Today was the funeral of Welsh warbler Bonnie Tyler, who passed in Portugal on 8 July 2026, aged 75. The most successful Cymric chanteuse after Shirley Bassey, BT was, unlike the older, imperiously Goldfingered diva, disarmingly down to earth. Which is why Shirl is holed up in the tax exile paradiso of Monaco while the public procession for Bonnie’s service snaked through her home village of Mumbles. Tellingly, it’s mere minutes from the singer’s birthplace in Skewen, where she entered orbit on 8 June 1951 as Gaynor Hopkins. And with a lovely lunar synchronicity, the final ffarwel took place just five days after a rare total eclipse shone a diamond star halo across much of Europe. She would have loved that.
Bonnie’s biggest worldwide hit other than that inescapably epic, high octane opera? That’ll be the Footloose and restraint-free soundtrack song, Holding Out For A Hero. A preposterously histrionic slice of wanton kitsch, the single had to settle for silver when it was out-camped, out-corned, and outsold by Bowie & Jagger’s charity ‘hilarity’ Dancing In The Street for three weeks in September 1985.
It might be said that, like the Live Aid cheesefest from the ex showbiz shags, Bonnie could be susceptible to the occasional crap career choice when it didn’t suit her—duetting with Shaky and letting her heroine Tina Turner take over her flop 45 to become the multi-million behemoth that is (simply) The Best to name but two. And like the titan from Tennessee, the Swansea seductress didn’t make her mark in music until she was well into her twenties. That’ll be the yearning housewives’ favourites Lost In France and It’s A Heartache then; a pair of plaintive country-tinged ballads useful for comparing her much talked about before-and-after-vocal styles.
Soon after the Gallic gem found its way into the UK top ten (No. 1 that November ’76 week? One of the very first 45s I really loved: Showaddywaddy’s Under The Moon Of Love. Cough. Well, I was seven), Tyler underwent an operation in the spring of 1977 to remove nodules from her vocal cords. However, the self-confessed chatterbox failed to follow the six-week rest period imposed by her doctor and permanently damaged her voice through sheer frustration, leaving her with that distinctive gravelly huskiness that would be her calling card, even if “a raspier Rod Stewart with strep throat” and “the singing cheese grater” were the sort of assessments that emanated in some lovingly unkind quarters.
No matter, because the naggingly insistent It’s A Heartache coursed its way into the top five by New Year 1978 (top of the pops? Wings’ pedestrian plod through the Mull Of Kintyre, which I didn’t care for one bit, and still don’t). Happily, BT’s second smash did the business across the pond too. Though commercial drought soon beckoned, punctuated only by a sleazy sax-dominated disco folly called Married Men, an acutely minor hit in the summer of ’79 which came across like porntastic spillage from The Stud. More Boyce than moist, the well would be dry as a bone for almost half a decade, until a certain coruscating comeback. Enter the man who made Meat Loaf. Zut alors.
Born in New York on 1 November 1947 (exactly a month prior to my father, albeit in London), Jim Steinman was an irrefutable master when it came to expansive, overblown rock. Something of a Gothic post-60s Spector, Steinman’s output has all the hallmarks of an alternate-universe Wall of Sound. His operatic onslaughts put Meat Loaf on the musical menu, being responsible for the vast bulk of his catalogue (Bat Out Of Hell, the Cher-boosted Dead Ringer For Love, et al), and by 1983 the larger than life lyricist, composer and producer had his colourful hand prints on a new breed of power pop bangers from washed up 70s starlets, among them an Air Supply soft rocker that did zilch in Britain and, well, the batty one…
A few years back there was a brand new myth, sorry, theory, doing the rounds. Apparently, the song that was No. 1 on your 14th birthday is the one that defines your entire existence. Why? I’m not entirely sure, but someone on the internet said it does, so, hey, let’s roll with it.
So what was the single topping the American Billboard Hot 100 on 26th June, 1983, four days before a certain Girls Aloud vocalist named Cheryl (insert ever-evolving surname of your choice) was born? Well, it was that Irene Cara post-disco soundtrack thing, Flashdance…What A Feeling. It’s alright, but you don’t need me to remind you that Giorgio Moroder had produced much more groundbreaking work when he felt like it.
What about in the country of my birth, the ‘United’ Kingdom? That musical honour went to that limpid radio behemoth, the stalker’s very own “our tune”, Every Breath You Take by The Police, which was also the year’s biggest seller in the US. Hmm, the bitter Sting of tears indeed. It’s decent, but how about I put through a quick call Down Under to my second adopted homeland, Australia, to see if they have anything better?
