There is a particular kind of goodbye that does not happen all at once, and it does not happen in a dramatic scene. It happens in a studio, over months, in takes that sound fine and singles that do not chart, in meetings where everybody is polite and nobody quite says what everybody knows. By the time Bonnie Tyler released her fourth album in January 1981, she had been a star, she had been a hitmaker, and she was, quietly, becoming something else: a singer whose record company no longer quite knew what to do with her, and who no longer quite knew what to do with her record company. The album was called Goodbye to the Island, and its title track, a short, wistful song about leaving a place that can no longer hold you, turned out to be more prophetic than anyone intended. It was her last album for RCA Records, the label that had made her famous, and it was the record that closed one chapter of her career just before another, far louder chapter opened, with a producer from New York, a song about an eclipse, and a fame that dwarfed everything that had come before.
This is the story of that album: how it was made, why it sounded the way it did, what it tried to be, why it sold less than any of Tyler’s RCA albums, and why it deserves to be remembered as more than a failure. It is a story about a Welsh singer being steered, against her instincts, toward country music, about a songwriting team whose dominance was finally loosening, about covers chosen with care and originals written with feeling, about a title song that said goodbye to an island and, in doing so, said goodbye to an era, and about the decision, after the album, to walk away from a five-year contract extension and bet everything on a new producer. It is also a story about what happens when an artist outgrows the people who discovered her, and about how a disappointing record can be the necessary bridge to a great one.
The RCA years, and how they began
To understand Goodbye to the Island, it helps to go back to where Tyler’s recording career began, because the album only makes sense as the end of a story that started well. She signed to RCA Records in 1976, after being discovered singing in clubs in South Wales, and she was paired with Ronnie Scott and Steve Wolfe, a songwriting and management team who became, in effect, the architects of her early career. Scott and Wolfe wrote her songs, produced her records, managed her affairs, and shaped her image, and for a time the arrangement worked brilliantly. Her debut album, The World Starts Tonight, released in 1977, gave her a hit with a song about being lost in France, a record that announced a voice that was warm, distinctive, and slightly rough at the edges, even before surgery would roughen it further. Her second album, Natural Force, released in 1978, gave her a worldwide hit with a song about heartache that became one of the defining singles of its year, a record that sold in huge numbers, that was played everywhere, and that made Tyler, a young Welsh singer who had been singing in pubs a few years earlier, into an international star.
That success, however, came with a cost that is familiar to many singers discovered by a single team: the team that made you can also become the cage that holds you. Scott and Wolfe were not only Tyler’s writers and producers; they were her managers, which meant that the people deciding what songs she sang were also the people deciding where she toured, what she wore, how she was presented, and what direction her career took. For a young singer, that kind of guidance is reassuring. For a singer in her late twenties who has already had international hits, it can begin to feel like a limit. By the time of her third album, Diamond Cut, released in February 1979 and produced with Robin Geoffrey Cable alongside Scott and Wolfe, the signs of strain were already visible. The album did respectably in Scandinavia, reaching the top twenty in Finland, Norway, and Sweden, but it only reached number one hundred and forty-five in America, and its singles did not repeat the success of the heartache song. Tyler was still a star in parts of Europe, but the momentum of 1978 was fading, and the question facing everyone around her was what to do next: repeat the formula and hope, or change it and risk losing what audience remained.
One bright spot in that period deserves to be remembered, because it shows Tyler at her best and hints at the singer she would become. In November 1979 she represented the United Kingdom at the Yamaha World Popular Song Festival in Japan, and she won the Grand Prix International award for her performance of “Sitting on the Edge of the Ocean,” a Scott and Wolfe song that would later be re-recorded for Goodbye to the Island. Winning an international song festival is a different kind of success from having a chart hit: it is about performance, about standing on a stage in a foreign country and convincing judges and an audience that a song deserves to win, and Tyler, who had learned her trade in clubs, was very good at that kind of performance. The win did not translate into a major hit at home, but it confirmed something important about her: she was a singer, not just a recording artist, a performer whose voice worked best when it was heard live, in a room, by people who could see the effort and the feeling in it. That quality would matter enormously in the next phase of her career, when she would need to convince a new producer, and then a new audience, that she was more than a voice on a record.
