Christopher Anton Rea ( ; 4 March 1951 – 22 December 2025) was an English rock and blues singer-songwriter, guitarist and record producer. He was known for his distinctive gravelly voice, slide guitar playing and music style blending soft rock with blues.
Rea recorded twenty-five studio albums beginning in the late 1970s. Although he had modest success with Water Sign (1983) and Wired to the Moon (1984), his commercial breakthrough came with Shamrock Diaries (1985), followed by platinum-sellers On the Beach (1986) and Dancing with Strangers (1987). Two of his million-selling albums topped the UK Albums Chart: The Road to Hell in 1989 and its successor, Auberge, in 1991. He had already become "a major European star by the time he finally cracked the UK Top 10" with the single "The Road to Hell (Part 2)". His commercial peak continued with God's Great Banana Skin (1992) and Espresso Logic (1993), and was marked by million-selling compilations New Light Through Old Windows (1988) and The Best of Chris Rea (1994), later also The Very Best of Chris Rea (2001, with three million copies sold by 2014).
His many hit songs included "I Can Hear Your Heartbeat", "Stainsby Girls", "Josephine", "On the Beach", "Let's Dance", "Driving Home for Christmas", "Working on It", "Tell Me There's a Heaven", "Auberge", "Looking for the Summer", "Nothing to Fear" and "Julia". He also recorded a duet with Elton John, "If You Were Me". He was nominated for the Brit Award for British Male Solo Artist in 1988, 1989 and 1990. Over the course of his long career, Rea's work had at times been informed by his struggles with serious health issues, which in the early 2000s influenced his change from adult-oriented rock to blues music style, releasing studio albums on his independent record label Jazzee Blue, such as Dancing Down the Stony Road (2002) and the 11-CD Blue Guitars (2005).
Life and career
Early life
Christopher Anton Rea was born on 4 March 1951 in Middlesbrough in the North Riding of Yorkshire to an Italian father, Camillo Rea, born in January 1922 in Guisborough, England (whose father, also called Camillo, was born in Arpino, Lazio, Italy) and an Irish mother, Winifred K. Slee. He was one of seven children. His family were of the Roman Catholic faith. The name Rea was well known locally due to his family's ice cream factory and café chain.
When he was twelve, Rea worked clearing tables in the coffee bar and making ice cream in the factory. He wanted to improve the business, but his ideas got no support from his father. After leaving, he was replaced by one of his brothers. At that time he wanted to be a journalist and attended St Mary's College, Middlesbrough. Rea bought his first guitar in his early twenties, a 1961 Höfner V3 and 25-watt Laney amplifier. He played primarily bottleneck guitar, also known as slide guitar. Even though he was left-handed, he played guitar right-handed. Rea's playing style was inspired by Charlie Patton, whom he had heard on the radio. He had initially thought Patton's playing sounded like a violin. as well as by the playing of Ry Cooder and Joe Walsh. He also listened to Delta blues musicians such as Sonny Boy Williamson II and Muddy Waters, gospel blues, Rea commented that, at that 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." He began writing songs for the band and took up singing only because the singer in the band failed to show up for a playing engagement. The band itself split up in 1977. He guested on Catherine Howe's EP The Truth of the Matter.
Debut album
Rea's debut studio album, Whatever Happened to Benny Santini?, was produced by Gus Dudgeon and released in June 1978. The title referred to a stage name that Rea had suggested when the record label insisted that his given name did not sound "croony" enough. The lead single, "Fool (If You Think It's Over)", was Rea's biggest hit in the US, reaching No. 1 on the Adult Contemporary Singles chart and No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100. As Rea gave Magnet Records its first major breakthrough and its first US Top 10, he was their biggest artist, the more so when he was nominated at the 21st Annual Grammy Awards as Best New Artist.
Michael Levy remembered Rea as "more of a thoughtful, introspective poet than a natural pop performer" which in Levy's opinion prevented Rea from becoming a bigger star. Throughout his career Rea emphatically rejected the label of "rock star".
Subsequent early albums
Dudgeon also produced Rea's second album Deltics (1979). Rea recorded his self-produced third album, Tennis (1980), with musicians from Middlesbrough, and it received positive reviews. Rea had a difficult working relationship with Dudgeon and the other "men in suits" who he felt "smoothed out" the blues-influenced elements of his music.
