Bonnie Tyler, singer of Total Eclipse of the Heart, dies aged 75
bbc.com187 points by theanonymousone 4 hours ago
187 points by theanonymousone 4 hours ago
Growing up in the 80s, I've known (and sung) this song all my life. But I just saw this flowchart for the first time today:
https://jeannr.tumblr.com/post/165291081/i-made-a-flow-chart...
I believe that's the original source, but it looks cut off. Here's a full version:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b1/82/dc/b182dcc291495c013c98...
Steinman was a genius. One of the greatest rock composers of all time and he picked his performers brilliantly.
That's actually a really interesting visualization of a professionally structured verse.
I once worked with a guy mixing TV programmes and live DVDs; I knew he’d been a studio engineer at one point in his career. We were re-arranging our studios one day and as I picked up a pair of NS-10s he casually said “I mixed ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ on those…”
Literal music video of Total Eclipse, one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsgWUq0fdKk
RIP Ms Tyler, you will be missed
That is so great. My wife and i love to annoy our teenage kids by getting Alexa to play this song and then singing along very dramatically haha.
How old are you, for curiosities sake? I'm born early 90s, fondly remembering me and a friend shaming all the rest of our group by singing this song (dramatically as well) as a duet whenever we were in (already loud) public spaces.
Back in 1999, the UK had its first total solar eclipse for several decades and VH1 played the music video (though, not this one ;-)) on loop for an hour while it was happening.
If you like meta-songs, you may be interested in "Title of this song" by Da Vinci's Notebook:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgmUgFEFzco&list=RDHgmUgFEFz...
The back story of the writing of Total Eclipse ain't bad either: https://youtu.be/LGqYnj_Y3CI?t=70
There’s also one of A-Ha’s “Take on Me”.
“Haaaand comes out…”
Nowhere near as good though.
I think Bad Apple the literal version compares well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReblZ7o7lu4
I like to pretend that was filmed in the Hogwarts sixth form commmon room in the eighties
It pretty much was. It was filmed in a Victorian sanitorium, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holloway_Sanatorium (built 1873-1885) which is in keeping with your (and JK Rowling's) vision of public schools, in particular Hogwarts was modelled on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fettes_College (built 1864-1870) in a similar architectural style.
I had never seen the music video until the news started playing it. Super funny
I went to the Reading Rock Festival back in the 80s. she was viewed very much as middle of the road and when she came on, got roundly booed and many bottles of nefarious liquids were tossed at her and the band.
she and they were total pros, shrugged it off, she hurled some abuse back and within a couple of songs had the crowd eating out of the palm of her hand.
RIP Bonnie. A class act.
My mum had a cassette with some of her songs. We'd have it on for long trips. I loved the long version of Faster than the speed of night. it's basically just "carpe diem" in a different format, but i loved her voice and the slight melancholy and almost call to action that the song brought with it. Also, the video (of the shorter version) is peak 80's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm4CgwRxw3Y
Jim Steinman, Meat Loaf, and now Bonnie Tyler. It truly all has come to an end. I think Celine Dion is the last one still carrying on Steinman's legacy.
This broke my heart:
> Despite coming from a big, musical family, Tyler and Sullivan never had children.
> I absolutely adore children.
> I did have a miscarriage when I was 40, I left it too late, you know?
I feel like, if you get into that situation, try to adopt or become a foster parent.
Ugh, what a bummer. I'll be listening to Holding Out for a Hero on repeat today. Nothing gold can stay.
This isn't hacker news... but whatever i guess.
"Strong Songs" podcast breaking down Total Eclipse of The Heart: https://strongsongspodcast.com/blogs/episodes/s07e06-total-e...
Little by little, memories of the 1980s fade.
"Every now and then, I get a little bit nervous That the best of all the years have gone by"
Sadly, Jim Steinman passed away half a decade ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Steinman
I still want to see the dream realized on Broadway of a Native-American inspired musical.
