PA - Chris Rea

I will always be a Boro lad

By Wil Marlow

Chris Rea is no stranger to hospitals. Pottering about his home-cum-studio, he tells of his latest visit, which was for a not very pleasant sounding operation to remove a blockage in one of his sinuses. Despite repeated visits, thanks to a string of health problems, he says he never gets used to going to hospital.

"It's always hard to go back. Just because of all the scenarios that have happened to me. In 1994 I had a big colon operation, and in 2001 I lost my pancreas, duodenum, and gall bladder."

That followed a cancer scare, and it goes on. "You're very much aware of post-operative infection, especially in hospitals now because of the MRSA stuff," explains the Middlesbrough-born musician.

"I'm always on at the doctor, driving him mad. I'll say to him 'I feel something.' He'll say 'Yes, it's called pain.' I'll say 'I've got an abscess,' and he'll say 'No, it's not an abscess,' and I'll say 'Prove to me it's not an abscess.'

"I do give the doctors a hard time. It's my paranoia, but I have a right to be paranoid."

He certainly has. The 54-year-old, who has sold 30 million albums worldwide, has just been back in hospital again. He developed an abscess on his leg following an infection from the insulin injections that he has to administer daily. He became diabetic after nearly dying following the major surgery of 2001.

Chris, who famously wrote The Road To Hell, is now on the road to recovery again but still leads a difficult life.

"It's tough," he says. "I train very hard to keep everything going as much as possible. I do a lot of weight training to keep my muscles the right size.

"I don't want big guy muscles but because the pancreas converts so many things into the whole life blood of your body. When you don't have one, lots of things go missing.

"In order to maintain muscle ratio, I have to do 50 press-ups to your 10, otherwise I'd start wasting away.

"I'm type one diabetic and certain foods can give me the effects of food poisoning very easily. What else? Oh yeah, my circulation's not good. So I train about five times a week. I hate it."

He makes it interesting by playing football games on his own. "I can play ball against a wall and invent a rule that means I have to keep running to keep it up. I can play for an hour."

Chris's health problems do not stop him working, however, much to his family's concern. His wife Joan and daughters, Josephine, 21, and 16-year-old Julia, were not overjoyed when he began work on a mammoth 11 album project which took him a year to complete.

Blue Guitars sees Chris and his regular band of musicians traverse the story of the blues from its origins in west Africa through to modern blues.

It's all original material written by Chris and his cohorts, but he did sample heavily as well as make use of old and modified instruments and electrical equipment.

"This was my first ever guitar," he says, picking up a battered looking instrument, "£28 it was. We used it on all of Blue Guitars.

"We found all these old instruments in silly little shops as well, and we got ourselves some great little amps from the 50s on eBay. One of them was a real pain actually but we managed OK."

Blue Guitars is an epic project but Chris is keen to point out it is no history lesson. He is looking at the blues timeline, and how it has changed over the years, then he is mixing it up to show the connections - like taking a jigsaw and putting it together in a different way while still getting the same picture. He famously does not like listening to his own music but it is obvious he is immensely proud of this.

"It's the first one I've ever taken home. It's different to all the others because there's been nothing in the way of what I wanted to do.

"I'm actually hearing my musical idea whereas, when I used to have executive producers, everything got watered down, shortened, strings added for the wrong reason. There's no compromise on Blue Guitars."

Chris, whose early ambition was to be a journalist, went to St Mary's College in Middlesbrough and was a latecomer to music. He did not pick up a guitar until he was 19 and joined his first group only at 22.

He is the son of Camillo Rea, the Italian immigrant whose family ran Middlesbrough's biggest ice-cream business and he even worked in the old family ice-cream factory at Brambles Farm.
As his career developed, he lived in a flat above Rea's famous Park Bar opposite Albert Park which was beloved of footballers and football fans on their way to Ayresome Park.

His first big success came with the album Whatever Happened To Benny Santini and the magnificently haunting single Fool (If You Think It's Over).

He married Joan, the former Stainsby Girl he immortalised in his song about the pupils of the old Acklam secondary school, and the successes kept rolling out including Driving Home For Christmas which will soon be ringing out from everywhere.

He moved away in 1983 and the family now lives at Cookham just outside Windsor.
Despite the 22 year gap, he still has that distinctive smoke and gravel Teesside accent.

"A lot of people are amazed I haven't lost my accent," he says, "but I don't mind. I'll always be a Boro lad."

A versatile one, too. Blue Guitars is not just a musical project as, for each album, he used his painting skills for the cover, creating a visual representation of each style of blues he experimented with. The paintings are to be shown at an exhibition in London.

"When somebody was doing the engineering technical stuff, or someone was learning a part, I'd be in the kitchen doing the paintings.

"I was working on this project all day every day for a year. The family weren't happy about it. After the illness I'd said I wasn't going to do much, that I wasn't going to chase the company line anymore. I ended up chasing my own line," he laughs.

"I'm on a promise now that I won't do this type of thing again in terms of how I did it. But to me it's not work. My bad moments are when I don't have anything musical to do.

"It's because I genuinely love doing it."

Blue Guitars will be his last release under the name Chris Rea. His tour next year with most dates - including Newcastle City Hall - sold out, will also be a last. Afterwards he will be part of a three-piece called The Fire Flies.

"I don't want to be hindered by my health," he says. "I love touring, it's the best job in the world - if I had a different body.

"My health is hard to forecast and I can't guarantee things aren't going to get any worse. I need to find a different way of working."