Music |
Chris Rea
By
Published: May 27, 2020
Category:
Rock
There are a million summer songs. But there’s something about Chris Rea’s music that’s idiosyncratic and addictive — in many of his songs, I hear blazing sun, burning beach, the tang of lotion mixed with ocean ozone. And time nowhere to be found, time banished. In Rea’s pre-global warming world, I feel young, fit, in love or about to be. Start here: “Looking for the Summer.”
You’ve probably never heard of Chris Rea.
He had a highly successful twenty-five year career in Europe.
He sold about 30 million CDs, mostly in Europe.
And — how is this for irony? — it won’t do you much good to fall in love with Chris Rea and hope to see him in concert because illness forced him to stop touring.
"It’s not until you become seriously ill and you nearly die and you’re at home for six months that you suddenly realize — this isn’t the way I intended it to be,” he’s said. “Everything that you’ve done falls away and you start wondering why you went through all that rock business stuff."
But just listen to Chris Rea, and you’ll be glad he spent a quarter century playing sleek, grown-up rock that has two easy-to-spot signatures — guitars that are fluid as mercury and a voice that sounds as if it’s been up all night and doesn’t plan to rest any time soon — even if his style is impossible to pigeonhole.
Who is Chris Rea? A master guitarist who didn’t pick up a guitar until he was 19. A Brit who learned the blues from records. And a singer-songwriter who, a wag noted, “seemed only to get in the charts when Dire Straits were somewhere else.”
Yes, Dire Straits is a first cousin. The comparison is apt, thought, about Quality. Like the first Chris Rea song that grabbed me: “Auberge.” Drums. A guitar trill, building. An organ asks a haunting question. Slide guitar responds. Nifty guitar figures, repeated. Horns. And, at last, that rough voice:
On the hard fast train
On the road to gain
Something gets right through to your telling bone
There’s a sudden itch
An electric twitch
Sometimes I swear this body’s got a mind of its own
Did your foot tap? Did you stand and move? No worries if you didn’t: those riffs will be in your head all day. More…
—–
To buy the CD “The Best of Chris Rea” at a bargain price from Amazon, click here.
To buy the MP3 download of “Auberge,” click here.
