CHRIS DE BURGH – "The Lady In Red"

Is this how Nick Drake might have ended up had he survived? Drake and Chris de Burgh were contemporaries at Marlborough School in the early sixties and even played in a band together. Then again, de Burgh’s music has always been decidedly less complex and troubled, at least on its placid surface. Musically and lyrically he is the equivalent of a Jilly Cooper or a Jeffrey Archer; easy emotions designed to appeal to the widest possible demographic.

“The Lady In Red” was his biggest hit, helped not a little by the contemporaneous and coincidental wedding of top Sloane Rangers Andy and red-headed Sarah (unlike Chas and Di, the shops and offices did not close down for the occasion). The production is one of expensive-sounding minimalism; a drum machine, a wistful Fairlight, tasteful fills from guitar and bass. Of its kind it’s a ruthlessly constructed across-the-board hit single, perfectly symmetrical and ending with a whispered “I love you,” though de Burgh’s anxious vocal, wherein he manages not to rhyme “dance” with “romance” with “chance,” is like being kissed with Marmite-covered lips. But the cynicism of the whole enterprise is reinforced by the fact that, despite the song being written about his wife, he was actually fucking the nanny at the time. Sadly, not that many cared, or noticed.

the way chris db sings “cheek to cheek” in an urgent erotic* whisper is endlessly a little bit amusing, so that’s a plus. otherwise, lir reminds me of “wonderful tonight” – the singer can’t actually find much to say about his veryspeciallady except that she’s his veryspeciallady and looks very nice, but choses to express this sentiment in a kind of pained moan. very strange

famously, chris db later dumped his wife (who i always thought was the lady in red) and went off with their teenage babysitter. this event was celebrated with comparable literalism, though rather less chart acclaim, in “blonde hair, blue jeans” – apart from richard hammond’s haircut, the single clearest expression of a mid life crisis in western culture. (ohmygod, i’ve just googled the lyrics – chris is going to” take her on the floor/and when morning comes she’ll beg for more” aaargh!).

*this word should be inside more quote marks than exist in the universe.

About 5-6 years ago I was on the bus to work and as usual the air was filled with the tinny treble of someone’s earphone output just being too loud. At the exact same time that the guy sitting opposite me glanced around with mild annoyance at the hiss we both realised that the song playing was in fact The Lady In Red. Somebody was listening to THIS song of all songs on the bus on the way to work that morning. We exchanged a brief look of horror and puzzlement and waited out the remaining aeons.

#7 no, no, no, tin machine weren’t a mid-life crisis, they were a PROPER BAND.

er, why?

I’m afraid that Punctum’s comments about Nick Drake being in a band with Chris De Burgh at no.1 are one of those urban myths. It’s in neither of the biographies and Trevor Dann’s excellent “Darker Than The Deepest Sea” lists the members of The Perfumed Gardeners as Drake, MIke Maclaran, Randall Keynes (grandson of JMK) Simon Crocker, Johnny Glempser (‘who couldn’t keep time’ and ‘a boy called Payne’. They were at Marlborough at the same time, though.

As for whether Drake would have tranmogrified into DeBurgh, that’s a gross calumny. More likely, had he recovered from the depression that led to his death, Nick would have continued his tentative career in computer programming, where he would have had a successful and lucrative but low profile career and taken early retirement a few years ago. His music was so good that it was bound to have re-emerged without the ‘suicide chic/tragic death’ aspect, much at Vashti Bunyan’s has, perhaps via an ad campaign. A new album might have been released three or four years ago, containing songs written since ‘Pink Moon’, titled, perhaps, ‘Black Eyed Dog’. Drake, however, would have refused all attempts to get him to perform live or grant interviews, but would still live at Far Leys, in Tanworth-In-Arden with, it would be nice to think, his wife of thirty years and frequent visits from his grandchildren.

#16 Thanks for that one Jimmy, you’ve set a precedent for when we get to a football-related one in 1994.

Plus the notion of “kissing marmite-covered lips” is generally to me a win-win proposition: even with CdB on the other end of the lips it would be “lose oh wait win”

Dreadful.
I’m not sure if ‘A spaceman came travelling’ which popped up on some Christmas compilations was better or worse.
The only pleasure I associate with CdB is when he appears on ‘The Mighty Boosh’ played by Noel Fielding’s dad

A reminder: CdB on his critics (or one of them)

#23:

“I want to do it.”
“You can’t stop me.”
“Who are you to judge me?”
“I’m as good as you are.”
“You don’t understand me.”
“I’ve got a right to.”
“Do it for me now.”
“You’ve got to.”
“What have you ever done for me?”

Polonius, ending up cowering behind the arras.

The Holy Trinity of Tom, Sukrat and Punctum are mocking de Burgh here. And by cracky they’re spot-on! Precious twat. Did poor old Ted Moult really level himself over this git?!

can’t let this occasion pass by without a mention of The Lady in Red’s cameo in the brutally hilarious 2000 screen adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis novel “American Psycho”. This song pretty much typifies what Ellis was spoofing in his book which, correct me if I’m wrong, was set in 1986 (and published two years later).

re 23 To be fair, that does read like a review written by a part-time critic in a country with a population the size of Greater Manchester.

As they say in Spinal Tap, there’s a fine line between clever and stupid (and between cloyingly naive and cynical, and refreshingly direct), and this song isn’t a million miles removed from clever and beautiful Blue Nile stuff I’ve loved over the years (see esp. ‘Saturday Night’ from their Hats album – or most of that album really). And, #24, consider that ABC’s ‘Many Happy Returns’ also discussed highlights in hair.

