‘Driving Home For Christmas’ singer remembered

CHRIS REA, a legendary English singer-songwriter and passionate guitarist, has been announced dead at the age of 74 on the afternoon of Monday, December 22. According to a statement by a spokesperson from his family, the Middlesbrough-born singer died “peacefully in hospital … following a short illness.” The singer had been having health complications, including a pancreatic cancer diagnosis, type 1 diabetes, and a stroke in 2016.

Chris Rea, a jack-of-all-trades genre musician with a knack for slide guitar playing

Rea, best known for hits including seasonal favourite Driving Home For Christmas and other beloved classics like The Road to Hell, was an influential guitarist known for his distinctive voice and his talent at slide guitar playing. His songs On the Beach and Josephine skyrocketed to popularity on the Balearic clubbing scene, whereas his 1978 song Fool (If You Think It’s Over) went on to be nominated for a Grammy in the Best New Artist category.

Rea was a jack of all trades when it came to music genres, blending blues, pop, soul and soft rock and giving it a fresh twist with his own personal and recognisable style of singing and playing. Over the span of his career, Rea sold more than 30 million albums.

Chris Rea’s early life: An interest in music from the beginning

Born in 1951 in Middlesbrough to an Italian father and Irish mother, Rea described beginning his life as an “outsider” in his own home. As a young man, he grew an interest in music while working odd jobs, including in his father’s ice cream factory, and he even considered becoming a journalist at one point. 

Rea joined a band called Magdalene when he was just 22 years old; he joined another band afterwards, called the Beautiful Losers, but decided to go solo when he was offered a record deal and released his debut single, So Much Love, in 1974 when he was 23.

Hitting his stride in the 80s and 90s

He skyrocketed to fame in the US with the aforementioned track Fool (If You Think It’s Over). While he struggled to recreate the same fame for some time afterwards, stating that he felt he had no control over his success, his 1985 album, Water Sign, was a booming hit across Europe and got him back into the public consciousness.

Rea found his stride in the late 1980s and early 1990s, finally topping the charts in the United Kingdom after having been alienated from the trends in the country since the beginning of his career. His 1987 album Dancing With Strangers was the breakthrough that began his streak of six UK top albums, with two of them reaching Number 1.

‘Driving Home For Christmas’: A holiday hit that still tops the charts

Subsequently, Chris Rea’s 1988 compilation album, New Light Through Old Windows, contained his biggest hit recorded in 1986, Driving Home For Christmas, which has become a world-renowned seasonal classic and a marker of the holiday season, skyrocketing Chris Rea into becoming a household name. For many, the track made the singer synonymous with the Christmas season, and though the song had a mild impact upon its first release, it continued to grow in popularity until it reached a chart high of Number 10 as recently as 2021.

With Driving Home For Christmas as a prime example, Rea often focused on cars and roads in his songs because he spent much of his life driving. He was an avid motor racing enthusiast and took his driving exam in his father’s ice cream van, which ended up being one of the singer’s more amusing driving anecdotes. When the examiner told Rea to do an emergency stop, the examiner fell off the box he was sitting on and cut his leg. Rea would later say: “I had to take him to the hospital, but he still passed me.”

Fans and music lovers share in mourning and remembrance of a legendary guitarist

This year, Driving Home For Christmas has reached Number 30 on the charts. As the world mourns and remembers the gravelly voice and passionate playing of this singer-songwriter, the voice of Chris Rea will surely continue to warm the homes of many fans this holiday season and bring back fond memories of a one-of-a-kind talent.

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