Bonnie Tyler died during the night between July 7 and 8 in a hospital in Faro, Portugal. She came from the Welsh coast of Swansea and left us by the Atlantic Ocean, on the shores of the Portugal she had loved for so many years and eventually made her home. Her death came suddenly and unexpectedly. She had been due to embark on a European tour in the coming months.
She was 75. She had been hospitalized since early May following emergency surgery for an intestinal perforation caused by a ruptured appendix. Her condition worsened, leading doctors to place her in a medically induced coma. After weeks in intensive care, she never fully recovered.
By her side was her husband, Robert Sullivan, a former British judo champion. They married when Bonnie was twenty six and remained together for more than half a century.
A voice born by accident
That voice was never part of the plan. At twenty six, doctors discovered nodules on her vocal cords that were serious enough to require surgery. The operation was supposed to restore a clear, polished voice. It did exactly the opposite.
Instead, it left her with the rough, smoky rasp that would become her unmistakable trademark, more recognizable than almost any melody she ever sang. The first song she recorded with her new voice was It's a Heartache, which in 1977 sent her straight into the charts across much of the world and, the following year, onto the stage of Italy's Sanremo Music Festival. In the polished pop landscape of the late seventies, that crack in her voice sounded almost out of place. It was precisely what made audiences remember her.
When pop became theatre
Everything changed in 1983 with Total Eclipse of the Heart, written and produced by Jim Steinman, the creative force behind Meat Loaf's operatic masterpiece Bat Out of Hell. The recording session featured two members of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, Roy Bittan on piano and Max Weinberg on drums. That detail explains better than any review why the song feels like a miniature stage drama rather than a conventional pop single.
The original recording runs for seven minutes before being shortened for radio. Its music video, filmed inside a former psychiatric hospital in England, added the gothic imagery that the lyrics only hinted at. The album that featured it, Faster Than the Speed of Night, debuted at number one in the United Kingdom, making Tyler the first British female artist to achieve that feat. The single went even further, reaching the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States, something no other Welsh artist had accomplished, while earning her two Grammy nominations.
She followed it with Holding Out for a Hero, another collaboration with Steinman written for the soundtrack of Footloose. It was grand, theatrical and unapologetically eighties. The song would eventually be certified triple platinum and, two decades later, would find a whole new audience when Jennifer Saunders performed it as the Fairy Godmother in Shrek 2.
A song that no longer needs its singer
Some voices become so closely tied to a decade that they end up serving as its unofficial soundtrack, even for people who were not alive when those years unfolded. Bonnie Tyler's is one of them. The opening notes of Total Eclipse of the Heart, whether heard at a wedding, during karaoke or in a television series, are enough for almost anyone to recognize the song instantly, including generations born long after its release.
Unlike many artists who spend years trying to escape the decade that made them famous, Tyler never distanced herself from that legacy.
"I never get tired of singing it," she once said.
Among the many tributes shared after her death, one of the most heartfelt came from Catherine Zeta-Jones, cousin of Robert Sullivan. The actress remembered Tyler's extraordinary sense of humor, recalling the evening before her own wedding, when Bonnie took hold of the microphone and entertained everyone until the end of the night.
Total Eclipse of the Heart will remain an open doorway to the memory of Bonnie Tyler. Today, that memory carries a little more sadness than it did before.