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 throughout 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.”
It’s evident from this latest successful twist in his career that Chris continues to be creative and enjoy new challenges.
