LONDON — Bonnie Tyler, the distinctive Welsh singer whose raspy voice helped turn “Total Eclipse of the Heart” into one of the defining power ballads of the 1980s, remains one of pop music’s most enduring performers. Reports circulating online about her death are not supported by verified public information.
Tyler, who has long been associated with both “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and “Holding Out for a Hero,” has continued to be celebrated for a career spanning decades. Her music has found new audiences repeatedly, particularly during solar and lunar eclipses, when fans return to her biggest hit in huge numbers.
Born Gaynor Hopkins in Skewen, Wales, Tyler grew up in a working-class family as the daughter of a coal miner. She was raised with three sisters and two brothers in public housing near Swansea before launching the career that would make her an international name.
Over the years, Tyler has received three Grammy nominations, represented the United Kingdom at the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest, where she finished 19th, and was honored with an MBE for services to music by Queen Elizabeth II.
“Total Eclipse of the Heart,” released in 1983, spent four weeks at No. 1 and has remained a pop-culture staple. Its music video has surpassed 1 billion views, while the song has also crossed the 1 billion-stream mark, helped in part by renewed attention during major eclipse events in 2017 and 2024.
The track’s dramatic production and sweeping vocals have continued to earn praise. In a 2020 reassessment, Stereogum described it as an “extinction-level event rendered in musical form,” calling it a spectacle of “fireworks and lasers and lightning and thunder.”
Its influence has extended far beyond the charts. The song was covered by Nicki French in 1995 and Westlife in 2006, appeared in films including “Bandits” and “Old School,” and was performed by One Direction on the U.K. version of “The X Factor” in 2010.
Early life
Decades after its release, Tyler’s signature hit remains inseparable from her legacy — a towering ballad that continues to resurface across generations, from karaoke rooms and movie soundtracks to viral eclipse playlists.
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 loved. Her favorites were 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’s how it all started for me. I fell in love with singing just from doing that. Looking back, even then my voice had a husky tone to it, but I didn’t think much of it. I thought everyone’s voices were different from each other’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.
‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’
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 around, bright 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 liked to put down a basic rhythm track, do nine takes of the song, choose the best one and then put the kitchen sink on there, like Phil Spector used to,” Tyler told The Guardian in 2023. “He gave me a cassette to listen to in my hotel and we both preferred 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 light in my life/But now there’s only love in the dark,” 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.”
After the ‘Eclipse’
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-flavored 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 an absolutely wonderful atmosphere there,” she told the San Francisco Examiner in 2023. “I was being interviewed every 15, 20 minutes, and when I walked out onstage behind the British flag, I thought the roof was going to come off! It was awesome, just awesome!”
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.
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