He's a bluesman and, true to type, he's suffered. But, back with new album 'The Blue Cafe', CHRIS REA talks about his Godfatheresque youth, near-death experiences, anarchy, and escaping from the Paris police.
Chris Rea lights up his third full-strength Marlboro with the haughty assurance only a man who has recently arm- wrestle The Grim Reaper into submission can muster. He sucks down the tarry fumes with undisguised glee, belching out a lewd, nicotine-stained laugh unheard in this plush West End restaurant since Sid James passed away.
"It's still there," gurgles the 46-year-old guitarist in his salty North Eastern brogue, patting the lower abdomen which attempted violent mutiny against its internal moorings three winters ago. "There are still moments in the day when you get this recurring feeling of fear. It's quite a shock when someone says to you: 'You need a big operation.' It's an even more devastating shock when someone says to you: 'You need another one!' Hurgh hurgh!"
In fact, Rea ultimately required five major operations after being felled by peritonitis, plus various stomach-churning complications, while holidaying in France in late 1994. In hospital for months, he amassed 100 internal stitches, while his weight plummeted from 14 to nine stone.
"So '94 and '95 became this hooded, dark thing," he scowls. "The physical effects of being completely opened up and thrown around down there five times cause a lot of lasting discomfort... and it's fucking horrible! Hurgh hurgh!"
Did life-or-death illness alter Rea's creative outlook?
"That's just starting to happen now. My career took a wild spin. As I got better I wasn't able to go touring, and I had these script ideas lying around, and so we embarked upon La Passione. In hindsight, it would have been wiser to have fully recuperated first."
Ah yes, La Passione. Released to merciless reviews last year, Rea's highly personal movie project was intended to document his lifelong fascination with Ferrari sports cars and their almost religious significance in Italian culture. Alas, the finished film bore little resemblance to his original plan, going down in history as one of the most spectacularly botched vanity cinema projects ever.
"I learnt a lot of lessons, but I'm not really bitter," winces Chris. "I'm annoyed at the experts who appeared then disappeared, leaving me holding the baby. And I'm annoyed with myself for not walking out the day I knew things were going wrong. It probably wins the award for the decade's most savage reviews. Even Showgirls didn't get such personal attacks as La Passione.
"l was sorry they didn't see the humour and the camp. I mean, anyone who flies to Monte Carlo while he's ill and convinces Shirley Bassey to stand on top of a 36-foot working fountain and sing 'Yes I Own A Ferrari'- don't I deserve at least one fucking chocolate bar?"
As a consequence of La Passione and its soundtrack album bombing so badly, Chris is now under heavy instructions from his record company to deliver the commercial goods. Hence 'The Blue Cafe', his new album, which is no-frills Rea with the rough edges methodically removed. Squarely aimed at his pipe-and-slippers heartland, this is Chris as MOR minstrel, not maverick bluesman.
"I've been a naughty boy with La Passione and had my bottom smacked," he mutters darkly. "Now it's just 'Give us what we fucking know..."'
This bottom-smacking entailed the shelving of three albums and the scuppering of The Blue Cafe' in its originally intended form as six half-hour TV plays. But even so, Chris hasn't lost the film bug. He is currently researching a documentary project tracing the links between his slide guitar style and bluesmen across the globe.
He's also working on other movie scripts and starring in Michael Winner's latest comedy, Parting Shots, as a man with a terminal illness who sets out to assassinate anyone who has ever crossed him.
Winner apparently chose Rea because his character, Barry, is a "miserable bastard" who has been "totally shagged by life". Typecasting or what?
IN FACT, life hasn't been that hard on Chris Rea. Unless you consider 20 million sales of 17 albums over a 20-year career, two beloved daughters and three decades of happy marriage to his childhood sweetheart Joan a raw deal. He's certainly come a long way from churning up vats of ice-cream in his father's shop in the sooty terraced streets of Middlesbrough. Captain Cook and Bob Mortimer are the town's other famous sons. Your humble VOX reporter was also born there, on the other side of town from Chris.
"Oh yeah? That was the posh area."
Bastard. Anyway, your correspondent distinctly remembers an ice-cream parlour in the town centre called Rea's...