I knew Bruce and Sheila wouldn’t let me down because reigning supreme on the incongruously titled Kent Music Report for a whopping six long weeks, from May through to July 1983, was Total Eclipse Of The Heart, by our beloved queen of eighties poodle perms. The curls will come, hold your horses.
Issued in April 1983, Bonnie Tyler’s fifth album Faster Than The Speed Of Night* is a patchy affair—a ragbag collection of twice the amount of covers (John Fogerty, Ian Hunter, Bryan Adams) to originals. Though, to my attuned ears at least, when they work Steinman’s high camp aural panoramas make much more sense with a female voice. Having said that, from the cadence to the phrasing the underwhelming title track is so obviously a Meat Loaf cast off it may as well been issued with a picture of a Sunday roast on the cover.
Either way, the collaboration with Steinman generated Bonnie’s only No. 1 LP, having entered the UK charts in pole position, slicing Pink Floyd’s Final Cut down from the top before being displaced a week later by David Bowie’s Let’s Dance.
Its first single, the perennial powder-keg that is Total Eclipse Of The Heart, also stands as Bonnie’s sole chart-topping 45, her biggest hit, and the one she’ll always be remembered for. A love song for a vampire, this is never-knowingly-understated Jim Steinman at his most brilliantly bombastic, the OTT opera we reach for when we have grown tired of exhibiting graceful restraint. And if I crank the volume up, its sparkly powerhouse of emotion can almost reduce me to a quivering wreck. Just because it’s insanely popular doesn’t actually mean it’s bad.
Epic, dramatic, volcanic and lots of other words ending in ‘ic’ too, Total also happened to be the fifth largest selling single in Britain that year, just behind the Dame’s Chictastic Let’s Dance. Out of character for me, perhaps, but I don’t mind admitting I absolutely lurve its Wagnerian-like onslaught of sound and emotion, written and powerfully produced by Jim Steinman. One could almost call it an aria.
After hearing the New Yorker’s compositions on ver Loaf’s mega unit-shifting Bat Out Of Hell, Bonnie approached the tunesmith for a team-up. Total Eclipse Of The Heart was originally earmarked for a Steinman musical about vampires, but he re-worked its conception for the Welsh woman, bringing in a set of ace musicians: Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg from Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band on piano and drums, Rick Derringer on guitar and Larry Fast on synthesizers. Rory Dodd, a frequent Steinman go-to, sings the angelic choral-like “Turn around, bright eyes”, a recycled refrain from Steinman’s 1969 college musical The Dream Engine.
As usual with Steinman’s work, Total’s arrangements are operatic, ornate and very over-the-top but Tyler’s ferocious vocal power is such that she’s not overwhelmed by the deliciously grandiose mania surrounding her. Crikey, I don’t know that a person enjoys the song so much as submits to it. It’s that devastating.
But if you’re wondering what the story is about — the particular story it tells — I can’t really help you, except that like the natural phenomenon itself, the lyrics are devilishly dark. “I always laugh when I hear people play Total Eclipse Of The Heartand Paradise By The Dashboard Light at their weddings,” Steinman once said. “I wonder if it’s grim foreshadowing.”
“With Total Eclipse, I was trying to come up with a love song and I remembered I actually wrote that to be a vampire love song. Its original title was Vampires In Love because I was working on a musical of Nosferatu, the other great vampire story. If anyone listens to the lyrics, they’re really like vampire lines. It’s all about the darkness, the power of darkness and love’s place in dark.”
The piece pulsates with heartache, passion, and mystery, communicating great anguish over some unspecified romantic loss: “Once upon a time there was light in my life, but now there’s only love in the dark,” she rasps and gasps, her three packs a day husk helping to legitimise the melodrama inherent in the lyrics. You might be thinking that love in the dark doesn’t sound so bad. Yet to hear Bonnie sing it—and her voice is capacious, emotive, truly unwavering in its sincerity—is to recognise that something good has collapsed. Perhaps Steinman’s narrative is purposefully nonsensical, a cryptic homage to the ways in which we gabble and rant when deeply wounded.
Who else can write mini operatic melodies like this nowadays? Jim gave the Welsh windbag a chance to belt, with a committed rendering that spirals orgasmically through at least six climaxes, key changes and hailstorms. Like the Loaf before her, Tyler seemed to instinctively understand that the best way to animate a Steinman song is to sing it like a crazy person—ruddy-faced, flinging your arms every which way, single-handedly sucking each molecule of oxygen from the room.
