| Nice Bonnie feature | |
|
Posted by: |
Jacqueline 08:55 am UTC 10/23/08 |
| Renegade angel Wednesday, 22 October 2008 Clive Simmons catches up with a woman who knows she was born to sing. “I love the smell of the stage,” Bonnie Tyler says. “And when I’m up there, I know that I’m in the right place. When I sing, I feel a connection to something else; something very real for me. I always sing out of conviction, and to do something that you really love is the best thing you can do. It doesn’t give me an orgasm or anything, but it does give me a thrill.” The woman they call “the renegade angel” was once told by a doctor to rest; that the nodules on her vocal cords would ruin her voice. But as Tyler confides, she was born to sing. To her, it’s like breathing, and she started singing long before she was supposed to. And the husky voice one hears on her records is the result of her refusal to follow orders. Renegades do that kind of thing, she says, and since then, Tyler has enjoyed worldwide success and worked with some of rock’s greatest luminaries. Born in 1951, Gaynor Hopkins grew up in Skewen, a small village in Wales, where her father worked in the local coal mine before he was incapacitated in World War II. But the thing she remembers is not the hardship that must have greeted the family with a disabled father unable to work, but music, which became her solace when times were rough. “I don’t really know how to describe my upbringing,” she says. “But there was always music. My mother would play music all the time, and she would sing along to the records. We all would. My brothers and sisters would roll up the carpet in the living room and we’d dance to Eddie Cochran, The Beatles, and all those great songs from Motown. “Skewen was right by a mountain, and every Saturday I used to go into the hills and pick wild bluebells and blackberries, and I would sing as I went.” Refused entry to the school choir, Hopkins spied an ad in The Evening Post for a talent quest and decided to audition. “It was at the local rugby club,” she says, “and that was the moment that I knew I wanted to sing. When I got there, I was told that it was for Bobby Wayne, who was a very well-known singer in Wales, and he had this very high voice like Gene Pitney. His group was called Bobby Wayne and the Dixies, and I became a Dixie.” She stayed with Wayne for 18 months, before forming her own group, Imagination, changing her name to Sherene Davies in the process. When a talent scout for producer Ronnie Scott came to hear the headline act and saw “Sherene” instead, she was invited to London to make a demo tape. “The demo had two songs on it, ‘My! My! Honeycomb’, which was released as a single and bombed. But the other song on it was ‘Lost In France’, which I didn’t really think suited my voice very well. It was more pop-oriented, but I did it because it was my chance to record. I knew it was my chance and I had to take it.” The gamble paid off. It was an international hit. Despite their success together, Tyler and Scott parted company, and Tyler began work with uber-producer Jim Steinman, whose work with Meatloaf on the Bat Out of Hell album had also met with international success. “I went to meet him at his apartment,” Tyler remembers. “It was just like E.T., you know? There was this trail of M&M’s and Smarties all the way to his apartment, and they were even on the door ledge. I didn’t know what to think. When I met him, he had this mass of hair. He looked like Thing out of The Addams Family. I thought ‘Oh, what’s this guy all about? He’s a bit weird.’ But we got on really well, and I still can’t believe how lucky I was.” The song he wrote for her, 'Total Eclipse of the Heart', would become an international #1 hit, and indeed, her signature tune. “I cried when I first heard it,” she says. “But I was terrified that they wouldn’t play it on radio, because it was eight minutes long. “We made a video to go with the single, and we filmed it in an old asylum. A doctor who’d invented some drug used all the money he made from that to build the asylum. It was hellish frightening filming there. “I was running around in the rain with all these pagan dancers at 3.30 in the morning, with all of us falling down in the mud because we couldn’t see anything. The other odd thing I remember is that the dogs just would not go into the room where they had given the patients electro-shock therapy. It’s funny how they just knew what had gone on there.” She did another album with Steinman which met mixed reviews, but her next single, ‘Holding Out For A Hero’, was a huge hit, although it stiffed on initial release and only when it was used to promote a football game did Tyler have success with it. Her follow-up album contained a potential hit, but her song, ‘Simply the Best’, was offered to Tina Turner, whose version was not only a hit, but ironically, would be used to promote football games. After doing a song for Georgio Moroder’s version of Metropolis, she worked with Rick Wakeman on Return to the Centre of the Earth, as well as Cher and Mike Oldfield. “I was flattered when he asked me to do Islands. I’m not actually sure why he asked me, but the thing I remember about that is something very funny. We recorded it in Switzerland in this beautiful studio in the street, and there I was singing it, and all these people going to the ski resort were walking past with their skis in their hands. It was quite an odd experience to be singing, and have that happening at the same time. But that’s rock’n’roll.” | |
| URL: | http://mcv.e-p.net.au/features/renegade-angel-4318.html |
| reply | | |
| Previous: | re: BOYZONE ON UK CHARTS - junior 02:27 am UTC 10/24/08 |
| Next: | re: Nice Bonnie feature - Bart 08:14 pm UTC 10/23/08 |
| Thread: |
|