A country turn she did not choose
The central tension of Goodbye to the Island is a musical one, and it is a tension Tyler herself later described with unusual frankness. RCA, and to some extent Scott and Wolfe, were steering her toward country music, or at least toward a country-flavoured pop that they believed would find her a new audience in America, where country radio was a powerful force and where a Welsh singer with a husky voice might, in theory, fit alongside American country-pop stars. Tyler, by her own later account, was not happy with that attempt to steer her into country music, and she was not happy, more generally, with the artistic image that had been built for her. She was a rock singer at heart, or at least a pop-rock singer, a woman whose voice had a rasp and a power that suited drama, not the polite restraint of country-pop, and the more her team pushed her toward Nashville-flavoured material, the more she felt the fit was wrong. That disagreement, polite at first and then less so, is the background music of Goodbye to the Island, and you can hear it in the record: a singer trying, professionally, to sing what she has been given, while her voice keeps pulling toward something bigger, rawer, and more dramatic than the material sometimes allows.
The album’s credits tell that story in miniature. On earlier Tyler albums, Scott and Wolfe had written almost everything. On Goodbye to the Island, the total number of Scott and Wolfe songs was cut down to just five, a significant loosening of their grip, and the rest of the album was filled with covers and with songs by other writers. That change was not, by itself, a rebellion; it was a practical response to a singer and a team running low on fresh material, and to a record company that wanted an album out. But it had an artistic consequence: for the first time, Tyler’s album sounded like a collection of songs chosen from different places, rather than a single team’s vision, and that eclecticism is both the album’s charm and its weakness. A listener can hear, track by track, a singer trying on different identities: a country ballad here, a rock groove there, a classic pop standard reimagined, a beach-like atmosphere that drifts without quite landing. Some of those identities fit her beautifully. Others fit her only partly, and the album, as a whole, never quite settles into a single, confident sound, the way her best later albums would.
The recording itself was a travelling affair, which also contributed to the album’s slightly unsettled feeling. Sessions took place in Vilamoura, in the Algarve in Portugal, using the RAK Mobile studio, as well as at Startling Studios in Berkshire, with mixing at Ridge Farm Studios in Surrey, and the engineers included Steve Lipson, Greg Jackman, and Doug Hopkins. A mobile studio in Portugal sounds glamorous, and in some ways it was: sunshine, sea air, a change of scene from London studios, a chance to record away from the usual pressures. But a mobile studio also means compromise, means working in a place not designed for recording, means a sound that is a little less controlled than a purpose-built studio would give. The album’s personnel, meanwhile, was strong: guitarists including Garth Watt-Roy, Gary Taylor, Robert Ahwai, and Steve Lipson, bassists Felix Krish and Kevin Dunne, keyboard players Betsy Cook and Mike McNaught, drummers Jeff Allen and Liam Genockey, and the saxophonist Raphael Ravenscroft, whose saxophone would become famous, in a different context, on another singer’s record. Arrangements were shared among Cook, John Cameron, McNaught, and Wil Malone, a division of labour that again reflects an album made by committee rather than by a single vision. The result is a record that sounds professional, warm, and well-played, but that rarely sounds like a singer and a producer in perfect, single-minded agreement.
The album, track by track
It is worth walking through Goodbye to the Island track by track, because the album’s story is in its sequencing, in what was chosen, what was covered, and what was left to carry the weight. The album, forty-two minutes long, opens on its first side with “I’m Just a Woman,” a Scott and Wolfe song, five minutes and eight seconds long, released as the lead single on 3 October 1980, a few months before the album itself. It is a big, declarative song, the kind of title that promises a statement about womanhood, and Tyler sings it with commitment, but it failed to chart, which is a telling start for an album: its lead single, its opening track, its statement of intent, did not find an audience. That failure is not necessarily a judgement on the song, which has its admirers, but it is a judgement on the moment: by late 1980, Tyler’s singles were no longer automatic radio records in Britain, and a song that might have been a hit in 1978 was, in 1980, just another record in a crowded market. The second track, “We Danced on the Ceiling,” also by Scott and Wolfe, four minutes and fifty-eight seconds, is a lighter, more rhythmic piece, and it shows Tyler’s ability to sing a dance-flavoured pop song without losing her warmth, but it too did not become a single, and it remains, for most listeners, an album track rather than a remembered song.
