Naked boys and a raging Meat Loaf. The crazy story behind the sudden revival of ... trends now

Forty years after it was released, Bonnie Tyler’s hit Total Eclipse Of The Heart has had a sudden big revival – thanks to last Monday’s total solar eclipse. The Welsh-born singer’s 1983 power ballad shot to No. 1 on iTunes while searches on the streaming service Spotify doubled. In her recent memoir, Tyler, now 72, gave an intriguing account of the record’s creation...

Six security guards, each with a dog, guarded the Victorian-built, former infirmary where we shot the video for Total Eclipse Of The Heart. You couldn’t imagine a scarier place.

It is said that dogs have a sixth sense and those six animals wouldn’t go anywhere near the morgue or the room where doctors used to administer electric shocks to patients.

This rambling building near Virginia Water in Surrey was called Holloway Sanatorium. It was a former hospital for the mentally-ill and its vast echoing emptiness struck terror into all of us.

But it did suit the mood of the song – and the extravagant imagination of the great Jim Steinman, dubbed the Lord of Excess, who directed the video and wrote Total Eclipse Of The Heart.

Jim – the composer, lyricist and record producer who also masterminded Meat Loaf’s album Bat Out Of Hell – added all sorts of crazy elements like American footballers and doves to the video.

Of course he did! His mind was endlessly inventive, eccentric and grandiose.

Amazing, too, that he persuaded me to wear a dress instead of my usual jeans and leather jackets. It was one of the few times I have, but it was a gorgeous one: diaphanous, floor-length and white with a daring split and a wrap-over top.

There was a famous film director on the production team who didn’t like the fact that I kept asking questions. Every time I said: ‘Do I really have to do this?’ or ‘Why are we doing that?’ he rolled his eyes. I found the video very confusing. I think people still do now. It was supposed to be a dream sequence, which is why some of it makes absolutely no sense. But then again, neither do dreams.

My goodness, though, it was relentlessly hard work. And because it was shot in the middle of winter, we were all perishingly cold.

We started at 9.30am and finished 18 hours later at 3.30am the following day, shortly after I’d been chased barefoot through the snow by a posse of pagan dancers.

At one point, a young chap sitting in a chair releases a dove. At first they wanted him to shoot the scene naked. I objected, saying: ‘You’ve got absolutely no chance; he’s a little boy.’

They eventually decided to dress him in a school uniform. Then two of the boys in a scene featuring a dinner party ended up in hospital. They had to enact a fight in which they flipped over a table and during the fracas a glass dish shattered. The poor lads fell on it and cut themselves, so were rushed off to casualty to get stitched up.