Chris de Burgh The Lady In Red: The Very Best Of Chris De Burgh (2000)

Covering all of his crucial eighties material, Spark to a Flame: The Very Best of Chris de Burgh offers up most of this songwriter's best work, while also including a few of his better pieces from early in his career…

Covering all of his crucial eighties material, Spark to a Flame: The Very Best of Chris de Burgh offers up most of this songwriter's best work, while also including a few of his better pieces from early in his career. The decade took apt notice of de Burgh, giving him two Top 40 hits on Billboard with "Don't Pay the Ferryman" in 1983 and the hugely successful "Lady in Red" in 1987, which are both included on this set. Three of his most delightful narratives from the '70s show up here as well, with "Spanish Train," "A Spaceman Came Travelling," and "Patricia the Stripper," all from the highly regarded Spanish Train and Other Stories album.

Three CDs, plus a fourth stuffed with rarities, sum up a career that both deserves far greater critical acclaim than it has ever been granted, and which has gone out of its way to discourage that from ever happening. An admittedly well-loved cult throughout his first decade of recording, Chris De Burgh exploded worldwide following the success of "The Lady in Red" and that, unfortunately, remains most peoples' sole perception of him; "unfortunately" because, at his best (which is more often than not), De Burgh both writes and performs with an extraordinary passion, and a musical ambition that travels way beyond that one song's parameters.