The third track is where the album first truly comes alive, and it is not a Scott and Wolfe song at all. “Wild Love,” written by Iain Sutherland, three minutes and fifty-one seconds, is, by the account of Tyler’s own official site’s fortieth-anniversary note, the track that offers her finest vocal performance on the album, and it is easy to hear why. Sutherland, a Scottish songwriter with a gift for melody, gave Tyler a song that lets her voice do what it does best: move between tenderness and power, between a near-whisper and a full-throated cry, without ever sounding forced. AllMusic’s review, which gave the album three stars, singled out “Wild Love” for its slower balladry and its acute sense of melody, and that judgement feels right: here, for three and a half minutes, the album’s eclecticism works, because the song and the singer are in complete agreement. The fourth track, “The Closer You Get,” written by the then little-known Chris Rea, also three minutes and fifty-one seconds, is a different kind of success: a boogie-flavoured, blues-rock groove that AllMusic compared to a well-known British boogie band, a song that lets Tyler sing with a swagger she does not always get to show on ballads, and that hints, in its rhythmic drive, at the rock singer she would soon become. Rea himself would go on to a major solo career, and hearing his early song in Tyler’s voice is a reminder of how small the British music world was in 1980, and how many future stars were writing for other singers before they became stars themselves.
The first side closes with a cover, and it is a brave one. “Sometimes When We Touch,” written by Dan Hill and Barry Mann, four minutes and nineteen seconds, is a song that had already been a major hit for Hill, a ballad about the overwhelming, almost embarrassing intensity of love, and Tyler’s version treats it with respect rather than imitation. She does not try to out-sing Hill’s original; she sings it as a woman, with a rasp that gives the song’s vulnerability a different colour, and the result is a version that stands on its own, even if it never became a single. The second side opens with the title track, and it is worth pausing there, because the title track is the album’s heart. “Goodbye to the Island,” written by Scott and Wolfe, three minutes and thirteen seconds, released as the album’s second and final single on 9 January 1981, is a short, wistful song, and its story, paraphrased rather than quoted, is about leaving a place, saying goodbye to an island that has been home, and facing the rain that follows. It is not a dramatic song, and it is not a big production. It is a quiet farewell, sung with a restraint that makes its sadness feel real rather than performed, and it reached number fifty-four on the British airplay chart, which is to say it was heard, but not widely, and it did not become the hit that might have saved the album. Its modesty is part of its charm, and part of its tragedy: a goodbye song that itself said goodbye without much fanfare.
Covers, re-recordings, and the second side
The rest of the second side continues the album’s pattern of covers and re-recordings, and each choice reveals something about where Tyler was, musically, in 1980. The seventh track, “Wild Side of Life,” written by Arlie Carter and William Warren, three minutes and forty-six seconds, is a country and western classic, a song about a woman who leaves home for the bright lights, and Tyler’s version leans into its country roots more fully than almost anything else on the album. It is, in that sense, the clearest example of the country turn she was unhappy with, and it is also, paradoxically, a good performance: Tyler sings country material with conviction, because she is a professional, and because her voice, with its natural twang of feeling, if not of accent, can carry a country lyric. Whether she should have been singing it at all is a different question, and it is the question that would eventually lead her away from RCA. The eighth track, “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” written by Gary Brooker and Keith Reid, four minutes and twenty-nine seconds, is the album’s most ambitious cover, a song that is, for many listeners, sacred, a baroque pop masterpiece with an organ line everybody knows. Tyler’s version does not try to reproduce that organ line note for note; it treats the song as a vocal piece, letting her rasp carry the mystery of the words, and the result is respectful, atmospheric, and, for some listeners, surprisingly effective. It is also a risk: covering a song that famous invites comparison, and comparison is rarely kind, but Tyler’s willingness to take that risk shows a singer who was not content to play safe, even on an album that was, in other respects, playing safe.
The final two tracks of the original album are re-recordings, and they are, in their way, the most revealing choices of all. “Sitting on the Edge of the Ocean,” three minutes and nineteen seconds, is the song with which Tyler had won in Japan in 1979, re-recorded for this album, and hearing it here, in a new arrangement, is like hearing a singer revisit a moment of triumph and try to make it fit a new record. It works, because the song is strong and because Tyler sings it with the confidence of someone who knows it has already won something, somewhere. The closing track, “I Believe in Your Sweet Love,” four minutes and twenty-two seconds, also by Scott and Wolfe and also re-recorded from an earlier single version, closes the album on a note of faith, of belief in love, that feels, in retrospect, like a bridge to the next phase of her career, when belief itself would become a song title. Together, these two re-recordings give the album a slightly retrospective feeling, as if Tyler and her team, running low on new Scott and Wolfe material, were reaching back to songs that had already proved themselves, rather than forward to songs that might prove something new. That backward glance is understandable, but it is also a sign of a creative partnership running out of road.
