High On Emotion

 Which artist or band have you seen play live the most times?

It won't surprise many of you to know that, for me, the answer is Roy Harper who, perhaps eccentrically, I consider if not the greatest living musician and poet, then at least my favourite. But, given my liking for bands like the Kinks, through Jimi Hendrix, progressive and punk rock, to REM and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the identity of the artist I've seen next most often might be a surprise: it's the deeply unfashionable Chris de Burgh, who we saw for a 6th time at the Liverpool Philharmonic recently.

Indeed, we'd have seen him at least a couple more times if it hadn't been for the boycott initiated by my wife - initially a bigger fan than me but a deeply unforgiving person at times - after de Burgh's egregious affair with his children's nanny in 1994 while his wife -  the lady in The Lady In Red - was lying in hospital recovering from a broken neck incurred while horse riding. Fortunately for de Burgh his daughter, Rosanna Davison, who won Miss World in 2003, is more forgiving, blaming the nanny, while admitting that it takes two to tango*. For himself, de Burgh admitted to being "guilty as hell" but he and his wife are still together. Either way, we hadn't seen de Burgh since a gig at Alton Towers in 1990.

We first saw de Burgh when we were invited to join a big buddy of mine from the football club we played at for a gig at the Liverpool Empire in the early 1980s. By that time he was touring his 6th album, The Getaway, with an extensive back catalogue. But, despite avidly reading a weekly music paper all through the 70s and early 80s and listening to a lot of radio, I knew nothing about him and had hardly heard a single track of his. He was deeply unfashionable years before he became deeply unfashionable after the mega success of The Lady In Red, described by one reporter as "a mawkfest which only James Blunt has been able to come up with songs more irritating than"#.

So I was a bit surprised in nineteen eighty whatever to find a sold out Empire Theatre, with a clearly passionate audience enthusiastically welcoming songs they knew very well. And to find that de Burgh was more of a quirky story telling troubadour than a conventional balladeer singer-songwriter. Indeed, his second album, released in 1975, was called Spanish Train and Other Stories. It contains his best known song at that time, A Spaceman Came Travelling,  which has become a standard on Christmas playlists despite being an almost anti-Christmas song, the thesis of the story being that the star in the east was some kind of flying saucer and the shepherds and co were of course afraid of the alien being who emerged to speak to them. Spanish Train is quirkier still, the Lord arriving at a dying railwayman's bed to claim his soul, only to find the devil has got there first but is offering to play poker for the soul, then upping the ante to 10,000 souls. The devil, of course, cheats to win before
And far away in some recess
The Lord and the devil are now playing chess
The devil still cheats and wins more souls
And as for the Lord?
Well, he's just doing his best
The song ends melodramatically with de Burgh imagining his own soul is at stake:
That train is still on time
And my soul is on the line
Oh, Lord, you've got to win.
With changes of time and tempo and a driving riff of a chorus this is a truly great song. De Burgh always plays these two songs live, together with another from the same album, the crowd pleasing Patricia the Stripper.

By the time we accompanied our friends to the following year's gig at the Empire (de Burgh has always liked playing Liverpool and probably gets as warm a reception there as anywhere) we'd bought a compilation album and were already bemused that songs like High on Emotion, Don't Pay The Ferryman and Ecstasy of Flight (I Love The Night) had been very minor chart hits, if they had made any impression at all. They are high quality pop-rock dance songs which come across well in large auditoriums; all they needed was airplay.

In practice, de Burgh's commercial success was limited and very patchy before The Lady in Red. Bizarrely his first album went to number one in Brazil: it didn't chart anywhere else. The second, Spanish Train, reached the top 40 in the UK and Norway. The next two didn't chart, but his 5th album was a number one seller in Norway and the sixth in Norway and Germany, achieving platinum sales, as did the seventh album, Man On The Line, which was his first big selling album in the UK. That second gig prompted us to buy several of these albums from his back catalogue and get into his stuff properly. And one track on his first album, 1974's Far Beyond These Castle Walls, called Satin Green Shutters, became one of my wife's favourite ever songs. It's a bit of a Romeo pre Juliet ballad, i.e. in love with the idea of being in love, but beautiful none the less.

