Chris Rea:
According to a statement issued by a representative for his family, British singer-songwriter Chris Rea, well known for popular songs like “Driving Home for Christmas,” passed yesterday at the age of 74.
According to the statement, he died quietly in the hospital following a brief illness.
Chris Rea combined blues, pop, soul, and soft rock on 25 studio albums, creating timeless hits like On the Beach and Josephine, which later gained popularity on the Balearic dance scene; Driving Home for Christmas, which became a beloved seasonal favorite; and The Road to Hell, the title track from a UK number-one album. He sold over 30 million albums globally over his career.
Chris Rea was raised with six siblings after being born in Middlesbrough in 1951 to an Italian father and an Irish mother. Being Italian-Irish at a Middlesbrough coffee shop—He once thought, I started my life as an outsider. While working a variety of manual labor jobs as a young man, including at his father’s ice cream factory, Rea experimented with music and even thought about pursuing a career in journalism.
He eventually joined Magdalene, a band that had previously featured David Coverdale (later of Deep Purple), at the age of 22. Later on, he joined The Beautiful Losers, but he chose to go solo after receiving a record deal. In 1974, he recorded his debut single, “So Much Love.”
His 1978 single Fool (If You Think It’s Over), which peaked at number 12 on the charts and got him a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, was his first significant hit in the United States. He famously likened the music industry to “a huge steaming pile of boiling stuff” throughout his years of struggle to replicate that success. He remarked, “I had no control over it—I didn’t know what to do.” But when his 1983 album Water Sign became a European hit, things started to turn around.
His career’s peak commercial success was in the late 1980s. He was eventually accepted in the UK despite frequently defying popular culture. He put out six UK Top 10 albums, two of which peaked at number one, beginning with Dancing with Strangers in 1987.
Although it was first recorded in 1986, his biggest hit, Driving Home for Christmas, was included on the 1988 compilation CD New Light Through Old Windows. The song had minimal effect when it was first published. But with time, it became a timeless favorite thanks to its tender, poignant interpretation of the joy of returning home, reaching number 10 on the charts in 2021.
The song was first written by Chris Rea during a really trying period in his life. He was essentially prohibited from driving, had no manager, and no record contract. He and his spouse couldn’t afford train tickets, so they had to drive from London to Middlesbrough. The song wasn’t finished for several years, although he wrote the lyrics while traveling.
Rea stated, “I was afraid the song would completely ruin whatever little credibility I had left—but now we laugh about it,” in a 2016 interview with The Guardian. He continued, “I roll down the window and start singing “I’m driving home for Christmas” to the people in the cars next to me if I ever get stuck on the M25.” They adore it.
Throughout his life, Chris Rea dealt with a number of significant health issues. After receiving a pancreatic cancer diagnosis, he had his pancreas and portions of his stomach and small intestine removed by surgeons in 2001.
He acquired diabetes as a consequence of the operation. He said that having a stroke in 2016 was “a terrifying moment.” I started to believe that my sense of pitch had been ruined by the stroke. Convincing me that there was nothing wrong with what I was playing required a great deal of work. He was transported to the hospital to recuperate after collapsing on stage at an Oxford concert in 2017. Chris Rea’s wife Joan, whom he started dating when he was 17, and their daughters Julia and Josephine, who both served as inspiration for popular songs he named after them, survive him.