On 19 March, at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London, Bonnie Tyler closed her set with the song that had become her second skin. As the opening piano chords of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” filled the hall, the audience, many of whom had been singing along all evening, rose to meet her. Tyler, then 74, stood centre stage, her trademark blonde mane catching the light, and delivered the song with the same gravelly intensity that had first carried it to the top of charts on both sides of the Atlantic four decades earlier. It was, according to those present, a performance of undiminished force—a singer still in command of the voice that had been forged, quite literally, by accident.

That voice fell silent on 8 July, when Tyler died unexpectedly in a hospital in Faro, Portugal, at the age of 75. Her family announced that she had succumbed to an illness for which she had been receiving treatment since undergoing emergency intestinal surgery in May. The surgery had been followed by an induced coma, and though she briefly regained consciousness in June, her condition remained critical. The news prompted tributes from across the British music establishment and beyond: Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office described her as “one of Britain’s greatest recording artists,” while the Welsh First Minister called her a “true icon.” Cliff Richard mourned “another wonderful friend gone too soon,” and Bryan Adams praised her “magnificent voice.”

Tyler’s voice was the product of a medical mishap. Born Gaynor Hopkins in a coal-mining village in south Wales, she was discovered singing in a Swansea club in 1975 and signed to RCA. In 1977, surgery to remove nodules from her vocal cords left her with a husky, ravaged timbre after she screamed in frustration during the prescribed silence. The result, as producer Jim Steinman later observed, was a sound that “isn’t pure or smooth. It sounds ravaged, like it’s been through a lot. It’s what rock’n’roll is all about.” That voice powered her first international hit, “It’s a Heartache,” and then, in 1983, the Steinman-penned “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” a Wagnerian power ballad that spent four weeks at number one in the United States and became the fifth-biggest-selling single of the year in the United Kingdom.

The song’s afterlife has been remarkable. It has been streamed more than a billion times on Spotify, its video viewed over a billion times on YouTube, and it has been covered, parodied, and repurposed across film, television, and advertising. In Argentina, it became an unlikely talisman: the 1986 World Cup-winning squad, led by Diego Maradona, insisted on hearing it in full on the team bus before every match, a superstition so rigid that players would refuse to disembark until the final note. Another Tyler hit, “It’s a Heartache,” was adopted by Argentine football fans as a terrace chant, its melody repurposed to berate underperforming players. “Holding Out for a Hero,” meanwhile, found a second life in the soundtrack of the animated film Shrek 2, introducing her to a generation born long after the 1980s.

Tyler never tired of her signature song. “I love it because everyone can’t wait to sing it,” she told the BBC. She remained a working-class girl from Skewen who, as she put it, “never stopped working.” She was still touring and recording, with a European summer schedule planned, when her health collapsed. Her last album, The Best Is Yet to Come, was released in 2021; her autobiography, Straight from the Heart, followed in 2023. She is survived by her husband of more than five decades, Robert Sullivan. The image that lingers is not of the hospital bed in Faro, but of that March night in London: a woman with a voice like broken glass, turning around one last time to face the crowd, as thousands of voices rose to meet hers.