In 1984, one of the most talked-about films in America was not a new release at all. It was Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s silent science-fiction epic from 1927, resurrected in a colorized restoration with a brand-new rock score assembled by Giorgio Moroder. The project was controversial from the moment it was announced: film purists were appalled, Moroder was unrepentant, and the soundtrack — featuring new songs written for the film by some of the biggest names in pop — became one of the strangest artifacts of the decade. Among its highlights was a track written by Moroder himself with his longtime collaborator Pete Bellotte and sung by Bonnie Tyler: “Here She Comes.”
The pairing made a peculiar kind of sense. Moroder, the Munich-based producer who had built Donna Summer’s disco empire in the 1970s and then pivoted to film music, was at the peak of his imperial phase in the early 1980s. “Flashdance…What a Feeling” had just won him an Academy Award, and his name on a project guaranteed attention. Tyler, meanwhile, was coming off the biggest year of her career: “Total Eclipse of the Heart” had been a worldwide number one in 1983, and “Holding Out for a Hero” was about to become her second defining anthem of the decade. Moroder produced the track himself, and it was released as a single on October 15, 1984, on CBS and Columbia, with “Time” on the B-side.
Bellotte deserves a moment here too. The British songwriter had been Moroder’s partner through the Munich disco years, co-writing a string of hits that defined an era. For Metropolis he worked in a different register — writing not for the dance floor but for Lang’s towering, dystopian city, its robot heroine, and its themes of machinery and desire. “Here She Comes” is, on its face, a song about the arrival of a woman — but in the context of the film, it plays as a theme for the Machine-Man herself, the robot at the story’s center. Tyler’s voice, all gravel and yearning, gave Moroder’s sleek electronics something human to hold onto.
The song’s chart journey was respectable without being spectacular — the classic profile of a soundtrack single tied to a polarizing film. It reached number 13 in Austria, number 32 in France, number 43 in Germany, and number 51 on the European Hot 100. In Britain it stalled at number 98; in America it climbed to number 76 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 81 on Cash Box. Modest numbers. But the song earned something more durable than a chart peak: a nomination for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance at the 27th Grammy Awards. It was Tyler’s third Grammy nomination — and, as it turned out, her last.
The music video, directed by Brian Johnson, deserves its own chapter. Shot in London, it casts Tyler in a black leather dress wandering a cobblestone street lined with statues of soldiers, encountering doubles of herself as a car smashes through a pair of garage doors and a spaceship descends from the sky. It was pure 1984 — big, strange, and expensive-looking. It was also, briefly, notorious: Britain’s Independent Broadcasting Authority investigated the video over the screen time given to a Renault 5, a product-placement controversy that feels quaint now but was taken seriously at the time.
Moroder’s Metropolis remains divisive — critics at the time largely savaged the colorization and the modern score — but “Here She Comes” was consistently singled out as one of the soundtrack’s strongest tracks. The Pittsburgh Press, the Montreal Gazette, the Reno Gazette-Journal, The Age in Australia, and the Vincennes Sun-Commercial all praised it: a rare point of consensus around a deeply contentious project. That critical warmth matters, because it suggests the song worked on its own terms, not just as a cog in Moroder’s machine. Stripped of the controversy, it is simply a well-built pop single with an unusual pedigree.
In Tyler’s catalog, “Here She Comes” sits in a fascinating hinge moment. Released between “Holding Out for a Hero” (1984) and “Loving You’s a Dirty Job but Somebody’s Gotta Do It” (1985), it captures her at the exact point where the Steinman-era bombast met the sleek mid-80s studio craft of Moroder. It is less theatrical than her Steinman records and more electronic than anything she had done before — a one-off experiment that worked. She clearly thought so too: she re-recorded the song for her 2004 album Simply Believe, returning to it two decades later with the perspective of an artist revisiting a road not taken.
What to listen for
“Here She Comes” will never be the first song anyone names when they talk about Bonnie Tyler, and that is precisely the point of this series. It is a footnote that contains a whole world: a silent film from Weimar Germany, an Italian disco pioneer with an Oscar, a Welsh singer at the height of her powers, a car-company controversy, and a Grammy nomination. Not bad for a song that peaked at number 76.