1983 No. 1, Written As A Vampire Love Song, Topped The Charts 43 Years Ago Today
On October 12, 1983, the No. 1 song in the U.S. was "Total Eclipse of the Heart" by Bonnie Tyler, a song that's secretly about vampires. The bombastic track, seemingly about a person distraught over their loneliness, saved Tyler from becoming a forgotten '70s one-hit wonder. After several unsuccessful attempts to follow up her 1978 country-folk Top 5 hit "It's a Heartache," Tyler fired her managers and sought out a collaborator who could help her record the grand music she truly wanted to make. Composer Jim Steinman, best known for writing "Bat Out of Hell" for future Tyler collaborator Meat Loaf, passed on the chance due to other obligations until finally welcoming Tyler to his apartment in New York, where he played for her an early version of "Total Eclipse of the Heart," a new song built out of elements of pieces he'd written years earlier.
"Total Eclipse of the Heart" flew to the No. 1 position on the Billboard Hot 100 the week of October 1, and it remained there for four weeks. It was also a chart-topper in the U.K., Ireland, Norway, and New Zealand, and became so entrenched in pop culture that a dance version by Nicki French hit No. 2 in 1995. The song came back for another bite two years later when Steinman unleashed his original, more explicitly vampire-oriented take on "Total Eclipse of the Heart."
Total Eclipse of the Heart was always cinematic and theatrical
Jim Steinman produced Bonnie Tyler's 1983 album "Faster Than the Speed of Night," and he wrote a couple of tracks, including "Total Eclipse of the Heart." The earliest version of the song dates back to Steinman's work on a project inspired by F.W. Murnau's classic 1922 vampire film "Nosferatu."
"Total Eclipse of the Heart" contains elements of other earlier Steinman compositions as well. One of the song's signature moments is an ethereal musical dialogue in which additional vocalist Rory Dodd implores Tyler's narrator to "turn around, bright eyes." Steinman lifted that element from "The Dream Engine," a musical he wrote and presented while studying at Amherst College in 1969, while other aspects came from the score he contributed to the 1980 film "A Small Circle of Friends." Completed with Tyler's voice and sensibility in mind, Steinman assembled a supergroup to record "Total Eclipse of the Heart": Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, and classic rock guitarist Rick Derringer. The song revived Tyler's career and helped cement her status as an '80s rock icon.
In 1997, Steinman premiered "Dance of the Vampires," a stage musical inspired by the 1967 movie "The Fearless Vampire Killers." One song, "Vampires in Love," is a remake, or actually pre-make, of "Total Eclipse of the Heart." "I was trying to come up with a love song and I remembered I actually wrote that to be a vampire love song," he told Playbill of the 1983 hit. "It's all about the darkness, the power of darkness and love's place in the dark."