To perform it properly means that by the time a singer gets to the end—to that final, shredding “I really need you tonight!”—she should be in a state of complete psychic collapse. On a cellular level, the dear listener must understand that she is not fucking around. This Total tune offers the gift of release, a chest-beating and emotionally exhausting exercise in psychodrama before a hot water bottle and bedtime.
We salute you Jim and Bonnie. Anyone who steps into the karaoke spotlight to try and emulate the power-pop pipeage on this mega-bombast classic has my undying respect, too. While rock critic snootperson types often looked down upon his extravagant and excessive style, the composer remained defiant: “If you don’t go over the top, how are you ever going to see what’s on the other side?” he once asked. Bonnie concurred wholeheartedly, telling the BBC’s The World At One she was “so privileged” to have Steinman’s songs in her repertoire.
“Jim writes these very bombastic sort of Wagnerian kind of music. When you see him play the piano, he starts with his hair all lovely and dry. By the time he is finished it’s dripping with sweat and it’s all stuck around his face because he plays with such vigour.”
A wrenchingly dramatic rock ballad with a darkly fantastical and sublimely subversive video that became an MTV staple, Total Eclipse Of The Heart spent a month atop the American Billboard charts, at its peak selling around 60,000 copies a day while that other Steinman scribe, Air Supply’s Making Love with a soft rock ballad, sat in second place.
Hell, this was a song so insanely powerful that in Britain the Total experience knocked Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean off her perch and denied Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) any chance of ever reaching the summit. After a fortnight’s glory, it would be deposed by Duran Duran’s Beatles-esque Is There Something I Should Know? The Brummies excepted, all were all seventies, if not sixties, veterans. But it is they suddenly finding themselves at the forefront of this shiny new era.
It’s like punk, as Smash Hits famously declared, never happened. And Steinman was beaming.
“That song never goes away. It’s the biggest karaoke song in the world and it’s been covered dozens of times. It’s one of my children and I’m as proud of it as I am the others. I try not to play favourites but yeah, it’s special. I was primarily known for doing records for Meat Loaf and my own records, which were these thunderous, Wagnerian, almost heavy metal, epic, stormy records. I was a little bit surprised they would ask me, but my second thought it was a real challenge because of that. And I thought she had one of the most passionate voices I’d ever heard in rock and roll since Janis Joplin.”
The only thing more spine-tingling than the song itself, which was edited from its fully unexpurgated seven minutes down to 4:33 for single release, was its promotional video. Yes, if you didn’t already know, the cine-extravaganza is unapologetically preposterous in its glorious ridiculousness.
The Total Eclipse extravaganza was conceived by Russell Mulcahy, the quick-cut gay Aussie director of Highlander I will forever give a pass to. Not because he worked with Sean Connery and Queen in one fell swoop, but because just prior to this clip he was the man responsible for putting Ultravox in Vienna (literally), and a shirtless John Taylor from Duran being squirted at on an elephant in Sri Lanka. Cue freeze frame.
A masterpiece high on overblown emotion, Total’s film takes its cue from its parent song by reminding us that pop music should involve fantasy and a keen sense of the ridiculous. It’s certainly one of Mulcahy’s most elaborate videos in terms of production value, artistic flourish, and high camp pretentiousness.
Embodying if not enhancing the lush, epic grandeur of the music, its opening shot gently moves us towards a softly lit window of a room at an imposing, castle-like prep school at night. (In real life, Surrey’s disused Holloway Sanatorium, a Victorian Gothic hospital that had already been queen of the promo scene for Adam Ant’s Goody Two Shoes and The Cure’s Charlotte Sometimes.). The 80s Hogwarts is ready for her close up, Mr. DeMille.
A shadow moves across a full moon. Our Bonnie looks plaintively out the window from underneath seven tons of eye shadow. She stares blankly, impervious to the gentle breeze blowing against her, while the room boasts a bunch of stuff that was apparently stolen from Stevie Nicks’s dressing room: fans, a gauzy bandana, and shitloads of candles.
Empty crystal decanters sit patiently as an empty toilet roll flaps in the wind, rising like a benzedrine puff adder or maybe just an engorged manhood. It all hints at her sleepless agony, or possibly just a runny bottom. This video is nothing if not meaningful, but please don’t stare directly at it for too long or you will go blind. And she’s got her eyes set on you.
