Chris+rea

Chris Rea's voice is like the smoke off a prairie fire or the sparks and flame from a flint and steel. Coupled with his robust, tasteful songwriting, the effect is to pull the listener into a song or album, grabbing at the brain – not just the ears. Auberge is the follow-up to Road to Hell, an ambitious, dark-toned album that found European and critical success…

Though Chris Rea has been around for nearly 25 years now, it's good to go back to his beginnings as a songwriter and guitarist who carved out a niche for himself with a late-night brand of very British formalist rock & roll that owes as much to J.J. Cale as it does to Dire Straits. But it's the late-night sound that is his trademark and it was in evidence on this, his very first outing. He has help from drummer Dave Mattacks, keyboardist Pete Wingfield, percussionist Ray Cooper, bassist Dave Paton, and a host of other dignitaries.

Though Chris Rea has been around for nearly 25 years now, it's good to go back to his beginnings as a songwriter and guitarist who carved out a niche for himself with a late-night brand of very British formalist rock & roll that owes as much to J.J. Cale as it does to Dire Straits. But it's the late-night sound that is his trademark and it was in evidence on this, his very first outing. He has help from drummer Dave Mattacks, keyboardist Pete Wingfield, percussionist Ray Cooper, bassist Dave Paton, and a host of other dignitaries. What separates Rea, and did from the very beginning, is his belief in having his songs finished by the time they were pressed and out the door.

All of the highlights from guitarist/songwriter Chris Rea's moody late-'80s and early-'90s records are collected on The Best of Chris Rea. For neophytes and casual fans, this a perfect introduction, though more serious listeners will find plenty to treasure on his original albums.

The Very Best of Chris Rea is the third compilation album by British singer-songwriter Chris Rea, released in 2001. The last track "Saudade" was originally written and recorded in 1994 as a tribute to the formula 1 racing driver Ayrton Senna who died in a crash at Imola on 1 May that year. The word Saudade in Portuguese language roughly means the feeling, emotions and euphoria of a certain moment in time. It reached #69 position in UK album charts, and was certified Gold in 2004.

With a career spanning over 40 years and over 30 million album sales, Chris Rea’s distinctive husky-gravel vocal and incredible body of work has seen him become one of the most loved solo artists the UK have ever produced. Each set of reissues comes with the original album fully remastered alongside a second disc of live performances, b-sides and previously unreleased versions of tracks from the accompanying album.

Dancing with Strangers is the ninth studio album by Chris Rea, released in 1987. It became Rea's first major success in UK, peaking at #2, behind Michael Jackson's Bad, and spent 46 weeks in the charts, achieving Platinum accreditation…

Best known for his string of late-'80s MOR blues-pop hit singles, Middlesbrough's biggest musical export Chris Rea has spent the best part of the noughties reinventing himself as a Tom Waits-esque troubadour with a series of ambitious and often gargantuan-sized albums focusing on the vintage slide guitar blues sounds that influenced his hugely successful 30-year career. More up to date than 1994's The Best Of and more extensive than 2005's Heartbeats, Still So Far to Go is the husky-voiced guitarist's first hits collection to place as much emphasis on his later more revered and prolific output as his more familiar and commercial airplay staples. Spanning four decades, the comprehensive two-CD, 34-track compilation features material from his 1978 debut Whatever Happened to Benny Santini? (his biggest U.S. hit, "Fool [If You Think It's Over]") right up to 2005's mammoth 11-disc offering Blue Guitars ("Somewhere Between Highway 61 & 49"), including the 1996 soundtrack La Passione ("When the Grey Skies Turn to Blue") to his self-penned film of the same name.

Though he had already cut a single, "So Much Love," for Magnet Records in 1975, this was Chris Rea's first full-length album. While "So Much Love" had basically disappeared quickly upon its release, the song "Fool (If You Think It's Over)" from Whatever Happened to Benny Santini? became his largest hit, especially in the U.S., where it was nominated for a Grammy (though it didn't win)…