Yet, I’ve always (like everyone else here) reacted allergically to LIR. I’m honestly not sure why that is. At any rate, I don’t quite buy Tom’s attempt to rationalize what’s distasteful here: that the singer is appreciating the gal extrinsically, or for her market value, or some such thing. De Burgh *is* getting at a real, interesting, relatively benign phenomenon: couples often fairly quickly end up so accustomed to each other that each becomes almost invisible to the other. Suddenly, on a special occasion when your partner is dressed up for an event of some kind you see them again as others see them (maybe as you first saw them), and you also see the attention they’re understandly getting, and so on. That’s a rather good topic for a song and not the nasty, distastefully objectivizing (or whatever) thing that Tom tried to stick onto LIR.

Still, this record is limpid enough to be genuinely irritating, even if it isn’t exactly morally objectionable. I’ve hated a lot of the (literally) pathetic #1s since Power of Love, and I’ve criticized a lot of them for their ‘woe is me’ character. LIR, however, has a ‘wow is me’ character which is evidently worse. Triumphant patheticalism – if it starts to grow on you, scrape it off (maybe ‘marmite kiss’ can’t be improved on now I think about it):
2 (my heart says 1)

My goodness, people don’t like this one, do they? And I’m not going to disagree with them, at least not by much. It’s a reasonable performance of a syrupy, over-sentimental song with a not particularly imaginative arrangement – what with the gauzy electronics that were becoming more and more widespread, and that bass. It’s better than the Christmas novelties and kiddie claptrap that usually get ones and twos on here, but only just. It has a kind of self-satisfaction about it that I find irksome. A four – just – from me.

An 8 or 9 for me. The Lady In Red is a wonderfully observed oneiric fantasy: a sombre, hermetic track with beautifully layered synth lines and that mysterious synth choir effect achieving something similar to 10CC’s I’m Not In Love, interspersed with subtle guitar licks. The ambiguous lyrics hint at a story without ever really giving it, playing a series of dreamlike binaries off each other. Are they on a crowded dancefloor, or are they alone? There is that lovely lyric slippage from the “highlights that catch your eyes” to “blind”. By the end of the song we are no clearer as to who the lady in red really is – a wife, a lover or merely a masturbatory fantasy figure? We are forever left in the dark.

A deliciously ambiguous phrase Rob!

As sometimes happens, I don’t object to this one quite as much as some others have done, but it is a bit of an ear-strain to hear him approaching (as opposed to hitting) some of the notes. With the right people and in the right atmosphere I can understand it being effectively romantic (or romahntic) but it doesn’t quite do it for me. Thing is, as Mike points out at #4, he’d been around for years and produced some pretty good stuff – the historically based material as opposed to the spaceman-based material, obviously – and even on the Lady in Red album (which my sister taped for me, thanks hon!) tracks such as “Say Goodbye To It All” show a flair for storytelling and drama.

One of my oldest friends was a big fan, and took me to a Chris de Burgh gig in 1981! We went to Fairfield Hall in Croydon with his girlfriend and a mate of hers, and by the end of the evening we’d paired off. His girlfriend was named Pat and it was during “Patricia the Stripper” that the sparks started flying with her friend. Our relationship lasted about three months, his is coming up for thirty years – but if the friend ever reads this, I hope you’re well and thanks for the memory!

Anyone remember de Burgh turning up on the Liverpool coach on a Cup Final Grandstand in the 90s? He serenaded them with “The Team in Red”. I think a few players had to go the treatment room afterwards to have their toes uncurled.

Number 2 Watch – the pretty appalling “So Macho” by Sinitta, she of the outsized palm leaves. It was an example of a record selling far better in one region than in the country as a whole – in this case the North of England, just as Viz comic and Sid the Sexist were expanding their empire beyond Newcastle. Go figure.

His “Spanish Train” album was a surprisingly consistent seller when I worked at WH Smith in the late 70s/early 80s, never enough to really bother the charts but every weekend you were guaranteed that some dad or mum would come in and buy a copy.

If ‘Abigail’s Party’ was set in the 80s I think this is the record Beverley would play instead of Demis Roussos to conjure up a sort of middle class aspirational hell. Though while Demis makes you think of Greek Islands this one is about as sophisticated as a Bernie Inn.

I’ve only ever seen it explored spitefully but there’s a fascinating essay to be written about the “cool” and the “uncool” sides of 80s cultural aspirationalism: the sub-suburban outreach towards the Cultural Other read as a bold post-punky* move or as a naff and sad move — is peter saville actually abigail? (or beverley, but that doesn’t sound so well…)

*i’m tidying continuity mod into postpunk here, which will rile andypandy!

“business psych” is a terrific phrase and actually i think a better stab at what “american psycho” is exploring — certainly mary harron’s film of same catches this well

n effect, it’s not about “ironic appreciation”: or rather, the term “ironic appreciation”, used positively or negatively, is really a dodging of the vertiginous terror the fact that hipsters (by whuch of course i mea “us” not “them”) do not now and have never understood more about the systems and the passions of the world than anyone else, however lame, after all…

disclaimer: for years i failed to distinguish between chris de burgh and chris spedding

Chris De Burgh always looks the type to be wearing aftershave so old, it smells of vinegary whiskey.

One of those songs I didn’t quite get, assuming it was for people of my parents’ generation who paid rather more attention to the charts than my folks actually did. The sort I thought were a bit flash. God, I’m probably one of them now; fortunately, Lady In Red still makes me squirm. De Burgh is simply ticking boxes.