. There are masked ninjas, white doves, billowing curtains, fencing instructors covered in gold dust, wind machines at every corner, and a troupe of pirouetting homosexuals menacing Tyler in Tarzan pants. Italian footballer Gianfranco Zola was rumoured for years to have been one of the schoolboys in it (he finally denied this in 2012), and the Billboard Video Music Awards nominated it for Most Effective Use of Symbolism, which… sure! “Thirty-nine years on and I still can’t explain [the video],” Tyler tweeted in 2022.
“Total Eclipse…” was a blockbuster, selling six million copies worldwide and hitting Number One in the UK, the US and Australia. It flies up the charts again whenever there’s a solar eclipse, and a 2013 poll saw it named the song Brits most love to sing in the shower. Tyler of course had a parade of other hits – notably “Holding Out for a Hero” and “The Best”, which was later covered by Tina Turner – but “Total Eclipse…” is undeniably her signature number, primarily because it seemed to properly understand Tyler as an artist: she was at her best when she was allowed to be a bit mad, a lot dramatic, and basically scream the house down.
