Bonnie Tyler, singer of Total Eclipse Of The Heart, dies at age 75
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Bonnie Tyler at her concert in Marbella, Spain, in 2021.
PHOTO: EPA
- Bonnie Tyler, known for her husky voice caused by a vocal cord operation and scream, died at 75 after illness and emergency surgery in Portugal.
- She rose to fame in the 1980s with hits like Total Eclipse Of The Heart and Holding Out For A Hero, working closely with songwriter Jim Steinman.
- Born Gaynor Hopkins in Wales, she created her stage name by combining random first and last names and was honoured with an MBE in 2022 for her music contributions.
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LONDON – The gravelly tone that made Bonnie Tyler’s singing instantly recognisable was the result of an accident.
After an operation to remove vocal cord nodules in 1977, she was ordered to rest her voice. But one day, she screamed in anger, permanently altering it.
Six years on, the Welsh singer would release her best-known song, Total Eclipse Of The Heart (1983), which flaunted her husky sound, and she was nominated for a Grammy Award.
Holding Out For A Hero (1984), another dramatic rock ballad, was released soon after, helping Tyler make her mark on Britain’s pop scene.
Both recordings have since featured in films, television shows and advertisements.
Tyler, whose releases also included It’s A Heartache (1977) and Lost In France (1976), has died, her family announced on Facebook on July 9. She was 75.
They said they were “heartbroken to announce that Bonnie unexpectedly passed away last night in hospital in Portugal as a result of the illness that she was being treated for”.
Her death came after her family raised hopes among fans after she came out of an induced coma and remained in intensive care afterwards in a Faro hospital, where she had undergone emergency intestinal surgery in May.
Her illness had forced the cancellation of dates on a planned European tour to mark the 50th anniversary of the release of Lost In France.
‘I wouldn’t say boo to a goose’
Tyler was born Gaynor Hopkins in southern Wales in 1951, the fourth of six children of a coal miner and a homemaker.
She grew up in a four-bed council house with a large garden in the village of Skewen, outside Swansea.
“I think mam and dad had it really hard, bringing up a big family on very little,” she told The Guardian newspaper in 2012.
Music was a constant of daily life, whether played on a radiogram or sung by her mother, who would intone opera or Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini (1960) as she did housework.
At seven, Tyler went to see a musical at the local church. There, she fell in love with American songwriter Irving Berlin’s song There’s No Business Like Show Business (1946), giving the shy child the desire to perform.
“I wouldn’t say boo to a goose, and yet there was a part of me that yearned to sing in front of people,” she recalled in her memoir, Straight From The Heart (2023).
‘This was the song’
Singer Bonnie Tyler performing during the Last Night of the Proms celebration in London in 2019.
PHOTO: REUTERS
She started out as a teenage backing singer, before releasing several albums of her own in the 1970s.
But it was not until the early 1980s, when she started working with American lyricist Jim Steinman, that she had her commercial breakthrough.
She won over Steinman, then already famous for composing Bat Out Of Hell (1977) for American rock singer Meat Loaf, by sending him demos of the theatrical rock songs she knew would suit her voice.
Of the moment she first heard his composition Total Eclipse, she recalled: “I knew this was the song I had been waiting for all my life.”
Recorded by Tyler, the “Wagnerian-like onslaught of sound and emotion”, as Steinman described the piece, would go on to top the charts in both Britain and the US.
Featuring the powerful lyrics – “Once upon a time, I was falling in love, but now I’m only falling apart” – the song has been streamed more than one billion times on the online music platform Spotify.
It was featured in the movies Old School (2003) and Bandits (2001), the television shows Glee (2009 to 2015) and Grey’s Anatomy (2005 to present), as well as an advertisement for Mastercard.
Creating ‘Bonnie Tyler’
From the 1990s, she had more success in Norway, Austria and France than at home, although she represented Britain in the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest and was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire for services to music in 2022.
Bonnie Tyler was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 2022 and received the medal at Windsor Castle in London in 2023.
PHOTO: AFP
Tyler married property developer Robert Sullivan, her first serious boyfriend, in 1973.
“I am still very much in love with him and he with me,” she said 40 years later. The couple did not have children.
Tyler never really liked her birth name.
Asked how she arrived at her pseudonym, she told BBC Radio Wales: “I got a broadsheet newspaper and I made an effort to write all the first names I came across on one list and all the surnames on another, and I went through them both and came up with Bonnie Tyler.
“And it’s been a brilliant name.” REUTERS, AFP
