OTTAWA -- The most vividly amazing dream occurred last night.
In search of an unmistakable Kanata castle, I was told there would be an appearance by the most majestic man who told the most bone-chilling tales anywhere.
This man of Irish descent, now in his early 50s, was renown at spinning otherworldly fiction of travelling spacemen, a downfall of old Jerusalem, a 1920s stripper, and warnings about evil ferrymen. The temptation was too irresistible to pass up.
Braving a harrowing April snowstorm, slipping and sliding as I sped down a dark old weather-beaten road, I finally found this unmistakable Kanata castle, in the guise of the Corel Centre's WordPerfect Theatre. There, in the company of nearly 5,100 eager listeners, we awaited with bated breath that first great spine-tingling fable of his three-hour tour de force.
A haunting synthesizer set the eerie tone of that dimly lit stage before that great man walked out and utters his first dramatic reading -- a love song entitled When I Think of You.
Then I woke up from that dream. My head was spinning.
Nightmare
On stage instead was a leather-jacketed Chris de Burgh, warbling some saccharin ode to love off his latest disc, The Quiet Revolution.
He then followed with another. And another. And another. And ... There was no escape. I thought it was a relapse into a nightmare -- Love of the Heart Divine, Love's Got A Hold On Me, A Woman's Heart (especially the line "Give me your lust and I'll drink you dry ... and I will love you until the day I die"), Missing You and the song that sunk him into this oblivion in the first place, The Lady In Red.
I checked my pulse. This was reality.
Close to an hour later, His Majestic Troubadour arrived at his first terror-striking tale -- a cover of the Eagles' Hotel California. "I wish I could have written that song," he said before launching into the all-too-familiar opening. Uh-huh.
Another hour later, de Burgh finally dusted off The Tower, which he once sang during a solo stint way back in '76 at Glebe Collegiate. And for a fleeting moment, the staid drivel was forgotten with second-encore crowd-pleaser Patricia The Stripper and his piece de resistance, Spanish Train, though methinks the rousing words "Look out, Lord he's going to win" appealed more to the cupid's arrow stuck in de Burgh's lovestruck heart.
To drive that point home, new number Natasha Dance was so stirring for de Burgh it had him running with a drumstick (is that some superstition for mediocre luck?)
Rise to fame
Don't get me wrong, the man deserves to be happy. Canada, in particular, has been responsible for de Burgh's pre-Lady In Red rise to fame. He wasn't short on entertainment value. Hand claps and plenty of audience singalong dominated most of the love-filled evening. And de Burgh can still hit those shrilly highs on Don't Pay The Ferryman, Say Goodbye To It All, and 1982's Borderline, one of his finest lyrical and vocal exercises.
Still, for every Ferryman, Spanish Train, or the rocking first-encore closer High On Emotion, the crowd absorbed its share of the tepid Sailing Away, a laughing-gas-induced My Lover Is and, as if he needed to inject a syringe of audience adrenaline, snippets of the Stones' Honky Tonk Women and oodles of Beatles (notably Yesterday and Hey Jude.)
"It's dreadful out there, so you might as well as stay here and pack your pyjamas, because it's gonna be a long night," de Burgh pointedly remarked.
I still had that long, snow-filled, knuckle-clinching, drive home. Try to make a love song out of that, will you?
JAM! Rating: 2.5 out of 5
