CHRIS de BURGH
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Chris de Burgh
50
Chris de Burgh celebrates a remarkable and rare career milestone during 2024; half a century as a recording artist.
Yet when he signed his first recording contract in 1974 and his debut album, ‘Far beyond These Castle Walls’, was released by A&M Records that same year, Chris did not look beyond the immediate future.
“As I held a copy of that record in my hands, I had absolutely no idea that this would even go any further,” he recalls. “I was incredibly naive about the music business but I was full of hope and dreams and, spectacularly, my dreams not only came true, they came truer than true. I had no concept that I was going to last as long as this. Fifty years? Wow!”
A song from that first album offered a very early glimpse of what might lie ahead for Chris; the single ‘Flying’ spent 17 straight weeks at No.1 in Brazil. “I thought ‘Right, I’m off! A world star, overnight!’,” Chris remembers. “Not a chance. From then on, it was a real, real slog and a hard, hard time, but the grounding that I’d had in my parents’ hotel, Bargy Castle, performing for the guests there made me believe that I did have something that I could give to people.”
Gradually, market after market – Australia, South Africa, Ireland, Norway, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Lebanon , to name a few – tuned into his music with the release of each new album and a solid foundation for a lasting and meaningful international career was built.
“What I was trying to achieve was looking at a globe of the world and turning lights on within it,” says Chris. “Some of them took longer to come on, some of them never came on, some of them have dimmed subsequently, which is of course entirely natural.
“I put in a huge amount of travelling and work because, at the end of it, there’s only one me. I’m the engine. I write all the songs, all the lyrics, do all of the TV shows, all the radio shows, all of the interviews.”
Over the course of five decades, Chris has achieved worldwide album sales in excess of 45 million, performed approaching 4,000 concerts globally and, perhaps more remarkably than anything else, continued to make his music, his way for his loyal followers. “Without the love and support of my audience I would never have had such a long career,” Chris acknowledges.
To celebrate that relationship and his musical longevity, Chris will be releasing a new album, ‘50’, in 2024 and embarking on a solo tour of the same name through the UK, Europe and beyond.
“I will select my favourite songs for the new album from each one of my previous studio albums”, he says, “and I will also write and record three new songs. That will be a great way of going out there and saying ‘This is what I’ve done.’ It’s just a taste of what I’ve done, of course, because I’ve written some 330 songs and counting.”
“The tour will be about referring back to when I started out, as a single guy with a guitar and piano. So it will be me performing and talking about the music, talking about the origin of the songs and their background.”
Meanwhile, ‘Robin Hood – The Musical’, co-created by Chris and already a smash hit production, will premiere at new locations in Germany, Switzerland and Austria in 2024, having initially opened in Fulda and then in Munich and Hameln.
“Ticket sales for the production are astonishing,” says Chris, “and 200,000 people have been to see it performed in a small, 700-seat theatre in Fulda. It’s been very exciting and I’m immensely proud of the musical.”
At the same time, his extensive back catalogue of repertoire continues to resonate across the years and generations, most recently with the inclusion of The Lady In Red’ in the soundtrack of movie blockbuster ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ which grossed in excess of $1 billion at the box office in just 23 days following its release in 2024.
It’s evident from these latest successful twists in his career that Chris continues to be creative, relevant and ready to embrace new challenges.
BIOGRAPHY
Few artists can lay claim to international success spanning five decades but, beginning with his very first release, Chris de Burgh has achieved just that.
The foundations for a remarkable and durable career were laid back in 1975 with the release of Chris’ debut album, ‘Far Beyond These Castle Walls’, featuring the single, ‘Flying’, which spent 17 weeks at No. 1 in Brazil. Subsequent records, almost in turn, continued to steadily draw in audiences around the world; Scandinavia was early to embrace the vivid story-telling that is Chris' unique talent, South Africa quickly tuned in to his power as a live performer, north America even demanded its own specially compiled greatest hits collection, ‘Best Moves’. In the United States, meanwhile, relentless touring with his management stablemates Supertramp was beginning to establish Chris as a gritty, charismatic stage presence.
Indeed, by 1980, Chris’ global profile had already mushroomed to the point where that year’s album, ‘Eastern Wind’, became one of the biggest-selling albums of all time in Norway. A year later, its follow-up, ‘Man On The Line’, was a Top 30 album in the UK, the US and 20 other countries, while producing the single ‘High On Emotion’, which went to No. 1 in ten European countries.
In many respects, it was this album that opened the door to the enormous success which was to follow, and scale new heights with the arrival of Chris’ 1986 album ‘Into The Light’. It featured the song which established him as a known singer-songwriter around the world. ‘The Lady In Red’, now undeniably an evergreen classic, achieved No. 1 status in 47 countries, including the UK, went to No. 2 in America – and has now sold in excess of 8 million copies. To this day, it remains one of the most played songs on the planet; in America alone, it has subsequently been the recipient of six annual ASCAP (Association of Composers and Publishers) Awards, presented to acknowledge the track as one of the Top 20 most played records in the United States in a period of 12 months.
