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Christopher Anton Rea ( ; 4 March 1951 – 22 December 2025) was an English Rock music 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).
Rea never toured the United States, choosing family life over greater fame. In the U.S. he was best known for the 1978 single "Fool (If You Think It's Over)", which reached No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent three weeks at No. 1 on the Adult Contemporary chart, earning him a Grammy Award nomination as Best New Artist in 1978. A decade later, "Working On It" topped the Mainstream Rock chart. He sold more than 30 million records worldwide.
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. Rea was also influenced by Blind Willie Johnson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe as well as by the playing of Ry Cooder and Joe Walsh.Auf Wiedersehen, Pet..., Q, February 1988, p.33 He also listened to Delta blues musicians such as Sonny Boy Williamson II and Muddy Waters, gospel blues, and opera to light orchestral classics to develop his style.
Rea recalled that "for many people from working-class backgrounds, rock wasn't a chosen thing, it was the only thing, the only avenue of creativity available for them", and that "when I was young I wanted most of all to be a writer of films and film music. But Middlesbrough in 1968 wasn't the place to be if you wanted to do movie scores." Due to his late introduction to music and guitar playing, Rea commented that when compared with Mark Knopfler and Eric Clapton "I definitely missed the boat, I think." He was self-taught and soon tried to join a friend's group, the Elastic Band, as the first choice for guitar or bass. Heeding his father's advice he did not join as his potential earnings would not have been enough to cover the costs of being in the group. As a result he found himself doing casual labouring jobs, including working in his father's ice cream business. 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."
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. Few of Rea's early singles charted in the UK. "Fool (If You Think It's Over)" performed modestly on its second release in late 1978, prompted by its strong performance in the US, and that stateside success also led to Rea being categorized as a piano-playing singer-songwriter, similar to Elton John and Billy Joel, rather than the guitar player he is. For several years, Magnet marketed him based on this misconception. Rea said that it "is still the only song I've ever not played guitar on, but it just so happened to be my first single". Rea had "always had a difficult relationship with fame, even before my first illness. None of my heroes were rock stars. I arrived in Hollywood for the Grammy Awards once and thought I was going to bump into people who mattered, like Ry Cooder or Randy Newman. But I was surrounded by pop stars". Throughout his career Rea emphatically rejected the label of "rock star".
Water Sign performed far better than Rea or his team expected in Ireland and Europe, selling over half a million copies in just a few months. The single I Can Hear Your Heartbeat charted in Europe. With the album's success along with that of the subsequent Wired to the Moon (1984), which was his first Top 40 album in the UK (reaching No. 35), Rea began to focus his attention on touring continental Europe and building up a fan base. 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". It was not until 1985's million-selling Shamrock Diaries, with its hit singles Stainsby Girls and Josephine, written for his wife and daughter respectively, that UK audiences began to take notice of him.
After Auberge, Rea released God's Great Banana Skin (1992) which reached No. 4 in the UK, while the single Nothing to Fear gave him another Top 20 hit. A year later the album Espresso Logic made the Top 10 and Julia, written about his second daughter, gave him his sixth and last Top 20 single. The album was partly promoted by Rea's taking part in the non-Championship "TOCA Shootout" round of the 1993 British Touring Car Championship, although he was eliminated in the first round. In 1994 another compilation album, The Best of Chris Rea, was released which peaked at No. 3 in UK. That July, Rea performed with Peter Gabriel and others at Sonoria festival in Milan.
In an interview, he said, "it's not until you become seriously ill and you nearly die and you're at home for six months, that you suddenly stop, to realize that this isn't the way I intended it to be in the beginning. Everything that you've done falls away and you start wondering why you went through all that rock business stuff." A record company offered him millions of dollars to do a duets album with notable artists. Having promised himself that if he recovered, he would return to his blues roots, he started the record label Jazzee Blue to free himself from his then current company's expectations. The first album under this label, Dancing Down the Stony Road (2002), reached No. 14 and was certified Gold by the BPI. He wanted the label to be a place "where musicians came and made a record" of this style of music. Jazzee Blue released several blues and jazz albums mostly by members of his then current band. 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.
