Chris Rea The Road to Hell

The Road to Hell: Part 2 is the fifteenth studio album by Chris Rea, released in 1999, ten years after the first The Road to Hell. The Japanese edition includes two bonus tracks.

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).

This album, with which the singer reached his commercial peak, reflects Chris Rea's love/hate relationship with the car. The title track is famously inspired by Rea's experiences of the M25, but this is not a simple tract on the evils of the automobile–in 1988, he bought himself a racing car. His vision of hell is the traffic jam that stops you from using all that expensive acceleration. In this sense Chris Rea–the epitome of maturity compared to most in his business–shows himself still very much a rock star. The Road To Hell, despite the melancholy piano riff of the song itself and its Leonard Cohen-ish lyrics, is an optimistic album with a warm, embracing sound. This album is graced with some of Rea's finest creations: the spacey "Daytona", the topicality of "You Must Be Evil" and the catchy "That's What They Always Say". "Texas" is another witty commentary on the need for speed, and like many of the tracks on this disc it has the mellow groove that Rea has made his own.

The Road to Hell is the tenth studio album by English singer-songwriter Chris Rea, released in 1989. It is Rea's most successful studio album, topping the UK Albums Chart for three weeks, and was certified 6x Platinum by BPI until 2004. The second part of the two-part title track, "The Road to Hell (Pt. 2)", is also one of Rea's most famous songs.

The Road to Hell: Part 2 is the fifteenth studio album by Chris Rea, released in 1999, ten years after The Road to Hell. The single released for the album was New Times Square. It reached #54 position in UK album charts, and was certified Silver.

British singer and guitarist Chris Rea has enjoyed a run of popularity in Europe during the late '80s and early '90s after almost a decade of previous recording. Rea started out performing with a local group called Magdalene, taking David Coverdale's place; the band won a national talent contest in 1975 as the Beautiful Losers, but still failed to get a record contract…

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.