With her raspy voice and windblown hair, she is the poster girl for ’80s power ballads – but Wales’ own Bonnie Tyler is planning a radical change in direction.The Skewen songstress has revealed to Wales on Sunday that she will be pulling on a cowboy hat and riding out to Nashville, USA, to record an album packed with country tunes. You can read the article of WalesOnline, and listen the new song with Wayne Warner here>>>
“It’s weird because I have always done rock so it’s going to be a completely different feel for me,” she said, speaking from her home in Mumbles, where she was being photographed for a new exhibition.
“I’m going to Nashville to work with a guy called Wayne Warner who has written some really good songs.
“I’ve been mostly on the road so I haven’t had time to go back in the studio but I should be working on it in October before my Australia tour.”
It will be a return to her roots for Tyler, who began her career singing country-style ballads before her rock reinvention in the 1980s, when she burst onto the international music scene with her Jim Steinman- penned power ballad Total Eclipse of the Heart.
But fans of her throaty rock anthems need not worry.
“A lot of people are turning to country – although I’m a rock girl at heart – and this is going to be country-rock,” she said
“But my shows, believe it or not, are rocky. My band rock and when I do country songs I will fit them in around all the other parts. It won’t be like a country show.”
The 59-year-old, who splits her time between Mumbles and Portugal with her judo expert turned property developer husband Robert Sullivan, also admitted she is a fan of American rock-chick Pink.
“I went to see Pink in concert the other night and she was really, really good,” she said. “I love singers like her, and I also think Duffy is fabulous. I really like her.”
She was being photographed as part of an exhibition by Welsh celebrity photographer Cambridge Jones, called Talking Pictures, which is due to come to the Wales Millennium Centre before touring in America.
It features 30 portraits of some of the best-known Welsh faces, including Dame Shirley Bassey, Sir Anthony Hopkins and Matthew Rhys, as well as recordings of them talking about who has inspired them.
And despite performing for more than 40 years, in which time she has released 15 albums, Tyler revealed she still gets nervous during photo-shoots.
“I was really nervous with all the famous people he’s photographed,” she said.
“When I’m on stage with my band I never worry but when a camera is put in front of my face I fall apart.”
Her glamorous lifestyle is a far cry from the late 1960s and early 1970s, when, as a teenager, she used to balance singing in the clubs around Swansea with a Saturday job in a fruit and veg shop.
“I was brought up in clubs around Swansea, where I was singing for seven years doing all kinds of different music before I had my first hit record in ’76,” she said.
“When I was a young girl I left school on a Friday and went out around all the shops to try and get a job. I was singing in nightclubs six nights a week but I didn’t really think I could make a career out of singing. How wrong I was!”
AJÁNLOM AZ OLDALT
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