In 2003, Rea released Blue Street (Five Guitars) and Hofner Blue Notes, and The Blue Jukebox the following year. 2005 saw the release of Blue Guitars, a box set of 11 CDs containing 137 blues-inspired tracks with Rea's paintings as album covers, which is a once in a lifetime ambitious project about the history of blues music. 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".
Rea released the compilation 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. Two new songs were included, "Come So Far, Yet Still So Far to Go" and the ballad "Valentino". The album reached No. 8 and was certified Gold by the BPI. Rea started the European tour called "Still So Far to Go" in January 2010. His special guest on stage was Irish musician Paul Casey. The tour ended on 5 April at Waterfront Hall in Belfast. In September 2011 Santo Spirito Blues box set was released. The set contained two feature-length films on one DVD written and directed by Rea along with three accompanying CDs – two of which featured the music from the DVDs and the third being a stripped back version of the related studio album. 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.
November 2014 saw Rea embark on a European tour called The Last Open Road Tour, with the UK part of the tour commencing on 1 December in Manchester and ending on 20 December in London. He also performed for the fifth time in his career at the Montreux Jazz Festival.
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.
He took the opportunity to get involved in Formula One on a few occasions, including as a pit lane mechanic for the Jordan team during the 1995 Monaco Grand Prix. He recorded a song, "Saudade", in tribute to three-time Formula One world champion Ayrton Senna. It featured prominently in the BBC documentary movie.
Rea had pancreatic cancer in 2001 and underwent a Whipple procedure, which resulted in the removal of the head of the pancreas and part of the duodenum, bile duct, and gall bladder. After having that surgery, Rea had problems with diabetes and a weaker immune system, requiring him to take thirty‑four pills and have seven injections a day. He underwent several subsequent operations. Nevertheless, he found greater appreciation for life, his family, and the things he loved.
Rea suffered a stroke in 2016, which left him with slurred speech and reduced movement in his arms and fingers. Soon afterwards he quit smoking to reduce the risk of further strokes and recovered enough to record and tour.
Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph wrote that "any musician would feel proud to have penned songs half as gorgeous and touching as his". Alexis Petridis of The Guardian explained that he "bristled against his record companies, his producers and fame itself – but that friction ignited both his Soft rock hits and his raw, spirited take on the blues", but also how in his blues part of career "he could be sniffy, even dismissive about the music that had made him famous, which didn't seem entirely fair: Rea was genuinely gifted at pop-facing AOR". Adam Sweeting of The Guardian noted that Rea "proved that it was possible to become a big-selling international artist while remaining low-key and publicity-shy". Ed Power of The Irish Times said that "it was that reluctance to be a pop star that made him such a memorable presence in the charts" and his hits "were beautifully catchy, but they were threaded through with a soulfulness that set Rea apart from peers such as Phil Collins and Sting".
Bruno Lesprit of French Le Monde described him as an "antistar", Arne Willander of German edition of Rolling Stone as a "silent master", and Sopan Deb of The New York Times as a "virtuosic slide guitarist" and "versatile" singer-songwriter. Jakob Biazza of German Süddeutsche Zeitung considered him a "great blues guitarist and singer who was far too long misunderstood as a soft rocker". Hrvoje Horvat of Croatian Večernji list also argued that he "was a far more serious musician and a great guitarist, who did much more significant things in his career than these most famous songs that most people remember him for ... was at his best when he moved away from the pop format".
Francesco Fusi of Forbes Spain described how Rea's "signature style was always a highly personal blend of rock, pop, and blues ... beyond sales figures and accolades, Chris Rea's legacy lies in having built an honest and recognizable body of work, free of artifice and grounded in a clear artistic identity". Dan Mc Sword of Italian Gente described how "his songs, with their captivating melodies, evocative lyrics and authentic sensitivity have accompanied many moments in our lives ... he was serious, credible, and devoid of rhetoric: that's why his songs have over time become an enduring part of the soundtrack of our lives". Hungarian singer Charlie emphasized his modesty and kindness, and having a "musical legacy that few people have. It had a great influence on many singers and musicians, including me".
Jon Harper of Blues Rock Review in 2025 concluded that Rea's work has an underrated legacy in blues rock due to several factors (geography, pop beginnings, avoidance of fame, timing), which "deserves serious study", especially the Blue Guitars (2005), "arguably the most ambitious blues-related project of the 21st century".
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