What the numbers said, and what they did not
Commercially, Goodbye to the Island was, by every measure available, a disappointment, and it is important to state that plainly, because the album’s story is often told as if it were a hidden masterpiece, and it was not, or at least not in the way its makers hoped. It had, according to the standard account, the weakest sales of all the albums Tyler released through RCA, and it only charted in one country, reaching number thirty-eight in Norway. It did not chart in Britain, it did not chart in America, and its two singles, the lead single that failed to chart at all and the title track that reached only fifty-four on an airplay chart, did not rescue it. For a singer who had, three years earlier, had a worldwide number one, that is a stark fall, and it is the kind of fall that ends careers, or at least ends contracts. RCA, understandably from a business point of view, offered Tyler a new contract, for another five years, but on terms that would have kept her in the same system, with the same team, making the same kind of records. Tyler declined. She later explained that decision in terms of disillusionment with her artistic image and a scarcity of performance opportunities in the aftermath of several unsuccessful singles, which is a polite way of saying that she felt trapped by an image she no longer believed in and starved of the live work that had always sustained her.
That decision, to walk away from a five-year extension from a major label, is the bravest moment in this whole story, and it deserves to be dwelt on, because it is easy, in retrospect, to say she was right, since what came next was so successful, and much harder, at the time, to know that. In January 1981, Tyler was not yet the singer of the eclipse song. She was a singer whose last album had charted only in Norway, whose last two singles had failed, whose team was fragmenting, and who was being offered security by the only label she had ever known. Turning that security down, in favour of uncertainty, of finding a new label, a new producer, a new sound, was a gamble of the kind that most singers, at that point in a career, do not take. They take the extension, they make another album like the last one, they hope for a better single, and they fade, politely, into compilations and nostalgia tours. Tyler did not do that. She left RCA, she signed with CBS and Columbia, and she set about finding a producer who could give her the dramatic, rock sound she had always wanted. She considered several famous names, including Phil Collins, Jeff Lynne, and Alan Tarney, all of whom would have been sensible, commercial choices, but her first choice, and the choice she pursued, was Jim Steinman, the songwriter and producer behind Meat Loaf’s vast, theatrical rock records, a man whose idea of a ballad was not a quiet farewell but a storm.
The contrast between Goodbye to the Island and what came next could hardly be sharper, and that contrast is why the earlier album matters. Faster Than the Speed of Night, released in 1983 and produced by Steinman, partly recorded at the Power Station in New York with members of the E Street Band, Rick Derringer on guitar, and Rory Dodd and Eric Troyer on backing vocals, gave Tyler the biggest hit of her career, a song about a total eclipse that became a number one in Britain and America and a defining record of the decade, followed by a song about holding out for a hero that became almost as famous. Those records succeeded, in part, because Steinman understood what Scott and Wolfe, in their country turn, had missed: that Tyler’s voice was not a country voice, or a polite pop voice, but a dramatic voice, a voice that needed big songs, big arrangements, and big emotions to match it. Goodbye to the Island, with its quiet farewells and its country covers, had been trying to make that voice smaller. Steinman made it bigger, and the public responded. Without the failure of the earlier album, and without Tyler’s decision to leave the system that made it, the later success might never have happened. Failure, in this story, was not the end. It was the permission to change.
The afterlife: reissues, box sets, and reassessment
Goodbye to the Island did not disappear after 1981, and its afterlife is a quieter, more interesting story than its original reception. In 1991, Castle Communications issued the album on compact disc, with alternate artwork, giving it a second life in a new format for collectors and for fans who had missed it on vinyl. In 2010, the British reissue label 7T’s issued it again, with two bonus tracks, and in 2019 it appeared as part of The RCA Years, a box set released by Cherry Pop that collected Tyler’s first four albums with, in this album’s case, eight bonus tracks, including alternate versions and B-sides that had originally appeared on singles. That box set version was released digitally in the United States and Canada in 2020, which meant that, almost forty years after its original release, a listener in America could finally hear the album easily, in full, with its extras, as part of a coherent story about Tyler’s early career. Tyler’s own official site marked the album’s fortieth anniversary in January 2021 with a celebratory note, listing its musicians, its engineers, its recording locations, and its songs, treating it not as an embarrassment to be hidden but as a chapter to be remembered, with its covers, its Chris Rea song, its Sutherland ballad, and its title farewell all given their due.
