It has been released numerous times as a single, becoming a popular Christmas song, and has appeared on many festive compilation albums.

The book made him think "what if the star of Bethlehem was a space craft and what if there is a benevolent being or entity in the universe keeping an eye on the world and our foolish things that we do to each other?"

A fan of Irish poet William Butler Yeats, whose work "The Second Coming" avers that every 2,000 years or so there would be a major cataclysmic event happening, de Burgh saw the birth of Christ as "such an event and then 2,000 years later there would be a similar" one.

He imagined "the nativity scene, the thing hovering over and I could see the shepherds in the fields and this weird, ethereal music was drifting into the air and they were 'what the heck is that'?"

[5] In 1986, following de Burgh's huge hit "The Lady in Red", "Spaceman" was reworked with a re-recorded vocal and reissued,[6] as a double A-side with the song "The Ballroom of Romance".