Bonnie Tyler, the Welsh singer whose smoky voice powered a generation of dance floors and long car trips, has died at 75.
Her family said she passed away “unexpectedly” in a hospital in Portugal, where she was being treated for an illness. She had a home in Faro and was hospitalised there in May for emergency intestinal surgery before being placed in an induced coma.
“Bonnie’s family and team are heartbroken to announce that Bonnie unexpectedly passed away last night in hospital in Portugal as a result of the illness that she was being treated for,” her family said.
For anyone who lived through the 1980s, Tyler needs no introduction. Total Eclipse of the Heart and Holding Out for a Hero turned up on every radio station, at every wedding reception and school disco, and they have never really left the airwaves since.
Total Eclipse of the Heart has now been streamed more than a billion times, with fresh waves of listeners tuning in whenever a real solar eclipse rolls around, as happened in 2017 and again in 2024. The song sat at number one for four weeks and its music video has clocked over a billion views.
Music site Stereogum once described the track as an “extinction-level event rendered in musical form”, calling it “pop music as heart-pounding, chest-thumping, blood-gargling, heavens-falling passion explosion. It’s sheer spectacle. It’s fireworks and lasers and lightning and thunder. It soars and swoops and barrel-rolls.”
Tyler’s career brought three Grammy nominations, a stint representing Britain at Eurovision in 2013 where she placed 19th, and an MBE from Queen Elizabeth II in 2023 for her services to music.
But her story began a long way from the stage lights. Born Gaynor Hopkins, she was a coal miner’s daughter raised in public housing with an outside toilet in Skewen, Wales, just outside Swansea, one of six children.
She grew up worshipping the Beatles, bought her first single, Hippy Hippy Shake by the Swinging Blue Jeans, at 13, and watched Top of the Pops religiously, recording it on a reel-to-reel machine so she could copy down the lyrics of the songs she loved, her memoir Straight From the Heart recounts.
Her early idols were Janis Joplin, Nina Simone, Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding, and it was in her own bedroom, singing into a hairbrush, that her legendary rasp first found its voice.
“I used to sing them into my hairbrush for hours and hours, and that’s how it all started for me,” Tyler wrote. “I fell in love with singing just from doing that. Looking back, even then my voice had a husky tone to it, but I didn’t think much of it. I thought everyone’s voices were different from each other’s.”
Turns out hers was one of a kind, and for millions of us, it still is.
Images: Instagram
