Bonnie Tyler – ‘Holding Out For A Hero’

28 September 1985

I knew this song as the theme to a mid-’80s US action TV show called Cover Up which was about—I’m not making this up—a CIA agent and a Special Forces operative who masquerade as a fashion photographer and a model to travel around the world and help American citizens in trouble. Oh, and she’s the photographer; he’s the model. TV in the ’80s was brilliant.

I assumed that I had been listening to Bonnie Tyler over the opening credits. But no: Tyler’s version was actually from the movie Footloose the previous year. What I had been hearing was the voice of an American lady called E.G. Daily, who also happened to be dating the lead actor of Cover Up, Jon-Erik Hexum. Anyone familiar with Cover Up will remember the huge news of Hexum’s death just one series into the show that was making him a star; apparently he was playing Russian roulette with a gun firing blanks, but held the gun too close to his head and fired a blank cartridge that damaged his skull and killed him. Hexum’s successor in the remaining episodes of the show’s only season, Australian actor Antony Hamilton, was subsequently in the running to become the new James Bond for The Living Daylights but lost out because the producers were said to be reluctant for the sexist womaniser 007 to be played by someone who in real life was gay. Hamilton himself died tragically young too, from AIDS-related pneumonia, in 1995.

Tasteless as this may sound, that level of outlandish melodramatic heartache fits perfectly with ‘Holding Out For A Hero’. (I haven’t seen Footloose but I have a hard time imagining a young Kevin Bacon jiving to it illegally in a barn, which is the impression I have of what Footloose is.) Tyler and Jim Steinman, as on ‘Total Eclipse Of The Heart’, throw everything at this, though here we have an up-tempo rock number rather than the ne plus ultra of power ballads. I know ‘up-tempo’ is really a poor approximation of what goes on here; ‘Holding Out For A Hero’ is heart-stopping, shirt-rending, teeth-gnashing, loads of other stuff, in all caps and underlined and bold and everywhere exclamation marks. Just as with ‘Total Eclipse Of The Heart’, the notional ‘other’ really doesn’t matter here. No hero could live up to this. You only need to understand that these feelings are epic, dramatic, sensational, turbulent, cataclysmic-

So yeah, basically it’s like listening to the spin cycle of an old washing machine, from the inside. Still, for all that it’s an ever-so-slightly enjoyable bit of nonsense.