Chris Rea—perhaps best known for his holiday classic, “Driving Home for Christmas”—passed away on Monday, December 24, at age 74, his family confirmed.
“It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Chris, who died peacefully earlier today following a short illness,” the family shared via Instagram. “Chris’s music has created the soundtrack to many lives, and his legacy will live on through the songs he leaves behind.”
Chris Rea Had a Storied Career
Chris Rea was born in March 1951 in Middlesbrough. He attended the local St Mary’s College before buying his first guitar, he told Music Radar in 2016.
“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,” he previously explained, according to The Independent. 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. But it wasn’t hard to leave in the Seventies depression. Lots of my friends left to be offshore welders.”
In 1973, Rea joined a local band called Magdalene—which previously included legend David Coverdale before he left to join Deep Purple. He would later receive a solo record deal with Magnet Records.
His debut album, “Whatever Happened to Benny Santini?”, debuted at number 49 on the Billboard Hot 200. His hit single, “Fool (If You Think It’s Over),” peaked at No. 12 on the U.S. charts, and helped land him a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist in 1978.
Rea is perhaps best known for such songs as, “I Can Hear Your Heartbeat”, “Josephine”, “On the Beach”, “Driving Home for Christmas”, “Tell Me There’s a Heaven”, and “Julia”.
“I only took up singing because the singer in the band I was in didn’t turn up,” he admitted. “I’d been the guy writing the songs, then everyone heard this voice and that became it.”
Chris Rea Had Many Health Issues
At just 50 years old, Rea was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
“It just goes to show that money and success don’t mean anything,” the musician said after Apple founder Steve Jobs lost his battle with the disease. “They used to call it cancer, and I knew very little about it. “Now they give your condition a name, and mine has only just been identified.”
He added, “For the record, it’s IgG-4 and when you have it your immune system attacks your own organs. “It becomes a mass and that’s why they call it cancer.”
According to the singer, he underwent his first operation to remove the tumor in 2001, and in the decades that followed the cancer returned multiple times.
“It can always come back,” he said. “The operation was 16 hours. You just don’t know how difficult that it is trying to live without your pancreas, and my cancer has come back three times, once in my liver and twice in my kidney.”
Rea’s cause of death remains unclear.
