Bonnie Tyler
Singer and Songwriter
Gaynor Hopkins was born on 8 June 1951 in Skewen, a village in the Neath Valley of South Wales. Her father, Glyndwr Hopkins, was a coal miner and a serviceman in the Second World War. Her mother Elsie was a homemaker with a love of opera - the first musical influence in her daughter's life. Gaynor grew up in a four-bedroom council house with three sisters and two brothers, a household full of music and competing tastes. She attended Rhydhir Comprehensive School in Neath, left at sixteen without formal qualifications, and began working in a grocery shop. Wales has produced many great voices from modest beginnings. This was another one in the making.
Her first public performance was singing All Things Bright and Beautiful in a chapel as a child. In 1969, at seventeen, she entered a local talent contest and came second -- inspired enough to pursue singing seriously. She found work as a backing singer with Bobby Wayne and the Dixies before forming her own soul band, Imagination. She changed her name - first to Sherene Davis, to avoid confusion with Welsh folk singer Mary Hopkin, then to Bonnie Tyler after spotting the name in a newspaper. In 1975 she was spotted performing with her band in Swansea by talent scout Roger Bell, who brought her to London to record a demo. RCA Records signed her.
In the mid-1970s, nodules on her vocal chords required surgery and a period of enforced silence. When her voice returned it was transformed - husky, raspy, raw. It was a voice unlike any other in popular music. She has been compared to Rod Stewart, to Kim Carnes, to Janis Joplin. She is, in fact, comparable only to herself.
