Steinman was responsible for Wagnerian pop: part opera, part stage musical, part rock, and lyrically all a kind of gothic, male adolescent fantasy. I never got it. In theory it should have appealed to me, since I was as interested in finding 'paradise by the dashboard light' as any teenage boy having to beat down 15 erections a day.

But no. I hated Meat Loaf, which was about as far as you could get from the progressive rock I was into. Music snob that I was, I thought it was for people who didn't know any better. It was Bruce Springsteen for 12-year-olds.

But hey, what did I know? Bat out of Hell sold millions, and it still does 200,000 copies a year, apparently.

One of Steinman's biggest hits was Total Eclipse of the Heart, which he wrote for Welsh singer Bonnie Tyler, who released it in 1983. It's typical of his songs: melodramatic and meaningless. It was huge, it was everywhere, and it sucked.

The music video, storyboarded by Steinman himself, is a great example of 80s excess. It's got everything you'd expect in a music video from the time: a mood-lit mansion at night, twirling ninjas, ghostly billowing curtains, an over-emoting singer with a Farah Fawcett blow-wave, and a kid with car headlights for eyes. Everyday stuff.

Like so many music videos, it's a bunch of visual non-sequiturs. All sound and fury, signifying a stinky pile of dog poo. Depending on your taste, of course.

Anyway, now somebody called dascottjr has reverse engineered the song from the video clip, to produce the 'literal version'. Be careful if you're watching this at work – you may wet yourself (I did).