1986 Chris de Burgh: The Lady In Red

Firstly, time for a confession. Back in 1986 I was an upper sixth former with a hopeless crush on a lower sixth girl. Bright as my passion burned, for her own part she did a damn fine job of not so much as acknowledging my existence. Being mildly stalker-ish about it all, through my 'investigations' I found out that she was a Chris de Burgh fan and so with a reasoning fueled by testosterone, I thought  if I became a fan too then she'd be bound to notice and fall in love with me on the basis of this common ground (reason has never been my forte).
And so one fateful weekend afternoon I went into town and came away with three albums by the great man. Yes, the punky looking girl at the WH Smith counter raised an eyebrow and a smirk when I laid my purchases on her counter, but what did I care of her mockery; these three pieces of vinyl were to me the keys to the gates of Eden and in buying them I was already halfway over the threshold to the land of milk and honey.
In hindsight, it would be all too easy to dismiss all this carry on as the lust blinkered antics of an immature nitwit, but I'm not going to let myself off that easily. I was sixteen at the time, plenty old enough to know better and besides, I did actually like some of this stuff. 
There, I've said it - I was a teenage Chris de Burgh fan. Happy? Not all of it by any means, but did genuinely believe that 'Don't Pay The Ferryman' contained some deep philosophical message in its lyrics, freshly culled from the wisdom of the ancients: "Don't pay the ferryman, don't even fix a price. Don't pay the ferryman...(dramatic pause)......until he gets you to the other side'!!!
Even if it wasn't exactly philosophy, it was still sound advice, so thank you Chris. And then not satisfied with that, I even sent a cheque for £19.50 for 'Chris de Burgh - The Video' that was advertised in one of the albums. I must have had it bad. Oh dear, dark days indeed, but in my defence I have to say that nothing, not even the promise of my unrequited lover climbing naked into my bed with a rose between her teeth would have prompted me to admit a liking for 'The Lady In Red', genuinely or otherwise. Because it's awful.
There's no doubt that de Burgh is sincere in his aim in elevating this totemistic 'lady in red' to a Rosebud muse for him to swoon over, but his sincerity somehow makes the end product all the worse. For what we have here is a solemn, low key autopilot backing of pedestrian tedium that Chris, lost in his moment of clarity, mumbles away to himself over in a sing/speak way that PUTS the emphasis on CERTAIN WORDS and phrases IN the erratic manner of a man trying to keep Alzheimer's at bay by practicing word association. Even then his pronunciation leaves a lot to be desired - the way Chris emotes 'darrnce' instead of 'dance' goes through me like a hot poker in the eye, while the strangled, elongated modulation of 'reeeeeedddddddd' on the chorus puts me in mind of nothing less than a man in pain. 
No, I'm sorry, but I could never pretend to like 'The Lady In Red', not even for the promise of teenage kicks; there's simply nothing about it to like. As a package it aspires to be a meditation on love, a statement of hushed, almost religious grandeur, but to these ears it's little more than an over sugared dollop of treacle that's only given form by the sheer force of repetition of that "the lady in reeedddd" refrain which, over the course of its four minute running time, wears me down to a white flag waving submissions where I'd do anything to make it stop.  
And in case you're wondering, no my ploy didn't work and I swear I left school without my distant love ever even knowing my name. Come to think on it, that video never arrived either. So cheers for all that Chris. You git.