Chris Rea, an English singer-songwriter and guitarist greatest recognized for his festive hit Driving House For Christmas, has died aged 74 following a brief sickness, his household stated on Monday (Dec 22).
Hailing from Middlesbrough, a port city in northeast England, Rea’s tune Idiot (If You Suppose It is Over) from his debut studio album in 1978 was his greatest chart hit, reaching the US billboard Scorching 100 and incomes him a Grammy nomination.
He launched 25 studio albums and offered greater than 40 million data worldwide in a profession spanning 5 a long time, cementing his fame as certainly one of Britain’s most outstanding pop artists.
Driving House For Christmas, written throughout a snowy journey when he was unemployed and launched in 1986, grew to become a seasonal staple in Britain, re-entering UK charts yearly and that includes in festive promoting campaigns.
“My supervisor had simply left me, I’d simply been banned from driving, my now spouse, Joan, she needed to drive right down to London, choose me up within the mini and take me residence, and that is once I wrote it,” Rea stated in a video clip posted on Instagram final week.
The tune was used this 12 months in a Christmas-season advert marketing campaign by retailer M&S.
A motor-racing fanatic, Rea took half within the 1993 British Touring Automobile Championship as a visitor driver. Two of his album covers, Auberge in 1991 and The Better of Chris Rea in 1994, featured automobiles.
Rea battled critical well being points in later years, together with pancreatic most cancers within the Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s, and a stroke in 2016, which left him with slurred speech and lowered motion in his arms and fingers. However he continued recording and touring, releasing his final album, One High quality Day, in 2019.
He’s survived by his spouse, who he met after they had been each youngsters, and two daughters. His household stated he died peacefully in hospital after a brief sickness, describing their loss as “immense”.