A single white dove—or perhaps Ms Nicks’s own cockatoo from the Bella Donna album cover—flies urgently out of a bright room into a dark hallway and flaps its wings, oblivious to the fact that the lyrics are telling it to turn around. Perhaps it doesn’t speak English. What should be a romantic image, then—soaring and dreamy—is in fact a frustrated one, because the poor bird is struggling to fly, flapping about at the bottom of the screen. Would it be gauche to call it a symbol of Tyler’s own frustrated desire? I hope not, because that’s totally what it is.
Amidst these shots of an amorous Bonnie brooding at night, the video shows a series of quick, dreamlike shots representing the stirring of her forbidden fantasies coming alive at night. Even though there’s no sign of Sia, chandeliers swing ominously in a grand hall full of dark wood panel frames and musty old bricks. Some serious moonlight—representing madness, desire, and transformation—casts an eerie glow through the school’s gymnasium like in a Hammer horror movie. The lighting contrasts that of light and dark, its radical juxtapositions, and Mulcahy’s use of smoke and mist to create achingly moody atmospherics.
The camera cues up a close up of our Welsh heroine looking a bit sad and scared as she belts the lyrics echoing those emotions. During the song’s first “Turn around bright eyes” line, double doors bathed in dark greenish light slowly open, revealing a strange young man wearing prep school uniform. I told you this was 80s Hogwarts. Except this student is definitely not a Hufflepuff. He has scary, glowing blue eyes because Mulcahy and his team were like, “Let’s take the part where she sings about bright eyes extremely literally.”
We see the world through her eyes, not Depeche Mode’s. Tyler looks forward, as though at him, or perhaps this is a dream, or a fantasy or a nightmare on realm street. Like a restless ghost, this tenacious adolescent haunts her subconscious. Or perhaps he just wants to roger her.
The only woman in the entire story, she’s tormented by her overflowing desire for the ripening tuck boxes of her male students. Mulcahy’s camera objectifies, displays, conceals, and reveals the lithe young bodies in strikingly artful and erotic ways. The school’s Gothic aesthetic, with high ceilings, stone walls and burning candles, hints at secretive rituals and adds to the video’s decadent tortured elegance.
As the choon builds, the visuals get more dazzling in their contrasts of light and darkness. Our Bonnie walks down the dark hallway, lit from behind angelically. A door opens to her right, and we get a quick peek of supple students sitting at desks as though attending class (despite the late hour, suggesting this is probably a dream or memory). They wear smart ties and white dress shirts.
Then, suddenly, a breeze blows, parting open the barely buttoned shirts of the young bucks, revealing tantalising glimpses of their smooth, nubile, bare chests. It happens so fast you are not sure if you really saw it or just imagined it, putting you further in the mindset of Tyler and her rapturous subconscious torment. Much of video dwells in such a dreamlike subconscious state. Thanks to trusty YouTube, I can confirm that yes, not only do shirts blow open, but they do so in slow motion, making the scene vaguely pornographic. But it’s so quick that if you blink, you miss it. More’s the pity.
As BT proceeds down the hallway, the next door flies open to reveal a younger lad sitting on giant wooden chair. He’s sporting yuppie-style slicked back hair but made up to look like a girl, adding a topical gender bending dimension to the vid’s homoerotic visuals. The boy-girl wears angel wings and hurls a white dove into the air. The face is bathed in bright white light, the school uniform in darkness. But this may not be the last of him-her.
Spying through a metaphorical keyhole, the next door reveals a group of goggle-eyed swimmers in speedos, carefully posed for the camera, their athletic bodies on full display, however brief. Suddenly, they’re drenched by water that comes from off-camera. Slow motion, of course. Helpfully, they stand in close proximity to one another in a tiled locker room. All this student activity is incongruous—it’s late at night, the kids should be in bed—but this one carries with it the idea of some kind of secret society which meets at midnight when the moon is full, and probably their balls are too. Something is definitely going on.
Mulcahy was cleverly subversive in providing his audience salivating glimpses of male sexual desire that hasten the heartbeat and elevate the pulse. And given the previous shot of the students’ shirts flying open, the sexy shot that conjures up images of those tantalising tuck boxes dramatically elevates the video’s homoeroticism. The It’s A Sin vibe seems to add to Tyler’s torment because it suggests that, while she cannot have them, they are probably all having each other in these cabalistic corners of the vast building. Such is certainly the cultural lore of male boarding schools: that these students would be furtively fooling around with one another due to the absence of those things called girls.
