Bonnie Tyler, singer of ‘Total Eclipse Of The Heart’, dies at 75

Bonnie Tyler, the gravelly voiced, Grammy-nominated Welsh pop star greatest recognized for singing the chart-topping energy ballad “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in 1983 and seeing new generations succumb to its bombastic charms throughout photo voltaic and lunar eclipses, has died. She was 75.

Tyler died “unexpectedly” in a hospital in Portugal the place she was being handled for an sickness, her household mentioned Thursday in a press release on her web site.

She was hospitalised in May in Faro, the place she had a house, for emergency intestinal surgical procedure and was later positioned in an induced coma.

“Bonnie’s family and team are 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 family said.

Tyler earned three Grammy nods, represented Britain at the Eurovision Song Contest 2013 – where she came in 19th – and was awarded an MBE for her services to music by Queen Elizabeth II in 2023, all largely thanks to “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which has had more that 1 billion streams, boosted by real eclipses in 2017 and 2024.

The song spent four weeks at No. 1, the video has surpassed 1 billion views and when Stereogum reevaluated it in 2020, the music outlet declared it an “extinction-level occasion rendered in musical type.”

“It’s pop music as heart-pounding, chest-thumping, blood-gargling, heavens-falling ardour explosion. It’s sheer spectacle. It’s fireworks and lasers and lightning and thunder. It soars and swoops and barrel-rolls,” the site said.

The song has never really gone away, covered by the English singer Nicki French in 1995 and the band Westlife in 2006. Cate Blanchett sang it while hitting Billy Bob Thornton with her car in 2001’s “Bandits,” it appeared at a wedding scene in 2003’s “Old School” and One Direction sang it in 2010 on a U.K. version of “The X Factor.”

Trademark vocal sound

Tyler was born – as Gaynor Hopkins – a coal miner’s daughter in public housing with an outside toilet in Skewen, Wales, about seven miles outside Swansea. She grew up with three sisters and two brothers.

She adored the Beatles and her first album was “A Hard Day’s Night.” The first song she bought was “Hippy Hippy Shake” by the Swinging Blue Jeans at 13 and watched “Top of the Pops” religiously, according to her memoir, “Straight From the Heart.”

She would record “Top of the Pops” on a reel-to-reel two-track recorder and write down the lyrics of songs she liked. Her favorites have been songs by Janis Joplin, Nina Simone, Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding.

“I used to sing them into my hairbrush for hours and hours, and that is how it began for me. I fell in love with singing simply from doing that. Looking again, even then my voice had a husky tone to it, however I did not assume a lot of it. I assumed everybody’s voices have been totally different from one another’s,” she wrote.

In 1976 she had to have surgery to remove nodules on her throat, leaving her with that trademark vocal sound.

Changing her name to Sherene Davis, she was fronting a soul band when she was discovered by talent scout Roger Bell, who brought her to London for demo sessions.

Then she waited for a label until RCA said it was interested.

Under her new RCA-sanctioned name Bonnie Tyler, her debut album “The World Starts Tonight” in 1977 contained her first chart hit, “Lost in France,” and she was nominated for a breakthrough artists award at the Brits Awards.

She then had a No. 3 hit in 1978 with “It’s a Heartache,” but soon drifted. She then signed with Sony and saw Meat Loaf perform “Bat Out of Hell” on the BBC.

Impressed, she requested to work with Meat Loaf songwriter and producer Jim Steinman.

How Total Eclipse Of The Heart came to be

Steinman introduced her to his song “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which would become the debut single for her fifth studio album, “Faster Than the Speed of Night.”

He borrowed one of the song’s lyrics – “Turn round, brilliant eyes” – from his 1969 musical “The Dream Engine” written as a student at Massachusetts’ Amherst College.

He told her the song was from a prospective musical version of “Nosferatu.”

“Jim favored to place down a fundamental rhythm monitor, do 9 takes of the music, select the most effective one after which put the kitchen sink on there, like Phil Spector used to,” Tyler told The Guardian in 2023.

“He gave me a cassette to take heed to in my lodge and we each most popular take two.”

Featuring E Street Band members Roy Bittan on piano and Max Weinberg on drums, “Total Eclipse” is a rumination on lost love: “Once upon a time there was mild in my life/But now there’s solely love in the dead of night,” she sings.

The video, a staple of early-days MTV, was shot in a frightening gothic former asylum in Surrey, where the guard dogs apparently wouldn’t set foot in the rooms downstairs where they used to give people electric shock treatment.

The visuals included slow-motion tossed doves, candles, dancing ninjas, dancing greasers, Tyler in frighteningly big shoulder pads, fencers, gymnasts, wind machines and shirtless boys wearing swim goggles being doused with water.

“Faster Than the Speed of Night” earned a Grammy nomination for best rock vocal performance – losing to Pat Benatar’s “Love Is a Battlefield” – and Tyler got another nod for “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in the best pop vocal performance category, losing to Irene Cara’s “Flashdance – What a Feeling.”

Other memorable hits

Tyler never reached such dizzying heights again but stayed current with such movie soundtrack singles as “Holding Out For a Hero” – from 1984’s “Footloose” – and “Here She Comes” from “Metropolis” also in 1984.

Her 2019 disc “Between the Earth and the Stars” featured duets with Rod Stewart, Cliff Richard and Status Quo’s Francis Rossi, and she ended that year performing a Vatican Christmas concert before Pope Francis.

In 2013, she switched gears to make a country-flavoured record in Nashville, “Rocks and Honey,” which included the Vince Gill duet “What You Need From Me” and a little ballad called “Believe in Me,” written by American songwriter Desmond Child and British songwriters Lauren Christy and Christopher Braide. “Believe in Me” was picked to represent the United Kingdom at that year’s Eurovision Song Contest in Sweden.

“It was a completely great environment there,” she told the San Francisco Examiner in 2023. “I used to be being interviewed each 15, 20 minutes, and once I walked out onstage behind the British flag, I assumed the roof was going to come back off! It was superior, simply superior!”

In 2017, she joined Joe Jonas’ band DNCE for a performance on the cruise ship Oasis of the Seas as part of a “Total Eclipse Cruise.”

When the moon passed in front of the sun, they played “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

Tyler was married to property developer and former Olympic judo competitor Robert Sullivan. – AP