The version from the wedding band in Old School will forever be in my mind.
And let us not forget "Holding Out For a Hero"
Featured towards the climax of Short Circuit 2, which was huge in my childhood. What a powerhouse piece of music!
I think of that movie every time I hear the song! That was one badass robot sequence.
"Suuuuure. Kidnap the humans, DESTROY THE MACHINE."
Yes, I will never fail to associate this music with Short Circuit 2, it is also burned into my childhood memory.
Absolute classic. If anyone is interested, the Footloose soundtrack (which has Holding Out For a Hero on it) is probably one of the greatest soundtracks of all time. The movie sucks but damn, this soundtrack is incredible.
Is it wrong that I prefer the Shrek version?
It's not. I prefer the bardcore version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx-x_1lIXh4
Fun fact: the original was only produced in English but the Shrek remix (which is a *BOP*) got translated into every language the movie did.
Where have all the good men gone and where are all the gods?
Is it too much to ask for a Streetwise Hercules?
'fraid so, the odds have risen too high.
We might need a white night on a fiery steed. One can dream.
Too soon, she could have had a lot more life left to live these days, but a bad surgery ended it. Sucks. Try to avoid needing surgery as much as you can.
RIP legend.
I'm curious now when this was announced. Yesterday, out of nowhere, TikTok showed me a video about someone praising "Total Eclipse of the Heart", despite not having this bubble in my profile. Kinda spooky to see the news now.
Probably one of those coincidences, like you talked about bouncy houses and now you’re seeing ads for bouncy houses
Wow. Holy crap.
Edit: guys, I get that it's not a "substantive comment" but there's no excuse for 3 downvotes. Get a life
How is this hacker news worthy? Never heard of her or the song. Is from a time when people carried boomboxes on their shoulders?
Before that. Her breakthrough album was 1977 and Total Eclipse of the Heart came out in 1982, so it was more the 8-track era. It remained a staple of radio plays (remember those?) through the 80s and 90s though, and was remade by Nikki French into a chart-topping dance version in 1995.
A lot of HN is folks in their late 30s, 40s, and early 50s (and sometimes even older!), so many folks here would've overlapped with the radio era. A lot of folks here were involved in making YouTube/Instagram/TikTok, not listening to it.
I'm old enough to remember Walkmans coming out in 1979, which was the start of the end of the boombox era. Approximately no-one was using 8-track at that point.
I'm not quite that old, but didn't people look down on cassettes due to their lower audio quality? Weren't most home systems (hi-fis) still vinyl or 8-track for a while longer?
A big driver of cassettes then was the write ability, unlike 8 tracks. You could borrow your friend's new vinyl album, pop in a new cassette tape on your hi-fi, and record a copy of the album to the tape. Of course the Walkman then made listening to your new album fully portable.
Next total eclipse, 2026-08-12.
Total: Greenland, Iceland, Spain, Northeastern Portugal
Partial: Northern North America, Europe, West Africa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_eclipses_in_the_...
Nah, occassional non tech stuff is very welcome. It’s interesting to see HN’s perspective on other things
Death notices of famous artists are regularly on HN. If people upvote it, it should be worthy.
That's not how it works. If upvotes alone mattered, HN would quickly degenerate into Reddit. The bar is whether "good hackers" would find this interesting.
Death notices of famous artists are the definition of off-topic: "most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." If normies care about it, good hackers by definition probably don't.
I flag this and every such thread I come across. If Hacker News is going to be consistent in its espoused principles, this is non-technical content and thus not welcome. If that standard applies to far more substantive stories regardless of the quality of conversation they produce, it must apply here as well.
> If upvotes alone mattered
I did not say upvotes alone matter, but they should be the final say after all other mechanisms.
> The bar is whether "good hackers" would find this interesting.
If this were true, the majority of frontpage-entries would have to be removed.
> "most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities,[..]If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
I guess the notable point here is "most" and "probably". The exception seems to be always news which are so important or dramatic that they are still not removed, and leaving the final decision to the upvotes. Which is why there are also regularly political and sometime seven sports entries (once or twice a year).
