Don’t miss the storyman

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/04/2023 (870 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Songwriters will often say they’re storytellers, but few tell stories to the degree that Chris de Burgh has.

His unique brand of story songs — which often pit good versus evil, such as in 1975’s Spanish Train and 1982’s Don’t Pay the Ferryman — earned him airplay during the early days of Canada’s album-rock radio boom in the late 1970s and early ’80s and a cult following.

De Burgh would later became synonymous with Valentine’s Day, owing to The Lady in Red, the lush soft-rock hit that topped the charts in Canada in 1986.

His fans in Canada have stuck with de Burgh and his music in the decades since, and there’s enough of them for the Irishman to forge a cross-country tour, which stops at the Centennial Concert Hall Saturday night.

Even de Burgh, on occasion, wonders why his storytelling approach to rock and pop has caught on.

“I’m entirely aware of the fact that without an audience who are supportive and they love what they do, I’d be sitting at home,” he said from his residence in the Wicklow hills, south of Dublin, prior to crossing the Atlantic Ocean for his Canadian tour.

“I’m not going to bang on about ‘Yes, my generation, we have all the right songs, not the current generation.’ That’s not true. But to offer an audience something they can put their teeth into, as it were, that’s certainly what I believe in.

“I do think in today’s modern music world, the people who want a little more depth in songwriting, they’re not really being taken care for particularly well.”

The plot of Spanish Train — it’s one of several de Burgh’s epics that has a full story arc — pits God against the devil in a poker game with the souls aboard a cursed locomotive as the stakes.

The devil, naturally, doesn’t play the game according to Hoyle.

“It was great fun writing it, but I was up late night many times trying to finish off the lyric,” he says of Spanish Train, which came about when de Burgh took a train in the southern part of the country during the early 1970s, not far from “Guadalquivir and old Seville,” the song’s setting.

De Burgh continues to write and sing about good and evil on his latest record, 2021’s The Legend of Robin Hood: A Short Story, which is also a German musical project he provided storylines and melodies for prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Robin Hood’s tales from the 12th century have been told thousands of different ways, and in de Burgh’s interpretation. Robert of Locksley returns from the Third Crusade and flees into Sherwood Forest to escape and cope with the horrors of war he witnessed.

It’s there where maid Marian confronts him and demands he not turn his back on people who are being exploited by the Sheriff of Nottingham.

Robert of Locksley would be transformed into Robin Hood, he would meet the Merry Men and the world’s most famous transfer of wealth would ensue.

“The thing about Robin Hood is that, yeah, maybe he never existed, but the enduring idea of him is that, for 800 years people have loved the concept of robbing from the rich to give to the poor,” de Burgh says. “I think that’s an eternal concept that people really buy into.”

While de Burgh sings in English, the musical theatre work is sung in German and found a home at a theatre in Fulda, Germany, where it was performed 177 times before 120,000 people last year; it’s also headed for Munich and Hamelin in 2023.

He took his family to the première, and while he knows little German, he says he was spellbound by the show.

“I just sat there and couldn’t believe it. To have created something like that, it’s a kind of notch on my bow, that I’ve achieved one of my ambitions,” he recalls.

De Burgh will play selections from The Legend of Robin Hood Saturday, which is a blend of Celtic harmonies and his penchant for melodrama-laced pop.

He won’t forget about the songs that keep bringing him back to Canada though.

That includes The Lady in Red, a love tune that gets hearts swooning, but also some eyes rolling: it made No. 3 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 10 worst songs of the 1980s, behind The Final Countdown by Europe and Starship’s We Built This City.

De Burgh has no time for his detractors.

“For me, (The Lady in Red) is a key to the door,” he says. “It brings people to all the other stuff I’ve done, which is a very wide selection of songs.

“It’s now much bigger than me in America. They have no idea who Chris de Burgh is, but The Lady in Red is the go-to love song. It’s a calling card and I think most songwriters would give their right arm to have such a tune.”

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @AlanDSmall