That reassessment, by fans and by Tyler herself, is fair, and it is also limited in a useful way. Goodbye to the Island is not, on repeated listening, a lost masterpiece, and nobody who loves Tyler should pretend it is. Its best tracks, the Sutherland ballad, the Rea groove, the title song, the re-recorded ocean song, are genuinely good, and they show a singer of real ability working with material that sometimes deserves her and sometimes does not. Its weaker moments, the country cover that feels like a detour, the lead single that feels like a formula, the overall lack of a single, confident sound, are real weaknesses, and they explain why the album sold as it did. But an album does not have to be a masterpiece to matter, and this one matters for three reasons that have nothing to do with its chart position. First, it documents, honestly, a singer at a crossroads, trying on identities, some of which fit and some of which do not, and that documentation is valuable for anyone who wants to understand how careers actually work, as opposed to how retrospectives pretend they work. Second, it contains, in its best tracks, the seeds of the singer Tyler would become: the dramatic ballad singer, the rock singer, the interpreter who could take another writer’s song and make it her own. Third, and most importantly, it is the album that made her leave. Without it, without its disappointment, without the five-year extension she turned down, there is no Steinman, no eclipse, no hero, and no second act that dwarfed the first. A record that leads, indirectly, to a career-defining success has earned its place in the story, even if it did not, itself, succeed.
Listening to Goodbye to the Island today, more than forty years after its release, the first thing a new listener is likely to notice is how warm it sounds, how unhurried, how unlike the frantic pop of its era, and how clearly it belongs to a moment just before pop production became dominated by machines and by a harder, brighter eighties sheen. The record still breathes, still leaves space around the vocal, still trusts a melody to carry a song without dressing it in every available sound, and that breathing room is itself a pleasure, even when the song underneath is only modest. It is a record made by musicians in rooms, in Portugal and in Berkshire, rather than by programmers in front of screens, and that human quality, audible in every track, is part of why it still rewards a patient listener. The synthesizers are restrained, the drums are human, the saxophone, when it appears, sounds like a person playing in a room, and Tyler’s voice, even before the Steinman years gave it its full dramatic range, is already unmistakable: that rasp, that warmth, that sense of a singer who means what she sings, even when the song itself is not quite worthy of her. A listener who comes to the album from the eclipse song may initially find it quiet, even sleepy, and that reaction is understandable. But a second listen reveals something else: a singer learning, track by track, what she does not want to be, and in that learning, preparing, without knowing it, for what she does want to be. That is a valuable kind of record, the kind that does not announce itself as important but becomes important in retrospect, because it sits, exactly, at the turning point of a life.
There is also a practical lesson in this album for anyone who follows a singer’s career rather than just their hits, and it concerns the value of listening to the records between the famous ones. A fan who knows Tyler only from her heartache song and her eclipse song will have a picture of her that is true but incomplete, a picture of a singer who arrived, fully formed, with two enormous ballads. A fan who listens to Goodbye to the Island will have a fuller picture: a singer who struggled, who was misdirected, who sang country songs she did not love and covers she did love, who kept her professionalism intact when the charts were not rewarding it, and who, in the end, trusted her own dissatisfaction enough to change labels, teams, and sounds. That fuller picture does not diminish the famous songs. It enhances them, because it shows what they cost, what had to be left behind for them to happen, and how much work, disappointment, and quiet courage sits behind a sudden-seeming breakthrough. The eclipse did not come from nowhere. It came from a singer who had said goodbye to an island, goodbye to a label, and goodbye to an image, and who was, therefore, free to say hello to something bigger. Listening to the farewell album, with that knowledge, turns it from a footnote into a prologue, and prologues, when they are sung this well, deserve to be heard in full, not skipped on the way to the main event.
If there is a single image to carry away from this story, it is not a chart, and it is not an album cover, and it is not even a studio in Portugal, though all of those have their place. It is a quieter image: a singer in her late twenties, in a studio far from home, singing a goodbye to an island she has never quite lived on, not knowing yet that she is also singing goodbye to a label, to a team, to an image, and to a version of herself that will not survive the decade, and singing it, nonetheless, with complete conviction, as if farewells, properly sung, are not endings at all but beginnings. That image captures what Bonnie Tyler did, at her best, and what Goodbye to the Island does best: it turns a disappointing album into a necessary farewell, a country detour into a lesson, and a last RCA record into the door through which a far bigger career walked. The island was left behind, the rain came, as the song said it would, and on the other side of that rain, waiting in New York with a piano and a storm in mind, was a producer who would finally let her voice be as big as it always wanted to be.