Christopher Anton Rea was born in Middlesbrough in 1951, the son of an Italian father, Camillo, and an Irish mother. He was one of seven children in a family known locally for Camillo’s ice cream factory and cafes.
As a teenager he worked in the family cafés and learned to drive in one of his father’s ice cream vans. During the driving test the examiner fell off the box he was sitting on and cut his leg. Rea later recalled: “I had to take him to the hospital but he still passed me.”
He bought his first guitar, a 1961 Hofner V3, in his early 20s and began to learn slide guitar while still working for his father. Rea said at the time he was “meant to be developing my father’s ice cream cafe into a global concern, but I spent all my time in the stockroom playing slide guitar”.
Rea played with local groups including The Elastic Band and Magdalene before finding broader attention with The Beautiful Losers. That exposure led to a solo recording contract with Magnet Records.
His first studio album, Whatever Happened to Benny Santini?, was released in 1978. The lead single, Fool (If You Think It’s Over), became a hit in the United States, reaching number one on the adult contemporary Billboard chart and earning Rea a nomination for best new artist at the Grammy Awards.
Michael Levey, co-founder of Magnet Records, described him as “more of a thoughtful, introspective poet than a natural pop performer”.
Rea recorded 25 solo albums in his career, two of which reached number one on the UK albums chart. His gravelly voice and slide-guitar style are heard on songs such as Road to Hell, Auberge, On the Beach and Driving Home for Christmas.
Driving Home for Christmas was released in 1986 after some initial reluctance from Rea. He said: “I didn’t need a Christmas song hanging around at that point. I did everything I could to get them not to release that record. Thankfully they did!”
The song sprang from a difficult period in 1978, when Rea’s record contract had ended and his wife drove to London in an old Austin Mini to collect him. With snow and heavy traffic on the return journey, he began to improvise the chorus. He recalled: “Jokingly, I started singing – We’re driving home for Christmas… then, whenever the street lights shone inside the car, I started writing down the lyrics.”
On writing hit songs he said: “It’s one of those moments that songwriters get – sometimes you can spend years and years writing. That one was five to 10 minutes. When you have a successful song, you don’t remember thinking about it – it just comes out.”
He did not perform the song live until December 2014, when, after persistent requests from his crew, he staged a performance that used 12 snow cannons. Rea joked about the aftermath: “We put three feet of artificial snow in the stalls. The venue charged me £12,000 to clean it up!”
Traffic problems on the junction of the M4 and M25 inspired Road to Hell, and many of Rea’s songs drew on scenes he saw while travelling. He observed: “I see couples in cars – are they married, workmates, having an affair?” and reflected, “You get ideas for songs and you’re actually on a road – the road always becomes a metaphor for where we’re going in life.”
He also said, “Most of the songs are different people’s love stories inside cars”.
One of Rea’s childhood ambitions had been to write for film. He realised that goal by making the movie La Passione in 1996, and he composed the score and title track for the film Soft Top Hard Shoulder. He also appeared in the 1999 comedy Parting Shots.
In 1997 he recorded Let’s Dance with his friend Bob Mortimer for Middlesbrough Football Club’s FA Cup Final. A later television clip in which Mortimer claimed Rea cracked an egg into a bath after recording went viral after appearing on the BBC panel show Would I Lie to You.
Rea was a self-confessed vehicle enthusiast who owned and raced a number of vintage cars, including a 1957 Morris Minor 1000 police car. He was friendly with Formula 1 team owner Eddie Jordan and recalled helping trackside: “I had the whole uniform. He put me in charge of the tyre-warmer for the rear right tyre of Eddie Irvine’s car”.
Rea’s career was interrupted by serious health problems. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at 33 and underwent surgery that removed part of his pancreas, the duodenum, the gall bladder and part of his liver. He also lived with type 1 diabetes and kidney issues.
Reflecting on how illness affected his approach to music, he said: “I was never a rock star or pop star and all the illness has been my chance to do what I’d always wanted to do with music”.
In 2016 he suffered a stroke but recovered sufficiently to record and tour his 24th album, Road Songs for Lovers, continuing to draw creative fuel from life on the road.
Across a multi-decade career Rea combined a distinctive vocal and guitar style with recurring themes of travel and everyday life. His fascination with cars and the literal and metaphorical journeys they represent remained central to his songwriting and public persona.
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