19 March 1983
We’ve already entered ‘Take That Look Off Your Face’ as evidence of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s role in ringleading the ’80s power ballad genre, and now comes a co-accused: Jim Steinman. In fact, ‘Total Eclipse Of The Heart’ may actually be the definitive ’80s power ballad.
Perhaps because of its all-or-nothing commitment to going big, ‘Total Eclipse Of The Heart’ has had a longer afterlife than other power ballad hits, a lot of which is an ironic pleasure; there mustn’t be a comedy club in the world that hasn’t at some time featured a routine about the litany of things Bonnie Tyler does every now and then. Still, this is born of a genuine fondness, or at least a recognition that what it does, it does to its utmost.
Even as someone who doesn’t like ‘Total Eclipse Of The Heart’ or being shouted at, I have to admire Steinman’s one stroke of genius: recognising that the lyrics of a power ballad don’t actually have to mean something; they just have to sound like they mean something. What’s a ‘total eclipse of the heart’ when it’s at home? Even the ‘you’ of the song is almost irrelevant. We only need to grasp that all this is A Big Deal of such interstellar, interplanetary, intergalactic proportions as to make your standard-issue Motown heartache—I love him, my friends say he’s a bad ‘un, but I still love him—seem like the meet-cute of a rom-com.
Admiring its heft doesn’t make it any easier for me to listen to it. The leading exponents of this nuclear power balladry—Tyler and Jennifer Rush in the ’80s, Céline Dion and Whitney in the ’90s—can make even the quiet bits feel loud, the same way that Tyler’s fellow Welsh belter Tom Jones doesn’t have a subtlety setting. This stuff shifted millions of units in the ’80s, which means there’s a lot more shouting to come.
Irish Number Ones 