Where does the history of Total Eclipse Of The Heart start? Well... I'm going to start in a controversial place. I'm going to start with a 1960s band called Ford Theatre from Boston, MA, and their instrumental track "Theme for the Masses" which you can hear on Spotify. It's fairly obscure, a short prog rock track (under 3 minutes is short for prog rock!) and its melody sounds quite similar to parts of Total Eclipse Of The Heart. The basic melody but especially, the instrumental bit in the middle of the song. "Theme for the Masses" was released back in 1968.
We cross over now to Mr James Richard Steinman, the composer of Total Eclipse Of The Heart. What was he doing in 1968? He was a 19 year old student at Amherst College, MA. He was in several bands on keyboard. He was involved in several college theatre productions as a musician, a composer, a director and an actor. He co-hosted a weekly radio show until it was cancelled for obscenity. And he was a writer, reviewer, and later Arts Editor for the Amherst Student newspaper. I know this because Amherst put all their archives of that student newspaper online and I read through them. If you want to easily access what he wrote, that's available here. Student-era Jim Steinman was also really into The Doors, and Brecht and Weill, the film Bonnie & Clyde, and... lots of things. Did he ever write about Ford Theatre? Never.
The bigger picture though - Jim Steinman, at the ripe old age of 19, had watched his generation (boomers as young adults) evolve from the "peace and love" hippy generation into something more disillusioned, nihilistic, violent, and drug fuelled, as they began being drafted for the Vietnam war, as they rioted in the streets following the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. He listened to local radio gleefully covering the suicide of another student by jumping 19 floors to his death - the station's reporters glad to be the first to report an event they found so exciting. "If it gets any lighter we won't see a thing."
He put everything of the contemporary world into a musical he wrote, called The Dream Engine. In the audience one night was Joe Papp of the New York Shakespeare Festival, who was so impressed with the show that he bought the rights during intermission.
Back in the 1990s, I received a copy of an audio recording of the musical via Jim Steinman's fan club, when I was around 19 years old myself. Most of it went completely over my head, since it's so in tune with 1968-1969 America counterculture, and I'm some random English person. You can hear it for yourself if you download it from Jim's website, and some helpful people on YouTube have mirrored it there too.
What does this have to do with Total Eclipse Of The Heart? There's a song called Come In The Night that I want to draw your attention to. Here's the audio, via Youtube - about 2 minutes 17, the "turn around" bit comes in. The sound quality is bad, I know. If you'd like a better singer and better sound, check out Andrew Polec's version from the 50th Anniversary version of The Dream Engine. There's that melody - recognisably the "turn around" section from Total Eclipse Of The Heart. (Or is it Theme for the Masses?) "Turn around, there's a black day dawning. Turn around, there's a corpse in mourning. Turn around to your tin can graveyard. Turn around to your tin foil saviour. Turn around, bright eyes! Turn around bright eyes!!" and so on. Full lyrics here.
I want you to always remember, the root of the song Total Eclipse Of The Heart comes from, also contains the lyric "How do you bury the skull of your country?" from a young man rebelling against his own nation willing to dispose of his life, and dispose of his friends' lives.
So, that's that. What happened to The Dream Engine? Well, it had several rewrites and several false starts. At one point, it was to star a young Richard Gere (who was another Amherst student. This was before he was particularly known). At one point, they were trying to court David Bowie to star in it. David Bowie and Jim became friends, but never ended up working together. The Dream Engine morphed into Neverland, morphed into Bat Out Of Hell 2100, morphed into Bat Out Of Hell The Musical.
Anyway. Fast forward from 1969 to 1980. By that point, Jim Steinman is known as the writer for the hit Meat Loaf album Bat Out Of Hell, and he writes the score for an anti-Vietnam film called A Small Circle Of Friends. You can hear the excerpt that sounds like Total Eclipse Of The Heart / Come In The Night / Theme For The Masses on YouTube here. It also has a little of the melody of "Making Love Out Of Nothing At All" in there.
Did Jim hear Theme For The Masses at some point in 1968 and knowingly pinch it? I have no idea. Do I think that if he did nab that melody, he had completely forgotten that he didn't write it by 1980? Almost certainly. I mean, by then he probably thought he's just reusing a theme from his college project. Do I think there's a scandal brewing? This song is so embedded in our culture now, that surely the folks of Ford Theatre (or their descendants) must have heard it, and it surely must have already been quietly resolved by now? Anyway, the rest of the song ("And I need you now, tonight! And I need you more than ever!"), the haunting piano intro, the lyrics, the drama, that's definitely all Jim Steinman, I'm fairly certain of it.
Jim Steinman reuses his own music a lot, which irritates a lot of "fans" but I think it's just how his brain works - obsession, perfectionism, won't let him let go of something until it's satisfied. Hence he released a musical that took almost 50 years to get a general release... and he still wasn't done tinkering with it for another year or so. Hence there are three separate songs Jim Steinman wrote called "A Kiss Is A Terrible Thing To Waste". He won't let something go unless either he's satisfied it's done, or he isn't allowed to continue.
