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Bonnie Tyler and the Agony of Welsh Yearning

The Welsh yearn better than anyone else on Earth—and Bonnie Tyler was the greatest Welsh yearner of them all.

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I have many memories attached to “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, which form into a blurred composite of being in my late teens, surrounded by mates and drunkenly wailing it—at house parties, in the backs of cars, at the beach, on the side of the road, or anywhere else you could hang out at night for free in the South Wales Valleys. Heads thrown back, black eyeliner smudged like tire marks across our temples, passing round a 2L bottle of lemonade half-emptied and re-filled with Glen’s, absolutely fucking butchering the key change. If you’ve never accidentally smacked someone in the face while flinging your arms open like Christ on the cross singing “EVERY NOW AND THEN I FALL APART,” then you’ve never sung it right.

I suspect this is a fairly universal experience, in spirit if not specifics. The UK’s number one favorite song to sing in the shower and one of the most globally recognizable power ballads of all time, Bonnie Tyler’s 1983 hit single is a timeless paean to an impossible love. Perhaps the only pop single with a video shot in an abandoned asylum in Surrey, it hit number one on both sides of the Atlantic, went platinum in nine countries, and has retained a cultural omnipresence ever since, from Hollywood needle-drops to KTVs in the Philippines. It has billions of streams on Spotify and YouTube, which has racked up while remaining completely impervious to trends. At the same time, Bonnie Tyler—who died unexpectedly yesterday, aged 75—represents a kind of yearning that is deeply and inextricably Welsh.

In Erotic Vagrancy, his biography of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, journalist Roger Lewis writes that “the Welsh are supreme at being actors and actresses because flamboyance is suppressed; it is........

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