Come 1990, Chris’ German popularity was such that he was the only international artist personally invited by then Chancellor Kohl to perform at the historic public celebrations marking the re-unification of East and West Germany. This momentous privilege immediately followed sell-out tours of Australia and Japan.
In the intervening years, and on the eve of the Millennium, Chris continued to add new audiences to his vast fan base – from Moscow to Malta, from Singapore to Sarajevo – and, always, to find and embrace new challenges for himself as a musician and a performer.
Throughout the years and across now 22 original studio albums, whether his lyrical – and musical – themes have tackled love and loss or been set against imaginative backdrops created from the past, present or future, the telling of tales is his special gift. Chris’ extensive repertoire of songs has taken his audience on travels through continents, cultures and centuries - in cinematic proportion.
In 2008 Chris recorded his album ‘Footsteps,’ an album which represented a deeply personal and candid appraisal by Chris of songs which have influenced and affected the way he has crafted his own particular musical imprint. Chris selected the songs he recorded by applying three critical principles: he had to love them, have sung them many times before – and, perhaps most relevantly, they had to have inspired him. ‘Footsteps’ crashed into the Top 5 of both the UK and German album charts.
Another fan favourite and UK and German Top 5 album, Chris’ 2010 ‘Moonfleet & Other Stories’, took him on the most ambitious, challenging and evocative journey yet of his long and successful career. With sales of his albums now approaching 50 million worldwide, his unique, filmic slant on musical story-telling raised his singer-songwriter bar to unprecedented new heights.
‘A Better World’ was released on September 23, 2016, a little over three months after the 30th anniversary, on June 1, of the release of Chris’ hugely successful album ‘Into The Light’, which established him as a true, worldwide superstar.
The campaign for a ‘A Better World’ commenced with the release of opening single ‘Bethlehem’, a dynamic rock song reminiscent of the global hit ‘Don’t Pay The Ferryman’, and continued into 2018 and beyond with a world tour that travelled through the UK, Europe, Canada, South Africa and the Middle East.
During 2019, Chris returned to the road, this time taking his ‘Classic Albums’ tour across the UK and Europe and performing two of his most outstanding recordings back to back and in their entirety; his 1986 release ‘Into The Light’ has the been the biggest-selling album of his career, while ‘Moonfleet & Other Stories’, from 2010, the LP he has most enjoyed making.
Re-imagining the fabled tale of a folklore favourite has been the latest creative challenge for Chris. The compelling result breathes music and lyrical life into a centuries-old and much-loved classic.
‘The Legend of Robin Hood’ finds Chris at his imaginative best, re-telling the story with cinematic vision coupled seamlessly to music of emotional depth and power.
The concept for this newest studio album by Chris emerged from his involvement in ‘Robin Hood’, a stage musical about the infamous Sherwood Forest nobleman and his band of outlaws. Chris was invited to contribute storylines and melodies to the musical, which will be produced later during 2021 in Fulda, Germany, by Spotlight Productions, a theatrical company that has already mounted eight successful musicals. “Since I was writing songs for this,” he explains, “I thought ‘Why not expand the story and put an album out, too?’”
“I learned a great deal from ‘Moonfleet’, particularly how to set out a story in sequence,” he says. “If I had a problem advancing the story in song, I’d just go and read the book again. This time, we didn’t have a book. There is no book! I had to create my own story, my own version of this classic tale.
“In my story, Robin Hood is not a hero, but circumstances and injustice to others turned him into the hero that is now known all over the world. He initially comes across as an obnoxious young man in his late teens, but he subsequently shows a different and compassionate side and the qualities of a born leader.”
As has only very recently been suggested by a respected historian, Robin Hood is thought to have been a key target of King John, his son King Henry III and their powerful justiciar (law-maker) Hubert de Burgh – who, almost incredibly, is an ancestor of Chris himself.
Given the inconsistencies concerning the dates in which Robin Hood is thought to have lived, Chris tells his version of the legend as if it were many years after Robin’s death, in the setting of a candle-lit tavern where a small audience has gathered to hear it conveyed by a Story Teller and enacted by his musicians, actors and singers.
It has the romance and magic of a minstrel entertaining and enlightening the listener, and that is precisely what has made Chris so unique and peerless throughout his long career.
Regardless of its central theme, the album stands up on its own as a new collection of vintage Chris de Burgh material, with instant, sing-along crowd-pleasers like ‘Live Life, Live Well’ and ‘Open Your Eyes’.
It includes a new and reworked version of live favourite ‘Light A Fire’ – from his 1982 album ‘The Getaway’ – and the show-stopping, message-bearing anthem ‘Legacy’. “You’ve always got to leave your audience singing and waving their arms in the air,” says Chris, “and I think ‘Legacy’ will do that.”
