First love, a painful breakup, friendship, death: Good pop songs are able to shape moments. Rarely does a pop song, however, manage to claim a concrete calendar time for itself. “Driving Home for Christmas” by Chris Rea is such a song.
Rea wrote it in 1978, when he was 27 and was himself stuck in pre-Christmas traffic, discovering that this experience connected him with his fellow travelers: “I take a look at the driver next to me, he’s just the same.” It was released only in 1986, and even then “Driving Home for Christmas” remained commercially unsuccessful. And that, although Chris Rea’s album “On the Beach” had already charted internationally.
Only decades later, in the 2000s, did the song achieve late fame. By then, Chris Rea had already moved away from his early work: “I can’t stand listening to my old recordings anymore,” he said in a 2002 interview. A cancer diagnosis, which he barely survived, changed the pop star from Middlesbrough in the north of England forever.
His gentle pop-rock, for which he was loved and reviled, suddenly seemed trivial to him in light of the near-death experience: “Men in suits used to manipulate my music massively, and I can’t blame anyone but myself for that. I gave them what they wanted, instead of doing what I wanted.”
The Blues Caught Up With Him Again
This ostentatious softness, which apparently pleased the label bosses, earned Chris Rea not only friends over the years. From the subversive disruptive potential of rock music there was little to hear from him; his sound was suited for a candlelight dinner or a yacht cruise.
After surviving the illness, Rea pursued his passion for the blues. This music had fascinated him since his youth, when the son of a ten-member Italo-Irish family still helped out in his father’s ice-cream shop. For a lifetime, his self-taught guitar playing remained noticeably influenced by that style.
Meanwhile, Rea’s 1980s songs grew into classics, including “On the Beach” and of course “Driving Home for Christmas.” A mix of calculated re-releases and the hard-to-parse dynamics of the ritualization of culture lifted the latter into the same league as Christmas hits by Mariah Carey or Wham!. This may have contributed to the fact that today more people share the experience of the pre-Christmas homeward journey than in 1978. In 2014, Rea performed the song live for the first time.
Now, almost 50 years after the initial draft, “Driving Home for Christmas” is inseparable from the collective memory. On December 22, its creator Chris Rea died after a brief illness at the age of 74.
