Three Songs - Bonnie Tyler (and Magritte Monday)

Today's "Three Songs" features Bonnie Tyler. The cover art for an album that features one or two of her songs appears to the right. Calling this Magritte-like is probably a stretch, but it is surreal, and the sky contained inside a cube is similar to Magritte's sky contained inside a bird.

I always thought Bonnie Tyler sounded like a female Rod Stewart. One blogger commented: "When a singer has throat problems severe enough to require surgery, the procedure can often be career threatening. In the case of Bonnie Tyler, however, the nodules that she developed singing in nightclubs in her native Wales turned out to be career making. After her 1976 operation, Tyler's voice carried a distinctive rasp somewhat reminiscent of Rod Stewart's".

She's best well known for "It's A Heartache" and "Total Eclipse of the Heart"

The first one, below, is rather country-tinged and actually sounds like something Rod Stewart would have sung:



Probably many of you know the ambitious power balled "Total Eclipse of the Heart". I rememeber well the video, with its army of Fonzies, blowing cloth, and glowing-eyed kids. The video below is a "literal video" version, with a Tyler imitator commenting on the many odd things in the video. This version has a cat frame around it in order to get around Sony's attempts to censor the video. My favorite line is "It started out as Hogwarts now it's Lord of the Flies". Watch it while you can before Sony censors this one;



This last one is from Mike Oldfield's album "Islands". Mike Oldfield achieved immense fame in the US as a one-hit wonder in the 1970s with his theme from "The Exorcist", which has since become the de-facto theme song for Halloween. One song from the album, "Magic Touch" was a top 10 rock hit in the US in 1988, but no-one remembers it and it gets zero oldies station airplay. The title track "Islands" was a big hit in Europe.

The video version below is a live one with "Bonnie Taylor" (sic):



If you like "Islands", you might like an alternate version called "When The Night's On Fire".

Like most artists, Tyler has not burned out in a flame of "VH1 Behind the Music" glory, nor is she a modern superstar. She has kept on with a busy career in relative obscurity (at least compared to her 1980s work).