It’s A Heartache: RIP Bonnie Tyler

How a coal miner’s daughter from Wales became the Rod Stewart then turned into an ’80s icon.

Bonnie Tyler’s first RCA Records publicity photo, 1976

Bonnie Tyler died July 8, 2026, in a hospital in Portugal, following complications from surgery. She was 75.

I spent most of the summer I turned 9 in a bright yellow chaise on the back deck of our house in Longmont, Colorado. My parents were at work, my brother was on the basketball court in the park across Lashley Avenue, and my sister was wherever college students go in summer. I was alone and in my happy place: stack of library books and a plastic glass of strawberry Kool-Aid over refrigerator-door ice on the metal table to my right, sprinkler on the lawn to my left, just close enough that a little freezing-cold mist might blow my way if a breeze came up. The tap water in Longmont, basically melted Rocky Mountain glaciers, was like ice even in the middle of July. Nobody ever used their Slip ’n’ Slide more than once.

Also on that table was a Panasonic portable radio and cassette player, my most recent Christmas present. I had it permanently set to 950 AM, Denver’s Top 40 powerhouse KIMN. That was the summer of the Grease soundtrack, “Baker Street,” “With A Little Luck,” and “Miss You.” And also of “It’s A Heartache,” a country-tinged soft-rock groove with an extremely familiar-sounding lead vocal, hoarse and lived-in and soulful. It was a great song, but the main reason I remember hearing it on KIMN that summer is that practically every time a DJ played it, they back-announced it by saying something like “2:38 on a warm and sunny Wednesday, hope you’re out there catching some rays. New from Bonnie Tyler, ‘It’s A Heartache.’ And guys, you keep calling in and asking for the new Rod Stewart single. It’s not Rod Stewart, her name is Bonnie Tyler.”

Bonnie Tyler was born Gaynor Hopkins in Skewen, a Welsh mining village, on June 8, 1951, and grew up one of six kids on a council estate. Raised in a deeply religious household, she sang in her Anglican church choir from childhood. Two years after she left school at 16, she came in second in a local talent competition, which was apparently all the encouragement she needed to get out of Skewen. Working a day job as a supermarket checkout girl, she played the Welsh club circuit with her band Imagination at night. During a gig in Swansea, she got spotted by a talent scout who liked her take on Freda Payne’s “Band of Gold” and brought her in to record some demos. That lucky break landed her a management team, a deal with RCA Records, and a new stage name she claimed to have pulled from two adjoining names in a London phone book.

Tyler’s new managers, songwriting team Ronnie Scott and Steve Wolfe, saw her as a sort of Welsh Linda Ronstadt, a pop singer who could cross over to the easy listening and country markets with the right material. Her debut album The World Starts Tonight did pretty well, landing a Top 10 UK hit with “Lost In France.” But years of singing without any kind of technique or training had given her nodules on her vocal cords, which required surgery in the spring of 1977. She was given strict instructions to stay on complete vocal rest for six weeks. According to legend, she screamed in frustration one day in the middle of her recuperation, permanently giving her already husky voice its signature rasp.

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“It’s A Heartache,” Tyler’s first single after the surgery, was a perfect showcase for her appealingly damaged new voice, and it became an international hit. She kept doing pretty well in Europe over the next few years, but she didn’t really like the material Scott and Wolfe were writing for her, or their insistence that she should become a full-on Nashville-style country singer. When her contract expired on New Year’s Eve, 1981, she walked away from both her label and her managers, determined to make a fresh start.

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British A&R legend Muff Winwood, whose discoveries included everyone from Sparks and Dire Straits to Prefab Sprout and Terence Trent D’Arby, signed her to CBS Records in 1982 and put her in touch with her first choice of producer, Jim Steinman, Tyler was an enormous fan of Meatloaf’s near-symphonic smash Bat Out of Hell, a Steinman-penned song cycle that was as much Andrew Lloyd Webber-style rock opera as it was Phil Spector-inspired pop. Recently estranged from Mr. Loaf and eager to make his mark again, Steinman assembled close to the same band that made Bat Out of Hell, including guitarist Rick Derringer and pianist Roy Bittan and drummer Max Weinberg from the E Street Band, and created the gloriously over the top Faster Than The Speed Of Night.

The album’s centerpiece was one of the most improbable hit singles of the ’80s. “Total Eclipse of the Heart” was a seven-minute ballad — yes, radio routinely played the whole thing — that pretty much entirely dispensed with traditional pop-song structure in favor of just one swelling, crashing climax after another. The spectacularly strange Russell Mulcahy-directed music video, a bizarre and vaguely sexual psychodrama set in apparently some kind of boys school in a medieval-era castle (or…something) is in retrospect the first shot in MTV’s shift from a cool, barebones showcase for low-budget music videos by little-known new bands into something that people expected to make a lot of money from. All I knew in the fall of 1983 is that they played this video like once an hour.

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In America at least, Bonnie Tyler only had one more hit, only a few months later. Another Jim Steinman tune, “Holding Out For A Hero” was one of five hit singles from the inescapable soundtrack to Footloose, a deeply silly movie about a town where dancing is outlawed until Kevin Bacon shows up and gets the local kids all riled up. It’s the probably the weakest of Bonnie’s three American hits, but it’s hard not to feel a nostalgic fondness for it whenever it shows up on the in-store music at some interstate convenience store.

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Bonnie Tyler maintained a solid career in Europe over the next four decades, scoring hits in places like Norway with songs like the Scottish folk-inflected “Bitterblue.” Perhaps inevitably, she represented the UK in the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest, finishing a very respectable 19th with a Steinman-style ballad called “Believe in Me.” She was awarded an MBE in 2023, and was still releasing singles and playing live as recently as earlier this year. “Total Eclipse of the Heart” was still her calling card, turning up in places as unexpected as The Beta Band’s 1999 indie groove “The Hard One” and a 2024 television advert for Jaffa Cakes.

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In a lovely touch, Rod Stewart posted a tribute the day her death was announced, affectionately noting their similar vocal style.