Rock and blues singer Chris Rea spent countless hours on the road, and his love of cars and driving became the inspiration for many of his songs.
He recorded 25 solo albums, two of which reached number one in the UK album charts. His characteristic, husky, harsh voice and distinctive slide guitar playing are immortalised in songs such as Road to Hell, Auberge, On the Beach and Driving Home for Christmas, writes the BBC, reports Gazeta Express.
Christopher Anton Rea was born in Middlesbrough, northeast England, in 1951, to an Italian father and an Irish mother, one of seven children. The family was known in the area for the Camillo's ice cream factory and family cafes, owned by his father, Camillo Rea.
Chris worked in the family's coffee shops as a teenager and took his driving test in one of his father's ice cream vans. When he was asked to make an emergency stop, the examiner fell off the box he was sitting on and injured his leg.
Rea said: "I had to take him to the hospital, but he passed my exam anyway."
He was still working for his father when he bought his first guitar, a 1961 Hofner V3, in his early twenties.
Rea said that at the time he was destined to develop "my father's ice cream business into a global business, but I spent all my time in the warehouse playing slide guitar."
He played with local bands like The Elastic Band and Magdalene, but it was the band The Beautiful Losers that put Rea in the spotlight, subsequently securing him a solo recording contract with Magnet Records.
His first studio album was Whatever Happened to Benny Santini?, released in 1978.
The lead single, Fool (If You Think It's Over), became a major success in the US, reaching number one on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart and earning him a Grammy Award nomination for Best New Artist.
Michael Levey, co-founder of Magnet Records, remembers him as "more of a deep and introspective poet than a natural pop performer."
One of Rea's childhood dreams had been to write and compose music for films.
He achieved both with his film La Passione in 1996. Rea also wrote the music and the main song for the film Soft Top Hard Shoulder and starred as an actor in the comedy Parting Shots in 1999.
Rea was building a reputation for his slide guitar playing when the record company insisted on releasing Driving Home for Christmas in 1986.
He said: "At that moment I didn't need a Christmas song following me around. I did everything I could to keep them from releasing that record. Luckily, they did!"
The inspiration for the song dates back to a difficult year for him personally.
In 1978, Rea's record contract had ended and he had separated from his manager.
The record company refused to pay for a train ticket to travel from London to his home in Middlesbrough, so his wife drove from there to pick him up in her old Austin Mini.
On the way back, it started to snow and they were constantly stuck in traffic. Rea said: “I looked at the other drivers and they all looked so miserable. As a joke, I started singing: ‘We're driving home for Christmas…’ and every time the streetlights came on inside the car, I started writing the lyrics.”
"It's one of those moments that happens to singers – sometimes you can spend years writing. I wrote this song in five to ten minutes. When you have a successful song, you don't know you thought about it – it just comes out on its own."
He didn't perform the song live until December 2014, after his team repeatedly urged him to. He used 12 devices to create the artificial snow and activated them during the song.
"We covered the chairs in the hall with about a metre of artificial snow and the bar asked me for £12,000 to clean it."
The heavy traffic at the junction between the M4 and M25 was also the inspiration for the song Road to Hell.
Rea's musical journey was temporarily halted when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at the age of 33.
He underwent a procedure that resulted in the removal of part of his pancreas, duodenum, gallbladder and part of his liver. He was also a type 1 diabetic and had kidney problems.
Health problems made him reconsider his career – he never toured America, despite his popularity.
"I was never a rock or pop star, and all these illnesses gave me the opportunity to do what I had always wanted with music," he said.
In 1997, this included recording the song Let's Dance with his good friend, Bob Mortimer, for Middlesbrough Football Club's FA Cup final.
Rea happily admitted that he was addicted to cars, and his trips in them helped inspire some of his songs.
He owned and raced various antique cars, including a 1957 Morris Minor 1000 police car.
He was friends with Eddie Jordan, the owner of the Jordan Formula 1 team.
"I had the whole uniform. He put me in charge of the tire warmer for the right rear wheel of Eddie Irvine's car."
In 2016 he suffered a stroke, but still recovered enough to record and tour his 24th album: Road Songs for Lovers.
Rea said he spent a lot of time on the road traveling to London.
"I see couples in cars – are they married, co-workers, having an extramarital affair?" he said to himself.
The musician liked to write about the simple things in life: "You get song ideas and you're actually on a road – the road always becomes a metaphor for where we're going in life," he once said.
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