Despite being called hacker news, reality is not binary and rules should not be handled like that.
>but they should be the final say after all other mechanisms
They shouldn't be, and they aren't. The mods make the final decision and they will work against the consensus when they disagree with it. This is a very aggressively curated community.
>If this were true, the majority of frontpage-entries would have to be removed.
Maybe the majority of frontpage entries should be removed. Maybe the "HN is turning into Reddit" people are finally correct. But that is literally what the guidelines say. On topic - "Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." Off topic - everything else, with the minor exception of "some new and interesting phenomenon" to gratify that intellectual curiosity.
I'm sorry but there is nothing new or interesting about the death of celebrities, and nothing about it to gratify intellectual curiosity. Their lives, maybe, but if someone wasn't worth discussing on Hacker News in life, they shouldn't be worth discussing post mortem.
>The exception seems to be always news which are so important or dramatic that they are still not removed, and leaving the final decision to the upvotes.
The final decision, in that case, is entirely up to the moderators. Threads with plenty of upvotes get flagged and stay flagged all the time.
>Despite being called hacker news, reality is not binary and rules should not be handled like that.
Maybe. But if there are grey areas, this doesn't seem like one of them. I don't see why far more substantive stories so often get flagged for "politics" or being "non-technical" even when they involve a pile of dead bodies, or why we police humor and emotion like signs of cancer, but we get to wallow in the nostalgia of every dead celebrity that comes along.
I do think HN should have an obit: category and filter them out the main page.
It's one thing to have obits for people who wouldn't be covered by regular news, but "75 year old celebrity dies" is not any kind of new phenomenon.
It generates a decent amount of upvotes and discussion based on name recognition and nostalgia, but every thread is essentially the same, "Oh, that's sad, I liked their work, <personal anecdote of how they were touched by it>.".
Nobody forced you to click on the article or jump into the comment section, did they?
Meta: More often than I should have, I have emailed HN and asked "Why can you not extend/build/etc" this? And, as expected, we'd get into a great email discussion about why that would provide a meaningful improvement over the existing experience. This is a forum of builders, makers, and hackers, to their unspoken point. The primitives provided are "good enough," Hacker News is feature complete. To build this on top of HN in a browser extension or mobile app is trivial, and so, I'd say "If you want this, build it and share with us."
Ask HN: Any good replacements for "Refined Hacker News?" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48845676 is an opportunity, for example. Show HN awaits for whatever you build.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48614633
> Anything that gratifies intellectual curiosity is on topic for HN! - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html That doesn't mean it has to gratify your curiosity or mine - no single article can do that for everyone. But it's clear that that's what makes the article on topic.
> One other aspect: the best HN submissions are the ones that are most uncorrelated with anything else that's gotten attention recently - or, as I used to put it, can't be predicted from any existing sequence
There is a "hide" link for threads not of interest, I strongly encourage it's use to optimize your forum participation experience; if this forum is not to your liking, there are others potentially more suited to what you desire.
> I flag this and every such thread I come across. If Hacker News is going to be consistent in its espoused principles, this is non-technical content and thus not welcome. If that standard applies to far more substantive stories regardless of the quality of conversation they produce, it must apply here as well.
Mods can turn off flag capabilities per account, keep this in mind. You won't know if your flags are effective or not.
>The bar is whether "good hackers" would find this interesting.
Who put you in charge of what other people find interesting?
Get over yourself, loser.
You seem to be new here, welcome to Hacker News.
Everyone is in charge of what you should find interesting and everyone will make it your problem.
Maybe it's not.
Guidelines:
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, (...) If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Very famous singer, multiple very famous songs, 40 yo song topped the carts during the 2024 Eclipse, was pretty much the theme song for a very small indie movie called Shrek 2.
I think Shrek would be pro open source software and hardware if he knew what it was, so this makes it HN worthy
