Farewell Bonnie Tyler: Remembering a Pop/Rock Legend and Her Greatest Hits

Goodbye Bonnie Tyler – and thank you for all your wonderful, gutsy over the top performances.  You will most certainly be missed – although we still have your music.  Without wanting to sound maudlin, when you reach a certain age and pop and rock icons shrug off their mortal coils, it does lead to a little reflection – and I have very fond memories of Bonnie Tyler.  Like a lot of people, I first came across her music with Lost in France – while not her first single, it did see her first entry into the UK charts. Sliding gracefully into the Top 10, it was a breezy country-pop delight, with the video particularly popular – she was just lost in France, in love.

The next Tyler song I remember is It’s a Heartache, a great number with the first real vinyl appearance of her raspy vocals.  As the press soon told the country, this was the result of the removal of nodules from her vocal folds – and while perhaps an inadvertent side-effect of the operation, it gave Tyler her trademark voice for which she will always be remembered.

Although Tyler continued to record and release, she fell of my radar until 1981’s Total Eclipse of the Heart which was really very difficult to miss.  With a quite startling video (very bug budget for the time, too) and our first glimpse of rock opera Bonnie (as I have just christened that particular incarnation of hers), it was a global hit and remains close to the hear of millions of people.  In fact, in the homage from the British channel ITV, an interview is played from when she sang the song at the moment of a total solar eclipse. 

Nos da, Bonnie. Cysga'n dda.

...And while we'er at it, why not listen to Total Eclipse again? As much as Bonnie Tyler never got sick of singing it, this is a song that so many of us return to time and time again just for the sake of listening to it one more time...