1983–1988: European breakthrough
Water Sign and Shamrock Diaries
From 1983, Rea's music began to better reflect his wishes and capabilities, despite pressure from his record company due to the accumulated costs of the production for his first four albums. To keep costs low, the label decided to release the demo tapes of his fifth studio album Water Sign. It was the first of several successful albums on which Rea collaborated with producer David Richards. He also changed managers and went on a UK club tour, followed by a 60-date tour as a support act for Canadian band Saga. He established a loyal following in West Germany, and believes this audience saved his career as there was no "image-led market", allowing him to succeed "by music and by word of mouth". He also performed at Milano Suono festival at stadium San Siro, Italy. By 1987, Rea was finally in a position to pay off the £320,000 debt he owed to the record company, and started to make significant earnings. He signed with Warners, who also bought Magnet Recordings. That year, the Dancing with Strangers world tour sold out stadium-sized venues, including two shows at Wembley Arena, and included Rea's first concerts in Australia and Japan. The re-recorded version of On the Beach reached the Top 10 on the US Adult Contemporary chart, and No. 12 in the UK.
1989–1994: Chart dominance, The Road to Hell and Auberge
Rea's tenth studio album was his major breakthrough. While the album peaked at No. 107 in the US, the single The Road to Hell (Part 2) climbed to No. 11 on the US Mainstream Rock chart, and was Rea's first and only UK Top 10 single, until perennial favourite Driving Home For Christmas also reached the top 10 in 2021 and again, shortly after his death in 2025. Rea said his neglect of the US market was one of his biggest mistakes because "every time I see a car that's too much money, I definitely regret it, just for five minutes".
1995–2005: Recovery from illness, return to blues roots and Blue Guitars
In 1996 released a soundtrack album for La Passione, which Rea also wrote and produced. Two years later in 1998 The Blue Cafe, his fourteenth studio album, followed. It reached the UK Top Ten and received extremely positive reviews and a tour named The Blue Cafe Tour followed to promote the album. In 1999, ten years after The Road to Hell, the dance and electronic infused The Road to Hell: Part 2 failed to reach the UK Top 40. Rea rebounded in 2000, when King of the Beach made it to the UK Top 30. He was disappointed with the music business when Michael Parkinson, who supported him to do Dancing Down the Stony Road, told him songs longer than three minutes were not played as often on radio anymore. Rea 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 [...] the best change for my music has been concentrating on stuff which really interests me". visiting various venues across the UK, including the Royal Albert Hall in London. Part of the tour was recorded and released as a live DVD and his first live album, The Road to Hell & Back, to positive reviews.
Rea released the compilation Still So Far to Go in October 2009 which contained some of his best known (and lesser known) hits over the last thirty years as well as songs from his "blues" period. Shortly after this release, in October and November, Rea underwent two surgical procedures. On 3 February 2012 the Santo Spirito Tour started at Congress Center Hamburg in Hamburg, Germany, with additional visits to Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium and France. The United Kingdom part of the tour commenced in the middle of March and finished on 5 April at Hammersmith Apollo in London. He also performed for the fifth time in his career at the Montreux Jazz Festival.
2016–2025: Further illness, recovery, and retrospectives
In September 2017, he released his twenty-fourth album, Road Songs for Lovers, and embarked on a European tour starting in October until December. On 9 December, Rea collapsed during a performance at the New Theatre Oxford, the 35th concert of the tour. He was taken to hospital where his condition was stabilized. This health issue caused the last two concerts of the tour to be cancelled. In December 2020, Rea guest starred on the Christmas edition of Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing, where he discussed his health issues over the years.
On 18 October 2019, Rhino released 2CD deluxe editions of five of Chris Rea's most commercially successful studio albums, Shamrock Diaries, On The Beach, Dancing With Strangers, The Road To Hell, and Auberge. Each contains a remastered version of the original album on the first disc, and remixes, rare and previously unreleased live tracks, single edits, and extended versions on the bonus disc. On 4 October, One Fine Day had been released, limited to 1000 numbered copies. The album contains tracks recorded in 1980 at Chipping Norton Recording Studios, most of which had never been released. On 20 November 2020, the triple CD compilation Era 1: 1978 – 1984 was released. It contains a mix of A-sides, B-sides, foreign language versions and different mixes, as well as all of One Fine Day on disc 2.
Musicianship
Guitars
thumb|right|Rea playing his [[Italia Guitars|Italia Maranello "Bluey" at the Heineken Music Hall, Amsterdam, 2010]]
Rea's first guitar was a Höfner V3 or 173 which he bought in a second-hand shop because, at the time, there were not that many shops in Middlesbrough where one could purchase a guitar. During his career the guitar most associated with him was a 1962 Fender Stratocaster which he called "Pinky". Rea bought the instrument after seeing a Ry Cooder concert at the City Hall in Newcastle. The guitar was once submerged in water for a prolonged time, which made it more mellow in sound compared to the classic hard Stratocaster sound. Since 2002 Dancing Down the Stony Road, his main guitar was an Italia Maranello which he named "Bluey". He wrote and produced the 1996 film La Passione, partially inspired by Rea's childhood experience of falling in love with motor racing and F1 Ferrari's driver Wolfgang von Trips. and "Windy Town",