My gig as DJ support for a Shania Twain tribute act in 2000 (when they were still called sound-alikes) was memorable mainly for being the only time in my career when a member of the public tried to flirt with me. I was (and still am) happily married; but even if I hadn’t been, I was quietly warned off during the evening on the grounds that the drunk young woman in question was the wife of the promoter.
She wore a red baseball cap, which she kept trying to place on my head. The promoter was a member of the locally powerful Stobart family, owners of a nationally well-known road haulage business. It would have been personally and politically disastrous if I had been at all tempted to wear the red cap.
I say with no regret that a mobile oldies DJ is not a rock god. It is not a job for someone who wishes they were one, with all the attention that goes with it. His job is to disappear behind the music, to play the music of his audience’s dreams, not his own. I would happily play music I loathed if it made a client and his or her guests happy. Job done.
This is especially true of that crucial last slow dance of the evening. The DJ’s task at that point is draw couples together, to help them fall in love, or at least to make love, if that’s what they want. A floorfilling slow dance is the end of a successful evening – and the loneliest four minutes of DJ’s life. There they all are, lost in each other’s gaze, body to body, heart to heart, while in a few moments he must negotiate the drunks to get his fee, dismantle his rig, pack it into a mechanically unreliable van and drive, still sober, perhaps fifty miles home to a quiet house and a sleeping wife. Rock’n’roll it ain’t.
A good slow dance has a much longer shelf life than most up-tempo hits. It isn’t subject to passing dance fashions; and by virtue of bringing people together it is more likely to become a couple’s “our song”. Chris de Burgh’s The Lady In Red has stood the test of time.
Chris de Burgh was hardly an overnight sensation. The Lady In Red was on his eighth album, Into the Light. Apart from his perennial Christmas hit A Spaceman came Travelling, which was #1 in Ireland in 1975, and Don’t Pay the Ferryman which reached #5 in Australia in 1982, De Burgh had made little impact on the Top 40 before The Lady In Red broke into Top 5’s around the world in 1986. He wrote it about his wife Diane.
Like many success stories, The Lady In Red has attracted more than its fair share of haters. “Only James Blunt has managed to come up with a song more irritating than Chris de Burgh's Lady in Red,” wrote Neil Norman of The Independent in 2006.
I am not a particular admirer of the song, preferring De Burgh’s earlier story-telling songs on, for example, his second album Spanish Train and Other Stories, which includes the magnificent Patricia the Stripper. One of the worst things about The Lady in Red is his fudged attempt to rhyme the very British long vowel of “DAH-nce” with the short second syllable of “ro-MANce” halfway through the first verse. It makes me squirm.
But as a slow last dahnce, it works. It was a staple of my DJ set from 1999 to 2006, alongside Phyllis Nelson’s very smoochie Move Closer and Robbie Williams’ more laddish Angels – the latter best suited to nights when there was less romance in the air because its chorus could be sung with tuneless drunken enthusiasm by a crowd:
A lorra luv an’ affecshun …
It’s a really good song, and everyone is happy.
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