Which is a shame because we think the song this good deserves a music video, and its connection to MINI meant that we wanted to give it one. However, Chris Rea never intended to write a Christmas hit, and so the song was never released as a single, and there was no music video produced for it. But after a few years, and without any marketing campaign, the song slowly became a bigger and bigger hit, re-entering the charts every year. Today it is considered a real holiday staple. It was only ever included as a B-Side on a different single, as nobody thought it would become much more than that.
They would add the familiar jazzy intro and Christmas carol-style arrangement later, and the song that we know today was born. The song would sit on a shelf for years before one day Chris Rea and his band were testing new pianos, when they came upon a tune that fit the lyrics to “Driving Home for Christmas” perfectly. There was a cheque for £15,000 in the letter as well, which saved their Christmas. However, waiting for them was a letter from PRS America that revealed that his song Fool (If You Think It’s Over) had been a hit in the USA. Song writing can really be that spontaneous, although we’d like to think being in a cosy Austin Mini helped.Īfter arriving home, and with only a few hundred pound in their pockets left, the Reas were preparing for a lean Christmas.
STUCK AT HOME FOR CHRISTMAS DRIVERS
Rea began looking at the other drivers and they all looked miserable to him, so he, almost jokingly, started putting down the words that would become his song. On their way back the snow began to fall and they were constantly stuck in traffic.
That’s when his wife Joan came to the rescue, making the 400 km+ drive down to London in their Austin Mini, to bring her husband back home.
Standing outside Abbey Road Studios, he was stranded in London, he couldn’t get back to his home in Middlesbrough, as the record company wouldn’t pay for his train ticket. Chris Rea was still a young and relatively unknown singer-songwriter when in the winter of 1978 he was faced with the prospect of a rather sad Christmas: he was almost out of his record contract and his manager was leaving him. It starts, like the best stories, from a pretty hopeless situation. We thought we’d honour the song and the holiday with a little poem of our own, but the whole story is even more of a festive fairy tale. But what about our inspiration, what about “Driving Home For Christmas”? The classic holiday hit was written in 1978 by Chris Rea, but didn’t become a song, much less a modern classic for almost a decade.
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