Håkan Steen remembers Bonnie Tyler
Håkan Steen
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Bonnie Tyler only had three big hits but her unique voice made them immortal.
Bonnie Tyler’s success was born out of frustration. In the spring of 1977, the 26-year-old from Wales was a fairly new and untested name as a recording artist. The year before, she had had a decent hit on several European charts with her second single “Lost in France” and just released his debut album “The world starts tonight”. When it started to be time for a new record, some knots were discovered on her vocal cords, which she needed to have surgery removed.
After such an operation, one should avoid talking for six weeks as much as possible. For Tyler, it was the same as not going out and meeting people. She, who described herself as a “talker”, did not want anyone to think that she had become arrogant and rude just because she got a hit.
One day she couldn’t take the silence anymore and stood up and screamed out loud.
When the doctor soon after stated that the voice would never be the same, Tyler at first thought that his career was over. Instead, one of pop history’s most distinctive expressions was hatched. It was more than anything else her hoarse and sultry voice that got the slightly country-pop single “It’s a heartache” to stand out on the radio and turn into a world hit.
In Sweden, which had de facto embraced Tyler already with the debut album, the song was heard everywhere, and that at a time when there were only two television channels and only one radio channel played pop music.
Of course, the six-year-old version of the undersigned didn’t know what “heartache” meant, but the raspy delivery of the lyrics somehow got the message across.
At the time of the breakthrough, however, Tyler was no novice. Born June 8, 1951 as Gaynor Hopkins she grew up in a strictly religious working-class home in the small town of Neath where she sang solo in church as a child.
She did not continue her studies after school but instead started working in a grocery store. When she was 18, she was asked by her grandmother to enter a local talent contest, where she finished second. Bolstered by the success, she began singing in both her own and other bands.
One night in 1975, she was singing in a club in Swansea and was lucky enough to be spotted by a talent scout who was actually there to listen to another singer but happened to walk into the wrong room.
It led to a contract with the record company RCA and a call from the executives to find a new artist name. The singer picked up some first and last names from a magazine and stuck with the combination Bonnie Tyler.
“It’s a heartache” made the second album “Natural force” sell gold in several countries, including the USA. A few more minor hits followed, but when the fourth album, 1981’s “Goodbye to the island”, only became a hit in Norway, Tyler chose not to renew his contract.
After instead signing to CBS and for a period searching for a new artistic identity, Tyler felt she needed to come back with a bang if it was going to be any idea. At the top of the wish list of collaborators was the American producer and songwriter Jim Steinmanwho a few years earlier had celebrated great triumphs with the bombastic rock on Meat Loafs hit album “Bat out of hell”.
Steinman specially wrote a single for Tyler’s voice. He described the song as “a Wagnerian attack of sound and emotion”, and with the help of, among others Roy Bitten and Max Weinberg from Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Bandthe guitarist Rick Derringer and the singer Rory Dodd he and Tyler bombed out one of the real contenders for the title of the power ballad of power ballads: “Total eclipse of the heart”.
Released in 1983 and in Sweden not least known for one classic performance in the TV show “The Fun Machine” where someone pushed with so much stage smoke that Tyler occasionally disappeared. It can be heard on the recording that she has difficulty holding back laughter.
For many early 70s people who went to middle school parties at the time, the song is presumably also immortalized as “the first pusher”.
The collaboration with Steinman led to another big hit the following year, the more uptempo-oriented but at least as bombastic and 80s-defining “Holding out for a hero” from the soundtrack to the movie “Footloose”.
No more big hits ever came to Bonnie Tyler but she continued to regularly record new music – latest single “One world one home” came as late as the end of April – and managed to build a solid career in the nostalgia swing with their old hits.
She had a loyal audience in countries such as France and Germany – collaborated in the 90s, among other things, with quite a few Giorgio Moroder and Dieter Bohlen from Modern Talking – and in recent years has, among other things, made quite a few cover albums and sung duets with them Francis Rossi from Status quo, Cliff Richard and Rod Stewart (who she has been compared to countless times for obvious vocal reasons). In 2013, she represented Great Britain in the Eurovision Song Contest, where she finished in nineteenth place.
Privately, Tyler lived together with the love of his youth Robert Sullivanproperty developer, since the end of the 80s with a house on the Portuguese Algarve coast as a base.
In mid-May, Bonnie Tyler would have been one of the poster names at the new 80s festival Walk In, Dance Out in Gothenburg, but fate regrettably wanted otherwise.
Bonnie Tyler turned 75 but her raspy pop classics are guaranteed to live on for a long time to come.
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