Notes from Psychick Albion
9th July 2026
Bonnie Tyler 1951-2026
Bonnie Tyler has died at the age of 75 following emergency surgery carried out in May. One of the great Welsh singers, and an international superstar, she will always be fixed in my mind for the gothic excess of the ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ song and video. The song spent four weeks at number one in 1983 and watching the video on Top of the Pops felt like watching a succinct, surreal horror film. Directed by the Australian Russell Mulcahy, the video was very much of its time and is a genuine time capsule from the heart of the haunted generation.
Watching it again now, it disturbs for different reasons. The sexualised schoolboys seem inconceivably problematic when viewed from a post-Savile viewpoint, and it’s uncomfortably difficult to imagine what was going through the minds of everyone watching the video back then. Obviously the ‘special effects’ are now charmingly clunky, and the overall aesthetic vision of the video belongs to a time when Athena posters were de rigueur. In truth, it’s a bit of a mess. And yet, the boarding school horror scenario suggests something of the violence of Linsey Anderson’s If…. and the video-as-mini-film concept was a relatively early example of what could be achieved with that format, offering a glimpse of a high-tech image-rich future that could barely be imagined.
Ultimately, the whole thing was held together and corralled by the masterful vocals of Bonnie Tyler. Jim Steinman’s melodies and arrangements are desperate to become too overblown (as happens when Meatloaf provides the vocals to Steinman’s work) but Tyler refuses to allow a sliver of detached irony into her performance. She manages - just - to keep the song at a human level, something that required an almost superhuman vocal power. Having managed to contain the power of the song to an intimate human scale, the gothic excess of the music adds to, rather than detracts from, its enduring power. Which perhaps explains why it one of the most popular songs of all time.
I don’t feel a particular connection to her other work, but it’s enough to marvel at the unlikely collision of artistic visions that brought together the operatic kitsch of Steinman, the melodramatic choreography of the video, and the unmistakable vocals of Bonnie Tyler to make ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ a song for eternity. I don’t know what strange alchemy made it all work but I’m certain that without that voice, it wouldn’t have.
Rest well in Annwn, daughter of Cymru.