"That was our dad's, yeah. I used to work at the one near the football ground and the one by the dole office, which were there before the one in the centre. Probably the inspiration for everything I ever did was formed above that shop on rainy Wednesday afternoons. That's where I found the blues."
Rea's father was a second-generation Italian immigrant and "a cross between The Pope and Mussolini". His own father had arrived in England via New York, and earned his first money pretending to punch horses out cold on Redcar beach. But by the time Chris was born, his father controlled the ice-cream monopoly for the
Middlesbrough area. Which almost sounds like, ahem, a Mafia scenario.
"Oh, without a doubt," nods Chris. "That was all receding when I grew up. But when I was under ten, it was very Family: all your cousins came over from Italy, anyone in Italy without a job was brought over and given work. It was The Godfather without guns, it was the romantic side. I think all those boys stepped off once the drugs arrived. It all dissipated when the powerbase became drugs as opposed to ice-cream vans."
The young Chris, however, wasn't keen on becoming the Michael Corleone of cornets. Instead, he studied journalism at Middlesbrough College Of Higher Education. Alas, these were the heady late '60s and Chris kicked against the political orthodoxy of the time. He made enemies by asserting in a debate, at the height of anti-war fervour over Vietnam, that most people would secretly prefer to have their streets patrolled by American tanks rather than Russian ones. But worse was to come.
"I did a long 17-page essay on the war poet Siegfried Sassoon, who I adored. And this stupid left-wing fucking lecturer went to rip it up because I hadn't put the indoctrinated left-wing view of the time - and this was 1968. She went to rip it and I went to stop her. But she fell over one of those stupid waste-paper baskets made by the blind and I went over with her - all I wanted was not to damage these 17 fucking pages! A lecturer came in from the next room and there I am on top of her, the whole room fucking bowling. And that was it. No one ever believed my story."
This tragi-comic incident proved to be a crucial crossroads in Rea's evolution. Obliged to leave the balmy hothouse of academia, he headed for London, taught himself bottleneck guitar and began carving a career in music. But don't get the idea from these comments that Chris is some Tory-voting Thames Valley gentleman rocker. He's equally scathing about the political right too.
"I'm a constructive anarchist," he insists. "I actually don't believe that the answer ever did lie in left and right. They're both fucking outrageously stupid to me."
Any thoughts on Chumbawamba soaking John Prescott at The Brits in protest at New Labour selling out the working class?
"I can agree with that. The Millennium Dome has stunned the fucking life out of me! I can't believe they've gone ahead with it. I actually think it will be a piece of art in the modern sense, a huge 3 -D statement. For political and executive reasons, it had to go ahead - that's the only reason it's there. That's the plaque they should put on it: This was the '90s!' Because it's big, it bought a lot of BMW's and it's fucking empty! Hurgh hurgh!!"
You're not a Blairite, then?
"I'm surprised how un-left wing Tony Blair has turned out to be. But I like him, I think he's honest. He reminds me of me, he's trying to play off art against commerce. But I love people like Clare Short I think she's superb - and I'm a big fan of Ken Livingstone. And that geezer who dug himself into a hole last year, Swampy, he actually made me cry."
Chris Rea: gruffgrizzly bear on the surface, fluffy teddy bear beneath.
REA HAS has never been very flash or fashionable. He spends his money carefully and without extravagance. Even his famous fascination with Ferraris appears to be waning.
"Ferrari was always a dream for me, but I now know why I loved them and I've moved on. I've bought a Volvo. Because if people see me in a Volvo they say: 'Chris, how're you doing?' But if they see me in a Ferrari, they call me a twat.
"I've found ownership of anything that's considered valuable a pain in the fucking arse. If I want a picture on my wall, I paint one -1 get more fun out of it that way. We have two family holidays abroad a year, which I consider an absolute luxury. Now that's being working class again."
Surely the cliched image of working class musicians suddenly becoming rich is that they blow their fortunes immediately?
"Mine came slowly. Without any exaggeration, I was a musician in debt for 15 years. I mean, I walked away from my first opportunity, when 'Fool If You Think It's Over' was a Grammy-nominated Top Ten record. I hated that record so much, I walked!"
Isn't Rea's normal-bloke image something of a contrived act, like Phil Collins?
