Bonnie Tyler was born in a coal-mining town in Wales in 1951. But she was made on an operating table in 1977, when surgery to remove nodules from her vocal cords went a little awry – during recuperation, she screamed in frustration when she shouldn’t have, permanently altering her voice so it sounded like she’d swallowed a bag of gravel. And it’s that new voice – husky, howling, truly singular – that we tend to remember, and specifically on “Total Eclipse of the Heart”. It was the wildly maximalist Eighties power ballad that rescued her career and – via its bonkers video, filmed inexplicably in an old asylum – made us all forever scared of glowing children.
Tyler died on Wednesday (8 July) at the age of 75, two months after she was temporarily placed in an induced coma following emergency intestinal surgery at a hospital in Faro, Portugal, where she had a home. The radio silence surrounding her health in the interim was concerning, but mainly because Tyler typically seemed a bit superhuman. So many of her gig photos seem to capture her mid-bellow, mouth wide and trembling. Her records, too, tended to have titles that suggested action and resilience – Natural Force, Diamond Cut, Faster Than the Speed of Night, with its cover art depicting a laser beam quite literally shooting through her temples. And her vocals were so guttural and loud, as if the walls of the recording booths she was in were at constant risk of shattering.
