Chris de Burgh celebrates a remarkable and rare career milestone: half a century as a recording artist.

Yet when he signed his first recording contract in 1974 and his debut album, ‘Far Beyond These Castle Walls’, was released by A&M Records that same year, Chris did not look beyond the immediate future.

“As I held a copy of that record in my hands, I had absolutely no idea that this would even go any further,” he recalls. “I was incredibly naive about the music business, but I was full of hope and dreams and, spectacularly, my dreams not only came true, but they also came truer than true. I had no idea I'd last this long. Fifty years? Wow!”

​A song from that first album offered a very early glimpse of what might lie ahead for Chris; the single ‘Flying’ spent 17 straight weeks at No.1 in Brazil. “I thought ‘Right, I’m off! A world star, overnight!’” Chris remembers. “Not a chance. From then on, it was a real, real slog and a hard, hard time, but the grounding that I’d had in my parents’ hotel, Bargy Castle, performing for the guests there made me believe that I did have something that I could give to people.”

​Gradually, market after market – Australia, South Africa, Ireland, Norway, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Lebanon, to name a few – tuned into his music with each new album, and he built a solid foundation for a lasting and meaningful international career.

​“What I was trying to achieve was looking at a globe of the world and turning lights on within it,” says Chris. “Some of them took longer to come on, some of them never came on, some of them have dimmed subsequently, which is of course entirely natural.

​“I put in a huge amount of travelling and work because, at the end of it, there’s only one me. I’m the engine. I write all the songs, all the lyrics, do all of the TV shows, all the radio shows, all of the interviews.”

​Over the course of five decades, Chris has achieved worldwide album sales in excess of 45 million, performed approaching 4,000 concerts globally and, perhaps more remarkably than anything else, continued to make his music, his way, for his loyal followers. “Without the love and support of my audience, I would never have had such a long career,” Chris acknowledges.