Bonnie Tyler - Loving You's a Dirty Job (But Somebody's Gotta Do It) (Video)

What this video is

Released in November 1985 as the lead single from Bonnie Tyler's sixth studio album Secret Dreams and Forbidden Fire (1986), this duet with Todd Rundgren was written and produced by Jim Steinman, the architect of operatic, bombastic pop. The video emerged at the apex of the MTV promotional video arms race, when CBS Records invested in cinematic UK production. The creative solution devised by Pope — using Welsh…

Why it matters

The video is a key artifact of the Jim Steinman 'Wagnerian pop' production cycle of the mid-1980s, connecting the visual grammar of Tyler's earlier Total Eclipse of the Heart (dir. Russell Mulcahy, 1983) to the more contained, studio-bound romantic drama Tim Pope favoured. It documents the CBS…

The director

Timothy Michael Pope (born 12 February 1956) is a British film director best known for his innovative music videos of the 1980s, most notably his long-running collaboration with The Cure (37 videos). He directed for Soft Cell, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Talk…