Bonnie Tyler: Voice that minted 1980s pop anthems like Total Eclipse

Welsh singer Bonnie Tyler, whose powerhouse voice defined 1980s hits such as Total Eclipse of the Heart and Holding Out for a Hero, has died at 75

By Alex Williams

 

Bonnie Tyler, the Welsh singer who, with a frosted, teased-up coiffure and a voice both weathered and operatic, soared to No. 1 with Total Eclipse of the Heart, one of the titanic pop anthems of the 1980s, died on Wednesday at a hospital in Portugal. She was 75. 

The cause was an illness, according to a post on her official Facebook account. She underwent emergency intestinal surgery at a hospital in Faro, Portugal, where she had a home, the Facebook account said in May. She was temporarily placed in a coma and remained in intensive care afterward, it said. 

 

Tyler reached her commercial zenith with a handful of hits at the peak of the MTV era, none more indelible than Total Eclipse. That pounding power ballad, with its repeated plea to “turn around, bright eyes,” evoked the hunger of unrequited love and was written by Jim Steinman.  

Tyler emerged from the Welsh pub-rock scene in the mid-1970s. She scored her first worldwide hit in 1977 into 1978 with It’s a Heartache. A loping ballad about love gone wrong, the song was drawn from her second album, titled It’s a Heartache in the United States (US) and Natural Force in Britain. 

It topped charts in Australia, Canada and throughout Europe, rising to No. 3 on the US pop chart and No. 10 on the country chart. 

“It was great, getting in the limo and you’re fixing with the radio stations, and you’re on just about every station,” she recalled in a video interview decades later. “It was like, ‘Put the windows down, that’s me!’” Still, little could have prepared her for the smash success of Total Eclipse of the Heart, a song she only had a crack at through a stroke of luck for her — and bad luck for Meat Loaf. 

In the early 1980s, Tyler was signed by Sony, and wanted to move from her country-inflected early sound toward something more arena-worthy. After seeing Meat Loaf singing on TV, she told Muff Winwood, a producer at the label, that she should work with Steinman, who wrote all the tracks on Meat Loaf’s blockbuster 1977 debut album, Bat Out of Hell. 

“Muff looked at me like I was barmy and told me that Jim would never do it,’” Tyler later recalled. “‘I just want you to ask him,’ I said.” Steinman gave it to her to use on her 1983 album Faster Than the Speed of Night, on which he was a producer. “After it was a hit,” Tyler recalled, Meat Loaf “always used to say: ‘Dang. That song should have been mine!’” Slowly and inexorably, momentum builds to climax after climax, during which Tyler’s surging vocals, dancing on the edge of camp, seem like they could melt the microphone.  Tyler earned Grammy nominations for both the song (best pop vocal performance) and the album (best rock vocal performance). In 2023, Rolling Stone listed Total Eclipse at No. 56 on its survey of the 200 best songs of the 1980s, describing it as “Power Ballad Armageddon.”  

Gaynor Hopkins was born on June 8, 1951, in Skewen, a village in South Wales. She was one of seven children of Glyndwr Hopkins, a coal miner, and Elsie (Lewis) Hopkins. (She adopted her stage name in the 1970s to avoid being confused with another Welsh singer, Mary Hopkin). In a 2012 interview with The Guardian, Tyler recalled growing up in a musical household. She took an early interest in singing, and her mother counseled her, “Believe in yourself, because no one else is going to do it for you.” 

She left school at 16 and worked at a grocery store while dreaming of a music career like that of her idols Janis Joplin and Tina Turner. Lost in France, a sunny 1976 number included on her debut album, The World Starts Tonight (1977), cracked the Top 10 in Britain.  

Her follow-up single, More Than a Lover, climbed to No. 27. 

Tyler continued to record, releasing more than a dozen albums through the 1990s and beyond. Her last album, In Berlin, came out in 2024. 

In 1973, she married Robert Sullivan, a British judo Olympian turned property developer. In 2023, she published an autobiography, Straight From the Heart. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available. Tyler never fully escaped the shadow of “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which she didn’t seem to mind.

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