Inside World Music: From your early childhood in Argentina, and the length of time you've lived in Ireland, has traditional Irish or Latin American music influenced you at all?
Chris De Burgh: Traditional Irish music is
something that I don't hear very often, but certainly
the music of a band like The Chieftans, which is top
quality Irish, very imaginative and creative - I do
enjoy that. I suppose I am drawn by birth, and having
lived in South America for 5 years, I love Spanish
Music; I love the drama of the way that Flamenco
music moves people. There's a whole story that goes
on, it's not just women jumping around and clicking their
heels. A story evolves, and the drama of that I find very
exciting. I've written song sin the past - well,
"Spanish Train" is one of them - there's one on my
album Into the Light called "Last Night" about a celebration of soldiers coming back the way, but every single one of them from being 19-year-olds, 20-year-old innocents that have come back with blood on their hands and a kind of hunger in their hearts to do it again, having seen the sheer horror but they are kind of drawn back towards that, ignoring the fact that up on the top of the hill, as the celebrations are going on, there's a young widow crying at the graveside of her young man who's been killed in the war. So that all happened in my head in Spain, and I come back to that again and again, Spanish music and Latin music.
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