Chris de Burgh always knows when Christmas is coming: when he’s out and about he hears his own song, “A Spaceman Came Travelling”. “It’s like the first cuckoo,” he says. He hears it in the oddest places. “Public toilets, supermarkets… My family and my grandchildren were at a funfair last week, and they heard it there.” Do people ever recognise him when it plays? “Yeah, it does happen. People point or they smile. Standing at a checkout, maybe the checkout guy sings along. And I sing along as well without telling him that I’m the guy who wrote it. That can be pretty funny.”

Fifty years on from its initial release on de Burgh’s second album, 1975’s Spanish Train and Other Stories , “A Spaceman Came Travelling” is the accidental Christmas classic by stealth. Completely ignored in the UK u

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