Chris de Burgh has said he “laughed his head off” after he appeared in two contrasting polls about the UK’s favourite and most hated songs.
The British-Irish singer-songwriter, 76, is known around the world for his 1986 song “The Lady in Red”, which hit No 1 in the US and No 3 in America.
However, the musician appeared to acknowledge that the song is not to everyone’s taste, as he spoke of a BBC poll “years ago” that placed “The Lady in Red” as the nation’s third most favourite song.
“It was there in Channel 4’s poll of the nation’s most hated songs too,” he said in a feature for The Times. “I laughed my head off. You need a neck of brass to survive in the music industry. But it’s a fantastic life.
“I’ve played in so many memorable places – the Sydney Opera House, the Royal Albert Hall and Ephesus in Turkey, where the stage was exactly where St Paul stood preaching to the Ephesians. It was an awesome feeling.”
In a 2012 interview with The Independent, de Burgh said he felt the problem with “The Lady in Red” was that it obscured much of his other work.
“One of the problems of having such a huge worldwide hit, like ‘Lady in Red’, which is still a hit, worldwide, is that you get pigeon-holed and so the other 250 songs you’ve written and recorded become irrelevant,” he said.
“I write songs about such a wide variety of topics. I don’t think there are too many covering what I’m covering.”
Asked whether he would “bury” the song if he could, he responded: “Of course not! I do diminish it slightly when performing live. I take the microphone and leave the band and walk through the audience, hugging people.”
In the same Times feature, de Burgh noted that certain musicians refuse to perform their big hits because they’ve come to hate them, but asserted that this wasn’t the case with his own work.
“People think it’s soppy but it’s really about a man realising he should be paying more attention to his wife,” he said.
“Is it about Diane? Well, we’ve been married nearly 50 years. I think our secret is laughing a lot.”
Chris de Burgh is currently touring the UK and Ireland, before beginning a tour of Australia and a string of shows in Germany, a country he said is “huge” for him.
