Bonnie Tyler obituary | Bonnie Tyler

“I couldn’t believe it the first time I heard this song,” said singer Bonnie Tyler of Total Eclipse of the Heartthe powerful 1983 hit that became his best known. Boosted to No 1 by the gothic video that got the most airplay in MTV’s early years, it returned to the top of Apple’s music charts after North America. total eclipse of April 2024. “I can’t tell you how many people have told me that they danced to this song for the first time, they loved this song,” Tyler, who died at the age of 75 after a long illness, said on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “I never get tired of it.”

Total Eclipse of the Heart comes nine years after Tyler Imagination’s band failed to get past the first audition for ITV talent show New Faces, and eight years after he was seen singing Freda Payne’s song. The Gold Group in the Townsman nightclub in his home town of Swansea is a talent scout. Signed to RCA in 1976, he had two transatlantic country albums, Lost in France (1976) and It’s Heartbreaking (1977), before signing with CBS (now Columbia) after his retirement in 1981.

When asked by the head of the A&R company, Muff Winwood, who he would like to work with, he asked Jim Steinmancomposer of Meat breadwhose 1977 album Bat Out of Hell was a huge hit. “(Muff) looked as if someone had just told him that aliens had arrived on the roof of the record company,” he wrote in his 2023 memoir, Straight from the Heart. Steinman initially said no, but his opinion changed after hearing Tyler’s new demos in a rockier style, adding that he had an “80s voice that hadn’t been used before”.

Tyler’s famous fatigue was caused by not resting long enough after a 1977 operation to remove vocal cords from his throat. The frustrated screams he gave as he recovered added months to his recovery. But just three weeks after Tyler met Steinman in New York in 1982, the songwriter gave him the song he wanted to make into a Nosferatu soundtrack. “And I just knew… this was the song I’ve been waiting for my whole life,” he said.

The video, which in 2023 surpassed a billion views on YouTube, matched the status of the song. Russell Mulcahy, Ultravox’s award-winning video director Vienna and later for the blockbuster fantasy Highlander, he set it in Holloway Sanatorium, a Victorian gothic hospital in Surrey. With long hair and blown by wind machines, Tyler endured an 18-hour shoot, ending one night at 3.30am “after being chased barefoot through the snow by pagan dancers”. Total Eclipse of the Heart went to No 1 in 10 countries and sold 6m copies worldwide.

But one Steinman aide was not amused. “By the time we were filming, Meat Loaf had lost his voice,” Tyler said told the Guardian’s Dave Simpson in 2023. “And after it got good, he used to say, ‘Dang. This song has to be mine!'”

He was born Gaynor Hopkins in Skewen, a large village north-east of Swansea, and grew up in a musical family as one of six children. His mother, Elsie (nee Lewis), was known locally for her singing (“she used to do chores with the windows open and people would stop by our fence because her voice was so beautiful,” wrote Tyler). Her father, Glynd Horr Hopkins, who was unable to work due to tuberculosis, bought the family a tape machine on which Gaynor used to record Top of the Pops before playing them in his bedroom.

He also survived tuberculosis as a child, a disease he was diagnosed with when he was 12 years old after receiving a vaccination and lesions were found on his lungs. A “very shy” boy, he first gained confidence at the age of 17 after coming second in Swansea rugby club’s talent competition, entering in the hope of winning a £5 prize and buying false eyelashes with the proceeds.

Using the pseudonym Shereen Davis to distinguish herself from Welsh star Mary Hopkin, she became a backing singer for a local band, Bobby Wayne & the Dixies, before forming her own band, Imagination, and performing in clubs around her work in a grocery store. In 1969 she met Robert Sullivan, who later built a property, and they married in 1973.

Asked by RCA to come up with a new stage name in 1976, he mixed names with recent newspaper names (Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, he said, provided the name) to come up with Bonnie Tyler. Artists who inspired Tyler’s role included Tina Turnerwho in 1989 was a global hit and the one Tyler released a year ago, Very good. “I have to be honest, he did better than me,” Tyler said OutInPerth magazine in 2017 – his straight-talking behavior saw him booked numerous times on daytime talk shows.

Some songs on his 1988 album, Hide Your Heart, became hits for other artists, including Don’t turn aroundlater in 1988 UK No. 1 of Aswadand Save All Your Tearsin 1991 Cher’s hit. Tyler also turned down the 1983 James Bond title, Say no more Say no more. “I didn’t like the song,” he told the BBC in 2024.

Another Tyler/Steinman collaboration, A Hero’s Catch (1984), written as the soundtrack to the US musical Footloose, became popular in the LGBTQ+ community. He played New York’s gay club Saint in the 1980s (“it was fun and it was a little dirty,” he said. told QueerForty magazine) and opened the Gay Pride festival in Manchester in 2009. He also played in the former Soviet Union, and performed three concerts in the Kremlin.

Along with 18 studio credits, the most recent of which was The Best Is Yet to Come in 2021, Tyler’s work includes playing Polly Garter in. George MartinA 1988 recording of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood (narrated by Anthony Hopkins) and collaborations with Mike Oldfield, Rick Wakeman and Rod Stewart. He has continued to tour the world in recent years, and recorded a new album in 2025 for David Guetta and Hypaton’s Together, which also included tracks from Total Eclipse of the Heart.

Appointed an MBE in 2023, he lives in the heart of Portugal’s Algarve in a Victorian mansion at Black Pill, near Mumbles, overlooking Swansea Bay.

She wrote in her essay: “I may have done amazing things, but in many ways, I’m still that young girl. Waleshe’s dancing around the piano with his family, and I’ll always be that way.”

She left her husband.