Forty years after its release, Bonnie Tyler’s hit Total Eclipse Of The Heart has had a sudden major resurgence, thanks to last Monday’s total solar eclipse. The Welsh-born singer’s 1983 power ballad shot to No. 1 on iTunes, while searches on streaming service Spotify doubled. In her recent memoir, Tyler, now 72, gave an intriguing account of the album’s creation…
Six security guards, each with a dog, guarded the old Victorian building infirmary where we filmed the video for Total Eclipse Of The Heart. You couldn’t imagine a scarier place.
It is said that dogs have a sixth sense and those six animals would not go near the morgue or the room where doctors used to apply electric shocks to patients.
This rambling building near Virginia Water in Surrey was called Holloway Sanatorium. It was a former mental hospital and its vast echoing emptiness terrified us all.
In 1983, it found heavy rotation on an exciting new channel called MTV, a gift for the song.
Jim: The composer, lyricist and record producer who also masterminded Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell album.
But it did fit the tone of the song and the extravagant imagination of the great Jim Steinman, nicknamed the Lord of Excess, who directed the video and wrote Total Eclipse Of The Heart.
Jim, the composer, lyricist and record producer who also masterminded Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell album, added all sorts of crazy elements, like American football players and pigeons, to the video.
Of course! Her mind was infinitely inventive, eccentric and grandiose.
It was also surprising that she convinced me to wear a dress instead of my usual jeans and leather jackets. It was one of the few times I did it, but it was gorgeous: sheer, floor-length, and white with a daring slit and wrap top.
There was a famous film director on the production team who didn’t like that I kept asking questions. Every time he said, ‘Do I really have to do this?’ or ‘Why are we doing that?’ He put his eyes white. I found the video very confusing. I think people still do it now. It was supposed to be a dream sequence, so some parts don’t make any sense. But neither do dreams.
Goodness, though, it was relentlessly hard work. And since it was filmed in the middle of winter, we were all freezing cold.
We started at 9.30am and finished 18 hours later, at 3.30am the next day, shortly after a group of pagan dancers chased me barefoot through the snow.
At one point, a young man sitting in a chair releases a dove. At first they wanted me to shoot the scene naked. He opposed me saying: ‘You have absolutely no chance; he is a little boy.
They finally decided to dress him in a school uniform. Then two of the guys in a dinner scene ended up in the hospital. They had to act out a fight in which a table was overturned and during the fight a glass plate shattered. The poor guys fell on it and cut themselves, so they were rushed to the emergency room to get stitched up.
There was a famous film director on the production team who didn’t like that I kept asking questions. Bonnie Tyler is appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire by the Prince of Wales in 2023.
The song itself was, in my opinion, perfect, apart from one flaw. Because it was originally written for a musical called Dance Of The Vampires, it was over seven minutes long.
Even now, every time I do TV shows, they play a clip from the Total Eclipse Of The Heart video, and it’s now had around 1.1 billion views on YouTube. [By Tuesday it was the channel’s second most watched video in the US after Americans devoured it during the eclipse].
I was amazed when they gave me the song. And I just knew. I knew this was the song I had been waiting for my whole life.
The song itself was, in my opinion, perfect, apart from one flaw. Because it was originally written for a musical called Dance Of The Vampires, it was over seven minutes long.
Imagine trying to put that on Top Of The Pops!
So it had to be cut down to four minutes and 30 seconds for anything to play on the radio.
Meat Loaf was also devastated that he wasn’t given the song to sing. He apparently called Jim Steinman to ask why they had chosen me to sing it. Every time he saw Meat Loaf, he said, ‘That song was mine!’ To this day, I have no idea why Jim chose me to record it, but I’m so happy he did. I will be forever grateful because his appeal is universal. Even when I recorded it, I knew there was something magical and lasting about it.
In 1983, it found heavy rotation on an exciting new channel called MTV, a gift to the song. There have also been some great parodies of the song and video over the years. My favorite is a Lego version that makes my head fall off.
People always ask me what I think of parodies, imagining that I would be offended, but in reality I am enormously flattered. When the song was released on February 11, 1983, it reached number one in both the United Kingdom and the United States and spent a month at the top of the American charts. [Today, sales are nudging six million and on the day of the eclipse it sold 4,000 copies].
I was 32 when it came out and it marked the pinnacle of my ambition. At the end of each day I called my record company to ask how many sales I had. Sales reached 57,000 copies a day, incredible by today’s standards.
I was nominated for two Grammy Awards, and the awards were held at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, a huge venue with all the glitz and glamor of a movie set.
I sang the song dressed in a tight leather mini dress and sky-high heels. [pictured].
I had to start singing at the top of a wide, wide staircase and go down to the bottom, staring at the audience.
It was absolutely stressful. I kept thinking: I’m going to fall, I’m going to fall! Thank God I didn’t.
I was amazed when they gave me the song. And I just knew. I knew this was the song I had been waiting for my whole life.
Today it is still one of those songs that everyone likes to sing after having a few drinks.
That February 1984 ceremony drew the awards’ largest television audience in its history. A staggering 51.67 million people tuned in. In the audience was a galaxy of stars: Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, Lionel Ritchie… all looking directly at me. I had never done anything on that scale before.
As for the awards, Irene Cara beat me in the Best Pop Vocal Performance category, female category with her song Flashdance. . . What feeling. Michael Jackson was the biggest winner of the night, with eight Grammy Awards.
It’s hard to imagine now that more than 40 years ago karaoke was becoming a huge thing. Total Eclipse Of The Heart was the number one karaoke song in the UK at the time.
Today, it is still one of those songs that everyone likes to sing after having a few drinks.
lAdapted from Straight from the Heart by Bonnie Tyler (Hodder & Stoughton, £22). © Bonnie Tyler 2023. To order a copy for £19.80 (offer valid until 27 April, free UK p&p on orders over £25), visit mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937
