Chris Rea Stony

Chris Rea was a rock star with the sort of gravel voice that was ideally suited to singing the blues, or was he a blues star who occasionally lent his talent to performing rock. The Road to Hell & Back was his 28th album in total including five different greatest-hits compilations, but was his first live album. Recorded at various venues during his 2006 tour from Warsaw to Moscow and Plymouth, Oxford and Brighton, all the tracks show a tight, together band, the Fireflies led by Chris Rea, not in the best of health but enjoying performing to appreciative, sometimes too polite audiences, who applaud in all the right places (at the end of each song).

Liberated from the shackles of major-label demands and the strictures of other people's expectations, Chris Rea has nailed his newly unadulterated colours–the blues, of course–firmly to the mast on the eloquently tranquil jazz of Blue Street, the follow-up to his corner-turning personal exorcism Dancing Down the Stony Road and one of four simultaneous releases on his newly created and independently minded Jazzee Blue label. Unashamedly self-satisfying, as chilled-out as a cool pool on a baking summer's day and almost entirely instrumental (the vocals do finally appear on "Still Going to a Go Go", one of those time-honoured hoarse-throated cogitations on the way life deals the cards) this is another refined offering from a man who just loves the sweet, slow sounds of collectable vintage guitars and whose former role as the archdeacon of the drivetime adult-rock chorus seems strangely distant.

The Blue Jukebox is the twentieth studio album by British singer-songwriter Chris Rea, released in 2004 by his independent record label Jazzee Blue. The cover artwork is inspired by Edward Hopper's Nighthawks painting. Compared to the Dancing Down the Stony Road (2002) has a smoother and jazzier take on the blues. It is Rea's fourth studio album released since the founding of his independent record label Jazzee Blue in 2002 and release of Dancing Down the Stony Road, with which changed his music style from rock to blues oriented after his life-saving medic operation in the early 2000s. It was released with cardboard packaging, matt paper, reproduction of illustrations, and 20-page booklet.

Without a doubt, Chris Rea is one of the most important and influential blues and rock musicians of the last 40 years. A freethinking all-rounder with a career spanning more than 30 million records sold, Chris Rea has been at times much of an artist and painter, classical composer, filmmaker and car fanatic, but always uncompromising himself.