In another staple of his set, Borderline, he imagines a couple of mixed nationality split by the onset of war as the man returns to his own country to fight against that of his lover:
And it's breaking my heart
I know what I must do
I hear my country call me 
But I want to be with you
I'm taking my side
One of us will lose
Don't let go, I want to know
That you will wait for me until the day
There's no borderline, no borderline
And as he makes his way to his homeland:
We're coming to the borderline
I'm ready with my lies.....
Walking past the border guards
I want to break into a run
But these are only boys and I will never know
How men can see the wisdom in a war
At this last line, mid-song, the audience broke into spontaneous applause. Well it might have been spontaneous 40ish years ago but most of the audience know exactly what's coming and de Burgh always builds in a pause before going into the chorus to allow the applause to fade. The story could be about any war, but it has the feel of WWII and the sequel to the song, Say Goodbye To It All from a later album implies the man is German and the woman French. Leaving aside the obvious question of whether there could be wisdom in a war against fascism, Borderline is a very good song. The new songs he played also went down well. One that made an impression on me was about a refugee from Syria, his difficult journey across land and sea and his wish to one day go back to a peaceful homeland.

De Burgh was born in Argentina, son of a British diplomat, Colonel Charles Davison and an Irish secretary, Maeve Emily de Burgh, whose father, Sir Eric de Burgh, had been Chief of General Staff in India in the World War II.  The family settled in Wexford at Bargy Castle, a dilapidated 12th century castle which Eric de Burgh bought in the 1960s and turned into a hotel, where the young Chris sang to entertain guests. The environment clearly influenced his story telling as the themes of his early albums like Far Beyond These Castle Walls and Crusader show.

De Burgh went to a public school (Marlborough). Public school alumni are, apparently, disproportionally represented in successful acts: I knew about John Mellor, aka Joe Strummer of The Clash and the members of Genesis and Radiohead come to mind, but in more recent years it's an epidemic: James Blunt, Chris Martin, Lily Allen, Mumford and Sons and so on, leading to articles like one in the New Statesman** bewailing the lack of ordinary Joes in pop and claiming that pop culture will be doomed as a result. (Hmmm, Joe Strummer seems to give the lie to that chestnut, surely? But maybe these days ordinary Joes are too busy with smartphone games to pick up a guitar.)  Either way, even the NME said in 2011 "it's wrong to hate bands for being posh".

With the release of his 8th album Into The Light in 1986 featuring The Lady In Red, de Burgh revealed a more mature and smoother sound, with his ballads now stripped down, confident and, ok, lowest common denominator. Gone was the Romeo, wondering just what love would really be like, as The Lady in Red and Missing You became huge chart hits and, with platinum selling albums in the UK and Germany and Gold in the US, suddenly everyone had heard of him.

Now you might think it's easy to write simple love songs but I recall one of my progressive rock heroes, possibly Robert Fripp, telling a music journalist who was sniffy about pop music "if we could write songs like Abba, don't you think we'd all be doing it?"

Of course, how often you've seen a performer is influenced by many factors: opportunity, your own availability, availability of readies, who friends and family want to see etc. Nevertheless, de Burgh is worth seeing and listening to and I willingly admit I'm a fan. You don't get to sell 45 million records if you can't write a decent song.

And as those around us in the cheap seats belted out the words to Patricia the Stripper after de Burgh had everyone on their feet for High On Emotion, I reflected that I've seen plenty of bands leave the house rocking but, perhaps surprisingly, none more so than Chris de Burgh.

We also met up with my old football chum who we hadn't seen in the 30 years we spent moving up, down and across the country, so it was a great night.

If you want to hear some of de Burgh's stuff you might not have heard, including Spanish Train, A Spaceman Came Travelling and Borderline, setlist.fm has links to many of the songs he's been playing on his tour e.g. here. I'm never sure whether these sites treat artists properly but the pathetic royalties they get from streaming wouldn't be material to Mr Davison, though the fact that these links often get taken down imply otherwise. Either way you'll find some good songs out there.

*http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/miss-world-lashes-out-at-dads-former-teenage-lover-26216516.html
#http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/chris-de-burgh-great-hands-shame-about-the-voice-422038.htmli. Actually, I quite like some of Blunt's stuff too and also the way he sends himself up in interviews.
** Stuart Maconie, The priveleged are taking over the arts - without the grit pop culture is doomed, New Statesman 4 Feb 2015.