Into the light

Before Chris de Burgh became synonymous with one particular ballad, he had already spent more than a decade recording and touring. He signed with A&M Records in 1974 but his early albums didn't trouble the UK or US charts. Far Beyond These Castle Walls and Spanish Train and Other Stories were built around strange narrative songs, such as trains that argued with the devil, or spacemen who visited at Christmas, which were hardly the sort of material competing with disco or straightforward pop. Yet they found followers. 

Through the late 1970s he kept releasing albums, slowly refining the sound while retaining that habit for telling a story within a song. By the early 1980s his work became more polished, more aligned with mainstream pop-rock. The Getaway brought him proper chart entries in the UK and the US. “Don’t Pay the Ferryman” even entered the Billboard Hot 100. 

By the time he recorded Into the Light, he was already well established, but he still lacked a truly universal hit. That changed with "The Lady in Red," a simple ballad about a husband remembering how his wife looked when they first met and seeing her anew years later. The song reached No. 1 in 47 countries and sold more than eight million copies. The momentum carried the album to No. 2 in the UK, his first studio release to enter the Top 10 there, and into the US Top 25. Not bad for a story-teller.

Side 1: Last night, Fire on the water, The ballroom of romance, The lady in red, Say goodbye to it all 
Side 2: The spirit of man, Fatal hesitation, One word (straight to the heart), For Rosanna, The leader, The vision, What about me?