Fast forward to 1982. Jim Steinman stated that he wrote the song Total Eclipse Of The Heart as "Vampires In Love" for a musical based on Nosferatu, during an eclipse. So I tried looking up eclipses visible in New York in 1982 and discovered the exact eclipse this song must have been written under. Although the song is often played during total eclipses of the sun, that's not how it was written. It was written under a lunar eclipse. July 6th 1982.
This is another thing I always want you to remember. This total eclipse of the heart is darkness within darkness. The blood red glow of a shadow.
"[...] with '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. Its original title was 'Vampires in Love' because I was working on a musical of `Nosferatu,' the other great vampire story. If anyone listens to the lyrics, they're really like vampire lines. It's all about the darkness, the power of darkness and love's place in dark." - Jim Steinman (source)
Sometimes I see claims that Jim Steinman wrote this song for a Meat Loaf album. But I haven't seen any actual evidence of that, I think it is just wishful thinking from Meat Loaf fans.
Move to 1983, here's a video clip of Bonnie Tyler and Jim Steinman rehearsing together (Jim does actually mention that the song was written under a lunar eclipse). "Everyone's invited to an exorcism tonight." At the end of the video, the TV show sadly overdubbed the finished song over Jim and Bonnie performing the song. Jim effectively miming to Rory Dodd's vocals. I would love love love to hear the original sound on this footage. Jim playing the piano like he gets electric shocks from the keys. Playing it with his elbows, scaring poor Bonnie half to death. I'd love to hear that. What exactly is he playing?
You might notice that they rehearse the song in G major. But the finished record isn't. Jim said on Facebook (around 6 years ago) "I wrote it in G major then sped the tape up in mastering! Although it's possible I worked with Bonnie and told Roy Bittan that it SHOULD be in A flat major..."
It is definitely sped up, it's between keys. So I tried taking a copy of the song and slowing it down by 5.3% so it's roughly in G Major (using Audacity), but then Bonnie sounds artificially low compared to her voice in this rehearsal footage. I'm not good enough at music to work this out.
There's an article about the recording and production of the song, thanks to Neil Dorfsman who was one of the song's sound engineers. It doesn't mention speeding anything up. But it does mention that Jim Steinman would have put more cannons in there if he was allowed to.
Shall we talk about the music video? Let's talk about the music video! My first reaction to it was that it's hilarious, and terrifying. As far as I can tell, Bonnie had a terrible time of making it. Running barefoot in snow is not fun! It was filmed at a disused mental asylum outside London called Holloway Sanatorium. You can read the papers of the patients online nowadays, which I find really weird. It's directed by Australian director Russell Mulcahy, who did a ton of hit music videos and also went on to make the Highlander films. Here's a quote from him about the music video (source) :
And then the song was a number 1 hit around the world.
Where should I go from there? Cover versions? The Nicki French dance version was a big hit but, meh. The Baby Pink Star version music video was filmed in Sheffield next to where I used to work. The literal version is hilarious, at least for the first time. Same goes for the Google Translate version (plus Malinda Reese is a far better singer than the literal version singer) - I love that even through the craziness of Google, it's still a vampire song. The Protomen version is probably the most amazing cover that didn't have any direct Jim Steinman involvement - especially when they do it live when you think it's going to fade out but it comes back huge with a really long "turn around guy" solo at the end for several minutes. It's like our collective Rory Dodd fantasies come true (but without actually being Rory Dodd), hahaha.
And finally, the Tanz Der Vampire / Dance Of The Vampires version. In 1997, Jim Steinman worked on a musical version of the 1967 Roman Polanski film Dance Of The Vampires, otherwise known as "The Fearless Vampire Killers, or, Pardon Me, Your Teeth Are In My Neck". Jim had six weeks to score the entire show, so he mostly used songs he'd written long ago - including Total Eclipse Of The Heart, which he didn't expect they'd actually accept into the show, as it was already a huge worldwide hit. The song was split into a duet, and new lyrics were written in German by lyricist Michael Kunze. The original cast for the show starred Steve Barton as Graf von Krolock - a Texan stage actor who originated the role of Raoul in Phantom Of The Opera back in 1986, but could speak German fluently and sing it beautifully. You can hear Steve Barton and Cornelia Zenz sing Totale Finsternis on the original cast recording. He also recorded an English demo with Elaine Caswell which you can hear here. Sadly Steve Barton passed away before the show went to Broadway, and... uh, that's a long story. But the show has been a big hit everywhere that isn't Broadway, and there are so many versions of Totale Finsternis from the various casts of the show and celebrity recordings. 10th Anniversary, Russian, Hungarian, Japanese, Jan Ammann, Helene Fischer, Veronica Appeddu and Mark Seibert. And Rob Evan & Morgan James.
If you've read this post and are wondering "after everything you found out, do you still love this song?" I reply, yes, I do. This crazy old song about dark, obsessive love that you can't get rid of? The somewhat dark history of a dark song which I'm obsessed enough to track through a huge pile of 50 year old newspapers, the song which still has the power to emotionally floor me after 37 years? Of course I still love it. And I doubt there's any escape. And I'm not sure I care whether there is one.
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