The British singer Bonnie Tyler, who gave us the anthem for broken hearts “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, has died at the age of 75.
“Turn around, bright eyes…” Bonnie Tyler, whose hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart” has accompanied many of our breakups, died this Thursday, July 9, in Portugal, at a hospital where she was being treated after an emergency intestinal surgery she underwent in May, announced her family in a statement. Aged 75, the British singer had just released a single, “Only Love”, and had planned to resume touring Europe. Over a career spanning almost fifty years, with 18 studio albums and 86 singles, the rock diva with the XXL bouffant and a gravelly voice recognizable a mile away, was also a touring companion to the LGBT community.
Born in 1951 in Neath, Wales, to a coal miner father and a homemaker mother, Gaynor Hopkins grew up in a family of six children. Between church choir songs, she fed on Janis Joplin and Tina Turner. Having left school at 16, she worked in a grocery store, sang in clubs, changed her first name to Sherene Davis, then became Bonnie Tyler after signing with RCA. Her first breakout came with “Lost in France” in 1976, followed by “It’s a Heartache”, a worldwide hit released after a vocal cord surgery. The operation could have ruined her career, but it gave her signature: due to not resting her voice enough, the singer would retain her famous rasp.
Bonnie Turns Wounds into Weapons
The Bonnie Tyler phenomenon occurred in 1983, when she met songwriter Jim Steinman, the mind behind Meat Loaf’s grandiloquent Bat Out of Hell. He wrote her “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, a seven-minute pop monument, shortened for radio, about the pain left by a vanished love. The track quickly became number 1 in the United Kingdom and the United States, and today surpasses one billion streams on Spotify, as does its video on YouTube. The following year, “Holding Out for a Hero”, an anthem for anyone who still believes in the fairy-tale prince, recorded for the soundtrack of the film Footloose, confirms the singer’s taste for impossible loves, cathartic refrains, and dramatic entrances. Yet, she remained with her first love all her life, British judoka Robert Sullivan, whom she married in 1973. Three Grammy nominations, hits that cross films, commercials, karaoke… Bonnie Tyler establishes herself as the queen of melodrama.
Indefatigable Tyler
Bonnie Tyler does not fade away with the 1980s that crowned her. In 2003, she gave us a new success in a duo with Kareen Antonn, “If Tomorrow… (Turn Around)”, which stayed number 1 for ten weeks in France, proof that her grand hit could still be reborn, in another language, with a different generation. Ten years later, she represented the United Kingdom at Eurovision with “Believe in Me”. Admittedly, she finished 19th in the competition, but she jokes: “I did as best as I could with a good song. It doesn’t make me sad and here I am ready to party!”
The diva is never defeated, even when mistreated. In an interview granted to the French media Music Waves, in 2019 on the occasion of the release of her album Between the Earth and the Stars, she recounts: “A rock critic came to interview me. Before even starting, he pulled my hair. He was convinced it was a wig. I grabbed him by the balls and asked him: ‘And yours, are they real?’ I couldn’t help it.” A blunt personality that does not prevent Dame Tyler from being named in 2022 to the Order of the British Empire, after having been honored by Elizabeth II for services to music.
