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Bonnie Tyler, singer of Total Eclipse of the Heart, dies aged 75

132 points3 hoursbbc.com
parkersweb1 hour ago

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…”

auslegung2 hours ago

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

chasd0025 minutes ago

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.

petercooper40 minutes ago

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.

nostrademons1 hour ago

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...

defrost37 minutes ago

The back story of the writing of Total Eclipse ain't bad either: https://youtu.be/LGqYnj_Y3CI?t=70

Decabytes51 minutes ago

I had never seen the music video until the news started playing it. Super funny

funnybeam2 hours ago

I like to pretend that was filmed in the Hogwarts sixth form commmon room in the eighties

amiga38660 minutes ago

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.

pavlov1 hour ago

There’s also one of A-Ha’s “Take on Me”.

“Haaaand comes out…”

urbsgpw1 hour ago

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

petcat32 minutes ago

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.

codelikeawolf32 minutes ago

Ugh, what a bummer. I'll be listening to Holding Out for a Hero on repeat today. Nothing gold can stay.

al_borland52 minutes ago

The version from the wedding band in Old School will forever be in my mind.

https://youtu.be/FfUU1wJKXDc

vardump49 minutes ago

Little by little, memories of the 1980s fade.

WillAdams38 minutes ago

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.

SideburnsOfDoom1 hour ago

And let us not forget "Holding Out For a Hero"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWcASV2sey0

myself24849 minutes ago

Featured towards the climax of Short Circuit 2, which was huge in my childhood. What a powerhouse piece of music!

nly39 minutes ago

I think of that movie every time I hear the song! That was one badass robot sequence.

"Suuuuure. Kidnap the humans, DESTROY THE MACHINE."

misnome39 minutes ago

Yes, I will never fail to associate this music with Short Circuit 2, it is also burned into my childhood memory.

biofox27 minutes ago

"Number 5 is alive!"

limbicsystem47 minutes ago

Is it wrong that I prefer the Shrek version?

amiga38630 minutes ago

It's not. I prefer the bardcore version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx-x_1lIXh4

Rayhem29 minutes ago

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.

nisiddharth1 hour ago

Where have all the good men gone and where are all the gods?

AndrewOMartin56 minutes ago

Is it too much to ask for a Streetwise Hercules?

deadbabe34 minutes ago

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.

PurpleRamen60 minutes ago

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.

alex11381 hour ago

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

cramer4next1 hour ago

How is this hacker news worthy? Never heard of her or the song. Is from a time when people carried boomboxes on their shoulders?

nostrademons56 minutes ago

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.

masfuerte49 minutes ago

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.

runako47 minutes ago

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?

MontgomeryPy27 minutes ago

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.

PurpleRamen43 minutes ago

Death notices of famous artists are regularly on HN. If people upvote it, it should be worthy.

krapp31 minutes ago

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.

PurpleRamen15 minutes ago

> 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.

xnorswap23 minutes ago

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>.".

sverhagen54 minutes ago

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.

swader99952 minutes ago

Every now and then an article like this is fine.

tekla56 minutes ago

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.