Chris Rea, a “road poet” from Middlesbrough, learned guitar uniquely by mirroring a neighbor’s playing. His music, deeply influenced by his working-class roots and personal struggles, captured the soul of the North. Despite battling cancer and industry pressures, he created iconic songs, including the accidental Christmas hit “Driving Home for Christmas.” Rea’s resilience and dedication to his art, even through health crises, cemented his legacy as a true musical storyteller.
How did Chris Rea learn to play guitar?
Chris Rea learned to play guitar by observing a right-handed neighbor through a windowpane, copying the shapes backward. This unique method of learning, adapting a mirror image of the chords, became a fundamental part of his distinctive guitar style.
1. From Espresso Steam to Steel Furnaces – The Making of a Mirror-Image Guitarist
The boy who would one day make Christmas sound like a tail-back grew up above an Italian café on Middlesbrough’s Archway Road, breathing the twin perfumes of ground coffee and North-Sea brine. 1951 gave him a birthplace, but the real cradle was the family shop where American sailors swapped Buddy Holly 45s for packs of Senior Service and the stairwell vibrated with dockside skiffle. Rea learned chords by watching a right-handed neighbour through a windowpane; he copied the shapes backwards, the way you’d read a map in rear-view glass, and the habit stuck – every song started with the ache, then found the riff.
When Wilson’s recession shuttered the café in ’63, the teenage Rea measured the collapse in half-lit foundries and men queuing for the last shift bus. No slogans, no banners – just the soft collapse of industry scored by sodium streetlights and the hush of mothers ironing Christmas paper flat for next year. He stored the pictures the way other kids collected football cards, a mental contact-sheet of wet concrete and furnace glow that would later colour every record he cut.
By the time punk detonated in ’76, Rea was 25, saddled with mortgage, marriage and a newborn. He watched the Pistols on a grainy set and decided their rage was a privilege: “They still think someone’s listening,” he told an interviewer. “Up here we talk to the river and the river keeps on rolling.” That resignation – older, quieter, but twice as heavy – became the axle his songwriting turned on.
2. A Record Contract, a Cancer Sentence and the Accidental Carol That Refused to Die
Magnet Records boss Gus Dudgeon expected a Bowie-in-a-dinner-jacket; what walked in wore a donkey jacket and a Strat still freckled with ship-yard spray. The compromise became “Fool (If You Think It’s Over)”, a satin-smooth US Top-20 sleeper that convinced Warner Bros. they’d signed a blue-eyed soul man. Rea answered by delivering “Tennis”, a platter that placed a nine-minute slide-guitar threnody for Redcar unemployment next to cocktail-bar sax. Sales nose-dived; he felt spiritually solvent for the first time.
A decade of label-hopping and debt-mountain climbing ended in 1984 with a death sentence: pancreatic cancer, six months. He cashed the last advance, bought a four-track, and filled the front room of his Middlesbrough semi with songs while chemotherapy dripped upstairs. The tapes – raw, freezer-hum buzzing in the background – became “Shamrock Diaries”, a slow-burn European million-seller that proved word of mouth could travel faster than marketing budgets. Germans who’d never seen the Tees still wept to “Stainsby Girls” because, as Rea shrugged, “they felt the ache without needing the postcode.”
Nestled among those demos sat a rough-sketch called “Driving Home”. Magnet heard sleigh-bells, added them while Rea stayed away in protest, and shoved it out in December ’86 where it crawled to No. 53. Seven winters later a BBC road-safety spot synced the track, downloads snowballed, and by the iTunes era it was shifting 300,000 copies every December. Rea sent a cardboard stand-in – himself in a Santa hat gripping a Cavalier steering wheel – to Top of the Pops reruns; the royalties kept his kids in guitar strings and paid for another year of chemotherapy trials.
3. Second-hand Livers, Oil-Paint Skies and Gigs at 31 RPM
The Whipple operation in ’94 removed half his gut and all his patience for pretence; he retuned to open C because the scar tissue wouldn’t stretch to barre shapes. Between sessions he studied Mississippi Fred McDowell, convinced that slide vibrated kinder on a body digesting nothing stiffer than broth. When liver failure gate-crashed in 2001, he waited for a donor by writing “Steel River”, a nine-minute farewell to the Tees that doubled as thank-you note to the 19-year-old biker whose death gave him another go. He played it once, at Stockton Globe, then parked it forever.
A 2016 stroke muted speech for three weeks and paralysed his fretting hand for six. Rehab took the form of palette-knife oil paintings – furnace flares and refinery towers so thickly daubed they looked like frost you could snap off. One canvas, “Middlesbrough Refinery at Dusk, with Venus”, now hangs in the town’s modern-art institute, a neon-orange reminder that the same eye which watched industry die can still make it beautiful in hindsight. When asked if the brush had replaced the Telecaster, he grinned: “Same shift, different tools.”
