LONDON, July 9 (Reuters) – The gravelly tone that made Bonnie Tyler’s voice so instantly recognizable was the result of an accident.
After undergoing surgery to remove a vocal cord nodule in 1977, she was ordered to rest her voice. But one day, she let out an angry scream that changed her forever.
Six years later, the Welsh singer released her most famous song, “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which showed off her husky sound and earned her a Grammy nomination.
“Hold Out for a Hero”, another dramatic rock ballad, was released soon after and helped Tyler make his mark on the British pop scene. Both recordings have since been featured in movies, television shows, and advertisements.
Tyler, who released works such as “It’s a Heartache” and “Lost in France,” has died, BBC News reported on Thursday. She was 75 years old.
“You don’t say boo to a goose.”
Tyler was born Gaynor Hopkins in 1951 in South Wales, the fourth of six children to a coal miner and a housewife.
She grew up in the village of Skewen, on the outskirts of Swansea, in a four-bed council house with a large garden. In 2012, she told the Guardian: “I think it was really hard for Mum and Dad. They raised a large family on very little money.”
Music was an integral part of everyday life, whether it was playing on radiographs, her mother singing while she did housework, opera or “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini.”
When Tyler was seven years old, he went to see a musical at a local church. There she fell in love with Irving Berlin’s song “There’s No Business Like Show Business”, which gave the shy child a desire to perform for the first time.
“I wouldn’t boo a goose, but there was still a part of me that longed to sing in public,” she recalled in her memoir, Straight from the Heart.
“That’s the song it was.”
She began working as a backup singer in her teens and released several albums of her own in the 1970s.
However, it wasn’t until the early 1980s, when she began working with American lyricist Jim Steinman, that she got her commercial break.
She charmed Steinman, who was already famous for composing Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell,” by sending him demos of theatrical rock songs she knew would suit her voice.
She recalls the moment she first heard his composition “Total Eclipse.” “I knew this was the song I’d been waiting for my whole life.” The song, recorded by Tyler, became, as Steinman described it, “a Wagnerian onslaught of sound and emotion” and would go on to top the charts in both the UK and the US.
The song, which features the powerful lyrics “Once upon a time, I was in love, but now I’m just falling apart,” has been streamed more than 1 billion times on online music platform Spotify.
It has appeared in the movies “Old School” and “Bandits,” the TV shows “Glee” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” and even an ad for Mastercard.
Creation of “Bonnie Tyler”
Since the 1990s, she has had more success in Norway, Austria and France than at home, but she represented Great Britain at the Eurovision Song Contest in 2013 and was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 2022 for her services to music.
Tyler married her first serious love, real estate developer Robert Sullivan, in 1973. “I still love him very much and he’s still with me,” she said 40 years later. The couple had no children.
Tyler didn’t really like his birth name. Asked how she came up with her pen name, she told BBC Radio Wales: “I got a broadsheet newspaper, wrote all the first names I could find on one list, wrote all the last names on another list, looked at both, and came up with Bonnie Tyler.
“And it was a great name.”
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(Edited by Olivier Holmy)
