Hundreds of people stood outside Swansea Minster on Monday afternoon, watching a screen. Inside, a few hundred more said goodbye to Gaynor Hopkins. The rest of the world knew her as Bonnie Tyler.
The funeral for the Welsh singer took place in Swansea city centre at midday on 17 August, five weeks after she died in a hospital in Portugal at the age of 75. The service itself was invite-only, restricted to family and close friends, but fans who traveled to pay their respects were able to watch on a screen erected in nearby St David’s Square, and online.
A voice that arrived by accident
The service opened with two of her own recordings — If I Sing You A Love Song and It’s A Heartache — and was conducted by the Reverend Canon Justin Davies. Among those who paid tribute was Roger Bell, the talent scout who first heard her sing in a Swansea club, alongside her long-time manager Matthew Davis.
Bell’s presence closed a circle that opened more than fifty years earlier. Tyler had spent seven years working the South Wales club circuit — singing blues one night, pop or country the next, ballroom numbers on a Sunday — before Bell spotted her and invited her to London to cut demos. She had left school at 16 and was working in a local grocery store, one of seven children raised in a council house in Skewen by a coal miner father and a homemaker mother.
The rasp that made her famous was not something she was born with. After the release of her 1977 debut album The World Starts Tonight, Tyler underwent surgery to remove nodules from her vocal cords and was told not to speak while she healed. She screamed in frustration during a painful stretch of the recovery, and her voice never sounded the same again. “I now sounded like a female Rod Stewart,” she later quipped — a comparison that stuck, and that served her well for the next four decades.
Steinman said no first
It was that damaged, grainier voice that carried It’s A Heartache to success in the United States and to the top of charts from Australia to Argentina. But the song that defined her took some persuading. After moving from RCA to CBS, Tyler approached Jim Steinman, the writer and producer behind Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell. He turned her down. Only after hearing her rock-oriented demos did he change his mind and write Total Eclipse Of The Heart — what he called a “Wagnerian-like onslaught of sound and emotion” — as a showpiece built specifically around her.
“It sounds ravaged, like it’s been through a lot,” Steinman said of her voice in 1983. “It’s what rock’n’roll is all about.”
The record went to number one in both the US and UK and made Faster Than The Speed Of Night the only UK number one album of her career, earning her a BRIT nomination and two Grammy nominations in 1984. Steinman followed it with Holding Out For A Hero for the Footloose soundtrack the same year. This January, more than four decades after its release, Total Eclipse Of The Heart passed a billion streams on Spotify — matching the billion views its video had already racked up on YouTube.
She never tired of it. She said she would “never get tired of singing it” because “everyone can’t wait to sing it.”
“Just Gaynor from up the road”
What came through most clearly on Monday was not the scale of the catalog but the smallness of the woman who made it. Speaking to ITV News outside the service, the Welsh musician Mal Pope — a close friend — called her an “everyday superstar.”
“We didn’t know how special she was, because she was just Gaynor from up the road,” he said. “People would ask her if she was still singing a bit, and she’d go ‘yeah yeah’, even though she may have just done a massive stadium tour. She always had time for people.”
Pope added that he hoped her death would prompt a reassessment: “I hope this is the start of a revaluation of her music and that people will look back at her music as she was a great singer.”
Her husband of 53 years, Robert Sullivan, attended the service. The two met when he was managing a nightclub; he had competed for Great Britain as a judoka at the 1972 Olympics and later worked as a property developer. They married in July 1973 and kept a deliberately unshowy life between South Wales and the Algarve.
The order of service carried a line from her family. She is remembered, they wrote, as “a warm, generous artist whose music touched generations and continues to fill dance floors and karaoke booths around the world” — someone who “lives on in the timeless songs that made her a legend.” The music chosen for the service included Bridge Over Troubled Water, Those Were The Days, a performance by Only Men Aloud, and, inevitably, Total Eclipse Of The Heart.
Newton Road
Monday’s service followed a public farewell two days earlier. On Saturday, hundreds lined the streets of Mumbles as her coffin — draped in the Welsh flag, accompanied by a framed photograph — was driven to her home. As the cortege moved down Newton Road, where she was simply a familiar local face, the crowd broke into applause and then into song. Some mourners had traveled from Austria and Germany.
After Monday’s service, her coffin was taken through Skewen, the village where she was born in 1951, before a private family committal.
Tyler had been due to tour Europe later this year to mark fifty years since Lost In France, the 1976 single that first put her in the UK Top Ten. She was made an MBE in 2023 for services to music, and represented the UK at Eurovision in 2013. Her eighteenth and final album, released in 2021, was titled The Best Is Yet To Come.
She described herself, more than once, as a working-class girl who never stopped working.
