“I couldn’t believe it the first time I heard this song,” said the singer Bonnie Tyler of Total Eclipse of the Heart, the bombastic 1983 power ballad that became her signature hit. Propelled to No 1 by a gothic video played on heavy rotation in the early years of MTV, it also returned to top the Apple music charts after the North American total solar eclipse of April 2024. “I can’t tell you how many people have told me they had their first dance to this song, they fell in love to this song,” Tyler, who has died aged 75 after a period of ill-health, said on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. “I never get tired of it.”
Total Eclipse of the Heart came nine years after Tyler’s band Imagination had failed to get past the first audition on the ITV talent show New Faces, and eight years after she was spotted singing Freda Payne’s Band of Gold in the Townsman nightclub in her home town of Swansea by a talent scout. Signed to RCA in 1976, she had two transatlantic country-styled hit singles, Lost in France (1976) and It’s a Heartache (1977), before signing to CBS (now Columbia) at a dip in her career in 1981.
