https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/jul/09/bonnie-tyler-obituary
"“I couldn’t believe it the first time I heard this song,” said the singer
Bonnie Tyler of
Total Eclipse of the Heart, the bombastic 1983 power ballad
that became her signature hit. Propelled to No 1 by a gothic video played on
heavy rotation in the early years of MTV, it also returned to top the Apple
music charts after the North American total solar eclipse of April 2024. “I
can’t tell you how many people have told me they had their first dance to this
song, they fell in love to this song,” Tyler, who has died aged 75 after a
period of ill-health, said on the BBC Radio 4
Today programme. “I never get
tired of it.”
Total Eclipse of the Heart came nine years after Tyler’s band Imagination had
failed to get past the first audition on the ITV talent show
New Faces, and
eight years after she was spotted singing Freda Payne’s
Band of Gold in the
Townsman nightclub in her home town of Swansea by a talent scout. Signed to RCA
in 1976, she had two transatlantic country-styled hit singles,
Lost in France
(1976) and
It’s a Heartache (1977), before signing to CBS (now Columbia) at a
dip in her career in 1981.
Asked by the company’s head of A&R, Muff Winwood, who she would like to work
with, she enquired after Jim Steinman, the songwriter for Meat Loaf, whose 1977
album
Bat Out of Hell had been a big hit. “[Muff] looked like someone had
just told him aliens had landed on the roof of the record company,” she wrote
in her 2023 memoir,
Straight from the Heart. Steinman initially said no, but
had his mind changed after hearing new Tyler demos in a rockier style, adding
that she had “an 80s voice that hadn’t been exploited”."
RIP,
*** Xanni ***