Certainly, the director was aware of this, the blunt homoerotic subtext characteristic of his other contemporaneous clips such as Elton John’s crotch-heavy I’m Still Standing or Billy Joel’s bare-arsed Allentown. These promotional devices sport imagery that grabs the attention of any gay boy watching MTV at that moment, while Eclipse’s use of a female protagonist inverts the music channel’s usual pattern of gender objectification. With a disproportionately male audience in mind, videos back then tended to feature objectified “hot babes” to amp up the heterosexual charge. More’s the pity.
Many female performers such as that two-bit tart Madonna were eager to exploit this hegemonic heteronormativity by slutting themselves up for the cameras. But this clip is different, as it also brushes up against taboos about intergenerational sex. Bonnie, then 32, is a reasonably mature woman and these athletic supports look to be in their late teens, making them dangerous bait with her professional obligations, like male femme fatales, luring her to certain doom if she succumbs to her desires. But in resisting her desires she suffers perpetual anguish. The video gives us a front row seat to her torment and longing for something she cannot have. Any gayer can identify with this scenario, especially in Thatcher-Reagan’s 1980s.
![Bonnie Tyler - Total Eclipse of the Heart [Top Of The Pops 1984]](https://stevepafford.com/core/cache/flying-press/14585cd2c796ad6ddf5b799746889991.jpg)
In this visual feast the star of the show is not turned into meat or eye candy, she is elegant, classy, and restrained, evoking 1930s Hollywood glamour. She wears a flowing dress which covers almost all of her body, making her the MTV equivalent of a nun, and its blinding whiteness hints at virginity. In other words, she’s not the usual “rock chick,” and the film is a forewarning of what Meatloaf would return with in the 90s. Even so, the possessed choirboys in thong-like undies dancing around Tyler is pretty astoundingly out there, even for the 80s. There would be a cacophony of sexual exploitation of minors outrage if it were attempted now.
After our trip through the homoerotic hallway, we see a bunch of dancing ninjas in black robes performing martial arts in the grand hall, followed by a scene of five young men in formal evening clothes sitting around an elegantly made up dinner table. They raise up their shining goblets into each other for an aggressive toast as red wine spills in all directions.
The toast is supremely synchronised with the song’s coruscating cymbal crash. It’s decadent, bacchanalian, and outrageously orgiastic. Things are getting out of control. As the chorus commences, we spy more jock-strapped athleticism in the form of fencers, sword fighters, half-naked cartwheelers and hunky football players wearing shoulder pads but no shirts, which, in the 80s, is how you knew a Gothic pop party was really getting serious. Dynasty this ain’t.
These successive images become increasingly improbable: the teacher is mentally undressing her charges, and getting increasingly agitated while she’s at it. The meaning seems pretty straightforward: Bonnie‘s battling that age old issue, repression, because these boys are but illusions, and any attempt to actually grab them will result only in the lady grabbing herself. (Ahem.)
Despite the out-of-control wind machines, BT’s layered haloed hair looks impeccable. The educator has become the Eclipse. Eventually she bursts onto a ledge overlooking an arched hallway, bright blueish light drenching her in religious hues, singing passionately about torment and desire as a group of leather-jacketed street tuffs make their carefully choreographed way up a flight of stairs.
Each of these arresting images—the athletes, the biker gang—represent icons of masculinity, yet all have gay inflections. The way the younger boys are juxtaposed with the older teens further suggests a possible pedophiliac reading, since the cutting directly associates the two pairs of juniors (cf the cuts at 4:06, 4:15, 4:20, and 4:24).
The street urchins shake their hips in a decidedly feminine fashion while ramming their fists in their hands, foreshadowing violence or maybe just a casual spot of BDSM. They don’t mean any arm. When the footie players reappear and crash into each other, one seems to grab the other’s crotch. The vision of team testosterone derives from gay fantasy, from the sort of overstated and campy masculinity displayed in the infamous Tom of Finland sketches or by the Village People going west to their YMCA utopia.
Eventually things quiet down. Flashing forward, Tyler is embraced by a muscular blond lad in angel wings, nurturing and protecting her from the violent sexual chaos in her mind as only a guardian angel can. He saves her from the night of her dream, his wingspan allowing her to wake up. She sings alone, exhausted, her silhouette profile voicing her final words as the film concludes with a daytime scene. Things are “normal” again. Oh, let’s see that cheeky chest one more time.
