The Lady in Red

Chris de Burgh wrote "The Lady in Red" about his wife, Diane, who used to come and watch him perform at his parents' hotel. On the British TV series This Is Your Life, he explained that the song was inspired by the memory of when he first saw Diane, and by how men so often cannot even remember what their wives were wearing when they first met. The track was built around a drum pattern performed by a Roland TR-808 drum machine and appeared on his eighth album, Into the Light.

A&M Records released the song on 20 June 1986 as the second single from that album. It became a massive hit across the world, reaching number one in Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway, and the Flanders region of Belgium, and climbing to number three in the United States during the spring of 1987. It was de Burgh's third UK hit single and his first to reach the top 40 there. The single also carried its parent album with it, pushing Into the Light to number two in the United Kingdom.

The song transformed de Burgh from a cult artist into a household name in many countries and quickly became his best-selling single. It remains his only major international hit. The music video was a studio performance with animation at the beginning and end, featuring a curly-haired woman in red, with performance clips taken from a 1986 episode of the BBC program Top of the Pops.