Chris Rea is an artist whose music I have known for years, I have many of his songs on my rotation and every December he gets to sing 'Driving Home For Christmas' in our celebratory roundup.
HOWEVER .. I have to admit that I wouldn't recognise him if he walked through the door with a case of beer and a cheeseburger. I've never consciously watched him perform, or seen a video or interview or magazine article. The nearest I got was an artists impression on an album cover.
Chris was always one of those singers in the periphery of my ear (does that even make sense?). He was a song on the radio that I knew but never followed up on. By the time I took him seriously and bought 'Dancing With Strangers' in the late 80s he'd had a whole list of hits and albums going back 12 years.
The only logical thing to do was pair that album with the compilation he brought out the following year. There were only two duplications so it was good value to get a taste of his back catalogue.
And what a catalogue it is. There's the well known hits .. 'Let's Dance', 'Fool (If You Think It's Over)', 'On the Beach' .. but my favourites are some of the lesser known or more obscure tracks. 'Gonna Buy a Hat' is fun, 'Ace of Hearts', 'Que Sera' and the fact that 'Stainsby Girls' loved the Rolling Stones.
Chris comes from Middlesborough, which has probably had the most relabelling from all the boundary and authority shakeups over the years. When he was born in 1951, Middlesborough was in the North Riding of Yorkshire. Quite a few of his songs are references to his life there - 'The Road to Hell', 'Steel River', 'Windy Town' for example, and when looking back, like most of us, he looks back on what has gone. "I went back to see my father after my mother had died and the fu**ers had knocked the whole place down. I literally went to drive somewhere that wasn't there."
In 2000 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, went through procedures, at one point taking 34 pills and 7 injections a day and made himself a promise that if he recovered he'd return to his first love, blues. Towards that end he started his own record label, Jazzee Blue. After a couple of albums he began work on a major project taking a journey through blues music.
'Blue Guitars' released in 2005 is an 11 CD collection broken into different stages from African roots through Country blues, New Orleans, Memphis, Texas, Chicago, Ballads, Gospel, Celtic, Latin and 60s & 70s. 137 songs recorded 12 hours a day, 7 days a week over 18 months.
I just got the collection and I'm steadily working my way through it. !!
If you haven't discovered Chris Rea yet, it's not too late. Start with the hits, work through the album tracks then dive into the blues.
A brilliant artist. Yes, I saw him perform in Auckland, at the Logan Campbell Centre. Apart from being a great show, it is also memorable because of a meteorological event.It was raining heavily outside the building, and a lot of it poured in and onto the stage. The drummer was having a laugh cause it was not far from him. He saw the funny side of being rained on at an indoor even,I presume.
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