Chris Rea, a versatile, Grammy-nominated British singer-songwriter whose hits included the sentimental ballad “Driving Home for Christmas,” died on Monday. He was 74.
His death was announced in a statement on his official Facebook account, which said it came after “a short illness.” The statement did not specify a cause or say where he died.
A virtuosic slide guitarist, Mr. Rea found fame and success, particularly in Europe, with a sound that blended blues, soul and the softer rock that came to define the 1970s and ’80s. He possessed a gruff Yorkshire voice and adored blues guitarists like Sonny Boy Williamson and Muddy Waters — influences that, in some ways, put him at odds with the music that made him famous.
“I am in that unique little club,” Mr. Rea told The Independent in 1997, “where I went into music because I love music, not because I wanted to be rich and famous. I’ve always knocked on the door of the musicians’ room, not the rock stars’ room.”
Chris Rea was born on March 4, 1951, in Middlesbrough, England, a port city in northern Yorkshire. He was one of seven children of Camillo Rea, who operated several coffee shops and ice cream parlors bearing the family name, and an Irish-born mother.
A relative latecomer to music, Chris was kicked out of secondary school for “playin’ with motorbikes instead of playin’ with me pen,” he said in a 1979 interview with The Associated Press. He picked up several odd jobs, including with his father’s ice cream business and as a bricklayer. When he was 20, a friend introduced him to the James Gang, an American band that featured Joe Walsh.
“That was the first album I’d ever bought,” Mr. Rea told The A.P. “I played it until I almost wore holes in it. And I just got into it after that, went out and bought a guitar and got started.”
Mr. Rea joined his first band, Magdalene, when he was 22. In 1978, Mr. Rea’s solo career got off to a fast start with the album “Whatever Happened to Benny Santini?” which featured the single “Fool (If You Think It’s Over).” The song was his biggest U.S. hit, reaching No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in the summer of 1978. He was nominated for a Grammy Award that year in the best new artist category.
Mr. Rea released more than two dozen albums, building a loyal fan base in Europe. At times, he leaned into his bluesy, guitar-driven influences, as with the single “Stainsby Girls” from his 1985 album, “Shamrock Diaries.” “On the Beach,” issued the next year, had a more mellow, jazzy feel.
“Looking at my career, the progress has been slow, mainly because I haven’t gone out of my way to sell myself,” Mr. Rea told The Advertiser in 1987. “Maybe if I had a flair for show business it would have helped to pay a few of the bills earlier on and maybe I wouldn’t be making the sort of music I do today.”
Mr. Rea’s survivors include his wife, Joan, and their children Josephine and Julia.
His biggest hit was “Driving Home for Christmas,” a song he wrote in 1978 for Van Morrison. He never heard back from Mr. Morrison and Mr. Rea ended up recording it as the B-side to one of his singles.
“It’s funny because I’d just been banned from driving when I wrote it,” Mr. Rea told The Daily Express in an interview that was published Friday. “But I was feeling good at the time, too, and people say they can hear that infectious feel-good mood when they hear it.”
It took decades for the song to become a hit, finally charting in the United Kingdom Top 10 in recent years.
In 2000, Mr. Rea’s doctors told him he very likely had pancreatic cancer, so he had his pancreas and parts of his stomach removed, which changed his life permanently, including leaving him a diabetic. (Mr. Rea had recently starred alongside Ben Kingsley and Dianna Rigg in a critically reviled 1999 comedy, “Parting Shots,” in which his character was given weeks to live after a cancer diagnosis.)
After his health scare, Mr. Rea was distraught that, in his view, he had spent much of his career compromising his music for record companies.
“I don’t remember being that worried about dying,” Mr. Rea told The Illawarra Mercury, an Australian newspaper, in 2002. “But what really pissed me off was that I had not made a single record where the slide-guitar solo was as long as a slide-guitar solo is meant to be.”
He insisted on releasing a blues album called “Stony Road.”
“If the heads of all the music companies had known about music and about Chris Rea fans, they wouldn’t have worried about ‘Stony Road,’” Mr. Rea told The Independent in 2004, two years after the album was released. “My regular fans have always known that side of me. I knew they wouldn’t have a problem with it. So I made ‘Stony Road’ anyway. All the record companies rejected it. I was very pleased when it eventually went gold.”
Sopan Deb is a Times reporter covering breaking news and culture.
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