The young bucks line up for some kind of ceremony on the school steps. Tyler the teacher, accompanied by an older professorial looking master in mortarboard hat and black robe, walks down the row shakes each of their hands. It‘s not entirely clear if it’s an introduction or a graduation. Most observers opt for the latter but the lads aren’t wearing grad mortarboards, and BT’s body language and facial expression doesn’t suggest she’s congratulating them, more of a polite meet and greet. The emphasis is entirely on restraint, on decorum.
Either she’s new to the school, or these lads are a new intake. The latter reading makes more sense: Tyler’s frustration seems a product of her already being a teacher at the school. What’s more, if the students are new, that would match the way the video began—with invasion penetrating from the outside. Each new school year brings new students, and the chance to start anew—and to lust after a new crop of boys, who are ignorant of Tyler’s deeper desires.
But something has changed. One boy isn’t standing in the line—he rushes up from behind and sneaks in to greet her. Now, unless I’m mistaken, this is the younger little slick in the big chair holding the dove, just minus the hair gel and the Boots No.7. For the sake of Thatcherite economy, he could be playing a completely unrelated character.
Seen in the light of day, wee Emo Kid is cheeky and cheerful, and riddled with freckles. But see what happens next. She affectionately ruffles his hair (alarm bells should be ringing), then moves down the line, perfunctorily pressing the flesh with the other students. One of them doesn’t release her hand, prompting Bonnie to look at him disconcertingly, confused and alarmed.
Well, hello, fantasy! The eyes have it, see, and this must be the youth Tyler first imagined visiting her at night—he’s even singing the line that played when he first appeared: “Turn around, bright eyes.” Her femme fatale fantasies, which should be confined to nighttime solace, are now happening in public in the harsh light of daytime.
There are two possible readings here. First, there really is some secret Children Of The Damned type conspiracy among the students, and they’re now collectively in on the singer’s secret. But given all other elements of the video (the enveloping angel in particular), I think the more likely scenario is that she’s still imagining all of this. Having succumbed to her wet dreams of children, she will now live lost in them at every hour of the day.
A reverse shot reveals what she’s seeing. As “turn around bright eyes” is voiced yet again, we see that his own luminescent orbs have vanished, and he’s facing the opposite direction. This might be a simple continuity error, but it contributes to the feeling that Tyler’s own vision can’t be trusted. Mind you, she’s not the only one.
The chap here looks remarkably like an effete stage school version of the famous footie fella Gianfranco Zola. Alas, the similarity ends there. Thanks to Mr Internet, said rumour turned into something of an urban legend and in a 2012 interview, the diminutive Italian even went on record to deny he ever appeared in the video. The former Chelsea chap would probably say the same if he was also asked if he gave me a peculiarly self-conscious eyeballing as we passed each other on London’s Hungerford Bridge in the late 90s too. Butt it happened, pulled up hoodie and all.
But back to 83. Our girl reacts with barely concealed shock, but then the camera shows us the young man again with normal eyes, as if she had imagined it. Even in the bright light of a sunny day, her nocturnal fantasies continue to haunt her.
What’s more, his stage school singing continues as the kids move past Tyler and up the stairs and into the building suggesting that whatever she’s seen and heard, it’s all in her head. No one else has noticed anything amiss. Even she herself doubts it—we see her blinking nervously in a pair of reaction shots. This woman is batshit crazy!
Maybe that’s what this story is telling us: that if you don’t turn around and avoid staring directly at a total eclipse, you’ll wind up with a case of the ol’ radioactive eyeballs. And just like that, the video for Total Eclipse Of The Heart proved it wasn’t just a promotional music video, it was actually a public service announcement all along.
The students shuffle past teacher. She lingers on the stairs, looking stunned and a bit afraid. Regardless of whether the encounter is real or imagined, in the end, we’re left with the great Bonnie Tyler standing, shaken, alone on the stairs. As she turns around to walk inside, the screen fades to black. The nightmare is over. Phew. Rock on Bonnie.
Steve Pafford
A veritable smorgasbord of sources in creating this article include New Yorker, Vulture, Videoclosetblog, Htmlgiant
*Steve Day, my bestie at the time told me he thought Bonnie Tyler “looks really juicy” on the cover of Faster Than The Speed Of Night. Nevertheless, this future homo remained steadfastly dry, lovely pussy and all.
Oh, PS. They’re back!
