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For an artist best-known for a string of slickly commercial adult-oriented rock hits – Josephine, On the Beach, The Road to Hell, the Yuletide perennial Driving Home for Christmas – Chris Rea’s career was a rather more fraught business than you might have expected.
He had something of the splendidly grumpy refusenik about him. His debut single, Fool (If You Think It’s Over) was a transatlantic hit, earning him a best new artist Grammy nomination (he lost to Billy Joel, an artist the single had garnered comparisons to), but Rea announced that he “despised” the song: “It’s just not me.” He chafed at his record company’s expectations: his 1978 debut album, Whatever Happened to Benny Santini? got its title after his label suggested that he might consider adopting a stage name, and he later protested that the producers he worked with made his music too glossy and “smoothed-out”.
When 1989’s The Road to Hell did well, his US record label thought he could be a huge star in America if he put the hours in touring, or appeared on MTV Unplugged; Rea declined to tour and turned down the MTV offer because he’d seen Eric Clapton’s performance on the show “and it reminded me of [the middle-of-the-road BBC TV show] Pebble Mill at One. I thought ‘Oh my God, I don’t want anything to do with this’.” He did not have much time for his fellow rock stars, claiming that the only one who hadn’t disappointed him was Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour.
Eventually, a life-threatening illness led him to completely reassess his career and pursue his real musical passion, the blues: he claimed that during his recuperation from the operation that saved his life but left him without a pancreas and in permanently poor health, he’d had an epiphany after finding an old Sister Rosetta Tharpe album in a drawer, bursting into tears at the sight of it. When his label rejected his 2002 album Dancing Down the Stony Road (“because it hadn’t been compromised in any way”), and suggested he make a big-name-packed duets album instead, he walked away from his deal, set up his own record company and happily saw out the rest of his career making and self-releasing the music he wanted to.
Thereafter, he could be sniffy, even dismissive about the music that had made him famous, which didn’t seem entirely fair: Rea was genuinely gifted at pop-facing AOR. If you’re in the market for a soft rock weepie, it might as well be one as beautifully-turned as Fool (If You Think It’s Over); whatever you make of the slick mid-80s production, On the Beach and All Summer Long are fabulously well-written songs. If you can occasionally sense Rea chafing a little at the commerciality of his sound (somewhere amid the synths and the booming rhythm track of Let’s Dance, there’s a gnarly uptempo blues-rock track fighting to get out), he would also throw his listeners the occasional curveball. A remix of Josephine – La Version Francais - famously became an anthem on the Balearic club scene, but the same could just as easily have happened to the ethereal slow-motion funk of Bombollini, from 1984’s Wired to the Moon.
He concluded his British commercial breakthrough, 1985’s Shamrock Diaries, with Hired Gun, which was eight minutes long, oddly menacing in tone and nothing like the hit singles that helped propel the album into the Top 20. Little Blonde Plaits and Just Passing Through, from the following year’s On the Beach, were impressively atmospheric and faintly jazzy. The Road to Hell (Part Two) was a huge hit single in 1989, but The Road to Hell (Part One) opened the six-times platinum album of the same name with five eerie minutes of dark ambient synth, distant piano chords and Rea singing the kind of grimly-hued blues song you could imagine Nick Cave performing.
Still, it came as something of a shock when Rea released Dancing Down the Stony Road: his take on blues was raw, intense, and so little concerned with studio slickness that you could hear the fretboard of his guitar buzzing, and, according to his self-penned sleevenote “everything Chris Rea was meant to be”. The initial critical reaction was that it was a one-off labour of love and that normal service would be resumed shortly, but it never was. The subsequent Hofner Blue Notes and Blue Jukebox fruitfully stirred jazz into his sound: should anyone have doubted his commitment to his new approach, 2005’s Blue Guitars was 11 CDs and 137 tracks long. If 2011’s Santo Spirito Blues and 2017’s Road Songs For Lovers made marginally more concession to the Chris Rea of old, the former was audibly more gritty and grungy in tone than anything Rea had released in his hitmaking days, while the latter contained the quite spectacularly bleak and gothic Last Train.
It was a dramatic left-turn that clearly confounded at least some of his old fans: platinum-selling albums and arena tours became a thing of the past. But you rather got the impression Rea preferred it that way. “I found fame really annoying,” he once shrugged. “Anything to do with celebrity, I just don’t get it.”
