Chris De Burgh - The Getaway

When I was in high school a friend of mine had Spanish Train And Other Stories, and I remember being enthralled by the title track. I don't recall anything else. When videos were a thing in '83 I remember seeing "Don't Pay The Ferryman" and I was hooked. The album would be a big deal here in Canada where it sold over 100,000 copies.

Chris De Burgh was likeable.

I'll be the first to admit that I never really thought much of the rest of the album at the time. It was decent but I was really hoping for an album full of rockers. Of course I should have known better, but hey I was still a teenager. It didn't matter though - that one song was a killer, and the rest of the album was pleasant enough and I'd play it once in a while. After all, I was a fan of Al Stewart so it wasn't like I didn't listen to what could be loosely categorized as "adult contemporary" music.

Rupert Hine produced this one, and he'd been working with SAGA around this time and brought on drummer Steve Negus for the album. Additionally guitarist Phil Palmer provided the fretwork, and John Giblin played bass, and oh my, his fretless work is so good.

Listening to this now, I'm enjoying it more than I thought I would. Some of the sounds now are terribly dated but it was actually a tad ahead of the curve in '82. It's funny how I couldn't remember anything other than "Don't Pay the Ferryman" which makes me wonder how often I actually played this album after lifting the big song for my mix tapes. Probably not often. Which wasn't unusual back then. If an album didn't make an impression right away I generally filed it and more or less forgot about it. My general impression at the time was the album was generally enjoyable, but to me it was a bit of a miss, but it didn't stop me from buying the next one when it came out ... and the one after that.

So here I am now, and I finally get it. I got hooked on the catchy commercial song, but Chris De Burgh had fans and his fans expected Chris De Burgh to sound like Chris De Burgh, and by gum he delivered a Chris De Burgh album, and it caught on.

He loved his sappy ballads. I don't think "Lady in Red" is the ultimate Chris De Burgh ballad, it's just the one that hit at the right time (although for better or worse, it is the song he is most closely associated with). I think "All The Love I Have Inside" is the better of the two. He likes his dramatic story songs, and he braids a number of songs together thematically into a pretty cool story about conflict, revolution, the cost of peace and then remembrance. Of course I may be full of shit, but starting with "Borderline" that contains the wonderful line, "I'm taking my side, one of us will lose" sums up the price of conflict. He continues through to the climax starting with "The Revolution" that dovetails into "Light a Fire" that contains an absolutely blistering guitar solo by Phil Palmer. The album then settles and ends with "Liberty" and the last line, "Never Forget" - it's a great way to close out.

I find myself sitting here feeling somewhat at odds with my younger self. I was hooked by the commercially successful single, but the rest of the album escaped me. I wasn't ready. It's a strange thing to be enthralled by something I've always known.

Post Script. A couple of years ago at Christmas my son, who I don't think had ever heard me play anything by Chris De Burgh, was walking around singing "A Spaceman Came Travelling" and it caught me by surprise. I tried to find out how he knew, he said he just did. We were in the car the other day, and I was playing The Getaway and I offered to change the music and he said it was the spaceman so it was okay.

I may not have paid the Ferryman, but I still ended up paying, and it was a pretty good ride for all that.

And it was.

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

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