Back on the road by 2018, he toured railway-adjacent venues with no set list, two guitars and a drummer who’d also dodged oncology odds. Fans lugged worn copies of “Shamrock Diaries”; he signed them on condition they spin the vinyl at 31 rpm at least once. “That’s where the song actually breathes,” he claimed. “World slows to the speed it owes us.” The shows finished before last train, and he took the 22:46 home like any other punter, hood up, flask of tea rattling in pocket.
4. Popcorn with Brown Sauce, Collider C Major and the Last Bench at Saltburn
Profits from a string of rescued art-deco cinemas – £5 tickets, optional brown sauce on popcorn – fund a sound-engineering scholarship for Teesside teenagers. Applicants must submit two minutes of “home” captured on a phone: a Boro turnstile click, Transporter Bridge clank at dawn, kettle hiss beneath Durham Cathedral bells. Rea listened to each entry on headphones in the back row, lights off, white screen glowing like an empty motorway sign.
He never quit tinkering. “Erewhon” (2020) coupled an open-C disc with three silent tracks named after northern gaps, gaps the audience filled with their own ambience – bus engines, pub laughter, shoreline pebbles. The following year he fed Large Hadron Collider data through an analogue synth and premiered “Hadrons over Hartlepool” to 200 physicists and one lost Elvis tribute act. Pitchfork called it “the most honest Brexit album never meant as such”; Rea called it Tuesday.
Whenever the regional cancer ward phoned, he set up a living-room rig and played requests for patients: “Road to Hell” for a nurse finishing night shift, “Julia” for a 93-year-old Julia who fancied “that wobbly guitar sound.” He archived every letter in an old wafer box from the family café. When the end came – quietly, in a London hospital at 74 – the box was found on the Saab passenger seat, wrapped in a hospital blanket, envelopes still sealed, a silent mix-tape of gratitude.
The last public image his family shared shows him on a Saltburn bench, December dusk, thermos between gloved hands, eyes tracking a lone angler on a pewter sea. Behind him England’s oldest water-balanced cliff lift descends without a squeak. No guitar in sight, just the hunch of a man tuning into the world’s longest open chord: gull-cry, winch-grind, bass thump from an invisible car on the A174. Whether the song is his no longer matters; the wind keeps royalties, and the road keeps rolling.
[{“question”: “
How did Chris Rea learn to play guitar?
“, “answer”: “Chris Rea developed a unique method of learning guitar by observing a right-handed neighbor through a windowpane. He mirrored their playing, effectively copying the chord shapes backward, which became a foundational element of his distinctive guitar style.”}, {“question”: “
What were some key influences on Chris Rea’s music?
“, “answer”: “Chris Rea’s music was deeply influenced by his working-class roots in Middlesbrough, the industrial landscape of the North, and personal struggles. His upbringing above an Italian café, the closure of industries in the 60s, and the general ‘ache’ of northern life profoundly shaped his songwriting.”}, {“question”: “
How did Chris Rea’s health struggles impact his career and music?
“, “answer”: “Chris Rea faced significant health challenges, including pancreatic cancer and a stroke. These battles profoundly influenced his creative process and output. For instance, after a Whipple operation, he retuned his guitar to open C because scar tissue made barre chords difficult. He continued to create music during chemotherapy and even used his art to aid his recovery, such as painting after his stroke. His resilience through these crises cemented his legacy as a dedicated musical storyteller.”}, {“question”: “
What is the story behind ‘Driving Home for Christmas’?
“, “answer”: “‘Driving Home for Christmas’ started as a rough-sketch demo. When Magnet Records heard it, they added sleigh bells, against Rea’s initial wishes, and released it. It initially had modest success but gained significant popularity years later after being featured in a BBC road-safety spot. It then became an accidental, but enduring, Christmas hit, with royalties helping to fund his ongoing chemotherapy treatments.”}, {“question”: “
How did Chris Rea stay connected to his roots and community?
“, “answer”: “Chris Rea remained deeply connected to his roots and community throughout his life. He funded a sound-engineering scholarship for Teesside teenagers, requiring applicants to submit local sounds. He also played requests for patients at the regional cancer ward from his living room, archiving their letters. His music often reflected the industrial landscapes and experiences of the North, and even in his later life, he was often seen in his hometown, like on a bench in Saltburn.”}, {“question”: “
What was Chris Rea’s approach to touring in his later years?
“, “answer”: “In his later years, after various health issues, Chris Rea adopted a more intimate and stripped-back approach to touring. He played railway-adjacent venues with no set list, just two guitars and a drummer. He encouraged fans to spin his vinyl at 31 RPM, believing it allowed the songs to ‘breathe.’ He would often take the last train home after shows, blending in with regular commuters, embodying his grounded nature.”}]