"I don't think so. You see me in the butcher's, you see me in Tesco, you see me in Waitrose. Sitting in the back of a stretch limo has never appealed to me - that's why I'm not a rock star and never have been. It's not a moral standpoint, I actually just think that being a rock star is a hard discipline that I don't possess. I think Madonna is wonderful, but I don't think we're in the same business."
Chris is resigned to never being trendy, although he still follows modern music.
"I was listening to The Verve album on the way in, actually. There's a bit of slide guitar on it. If it is the young lad in that band, it's great. I like Radiohead. The Manics are great, especially live. And I love hip-hop and rap - the blues has always been rap."
This might sound like your granddad trying to be 'down' with the kids, but there's more to Rea than that. For starters, one of the albums he was obliged to shelve over the last three years was a rap project. Also, much of The Blue Cafe' was written using samples and drum loops after a lesson in cutting-edge computer technology from his 14-year-old daughter Josephine. Chris Rea has officially gone techno.
None of which is quite as bizarre as his brief flirtation with acid house back in 1990, when a funk version of 'Josephine'-a hymn from Rea to his eldest daughter - became massive on the Ibiza club circuit. Chris recalls his unlikely graduation to DJ icon.
"It was 5.30 in the morning, and me and a friend were pissed out of our heads in a Parisian transvestite club," he deadpans in pure Shane MacGowan style. "We'd been chased there by the police because I'd tried to climb the Fountain Of Innocence down near Les Halles. They were playing these Chic 12-inches and during the course of our inebriation we decided that 'Josephine' was a blues record, and there was a lot of blues in those 12-inch bass records. So when I got back to the studio, I just whipped off onto a C90 cassette a Chic-style version of 'Josephine'. And that C90 became the master, the song became a mild hit in France, and then because it was French it was brought back to Britain as a hip record by Paul Oakenfold!"
Have you ever been to a rave?
"I went to one maybe a bit too soon after my illness, because I found the sub-bass a bit painful, hurgh hurgh! I think it goes back to hippies. It's about being happy with a capital fucking H as opposed to being anarchistic... but what does society want? We complain because the kids are fucking violent, then we complain if they all go out and peacefully have a good time."
Ever tried Ecstasy?
"No. I don't particularly feel the need to."
Have drugs played a part in your career, like with most bluesmen?
"Only the usual. Marijuana was always a laugh. With a lot of my friends now, who are middle-aged, it's away of life. I don't see it as a big deal, I never did. The original experience I knew of cocaine wasn't as a recreational drug, it was something to keep you up late while you were driving home after a gig. Over the years I've seen it all come and go. But there's only so many times you can watch it happen before it doesn't mean anything to you."
Chris Rea's best work, like The Road To Hell' or 'On The Beach', are full of longing and regret, dashed faith and desperate escapism. Rea often observes situations voyeuristically- he is, after all, a would-be journalist - but there is almost invariably a yearning, troubled heart to his sublime slide-guitar balladry. So does Chris truly have The Blues inside him?
"I'm absolutely convinced, yeah. It comes from being unhappy and wondering if there's a time and place where the angst and aching feelings you get can be relieved."
You're not just a miserable sod then?
"Hurgh hurgh! My working theory at the moment is that people who play the blues are unhappy with their situation because they imagine something more beautiful. It's a conglomeration of certain attitudes and psyches. It's sensitivity. You don't play the blues if you're not sensitive."
Do the roots of this melancholy lie in Rea's Catholic upbringing? He certainly concedes that religion shaped much of his early lyrical imagery.
"For over 15 hours a week I was steeped in a world where there were flying men with wings, men with beards who commanded the world, stigmata, exorcisms - all of that. When all that happens in someone's brain from the age of three to 14, it's no wonder it shapes you somewhat."
Chris is no longer an orthodox Catholic but remains "optimistically open". Indeed, it was a question of faith which inspired his most tragically beautiful song. Tell Me There's A Heaven', in which a father reassures his daughter that God exists without believing it himself.
"There's a true story behind that," says Chris. "When Josephine was four she was upset by a news report about a South African who'd been necklaced with a burning
tyre. And this was the Six O'Clock News! She was horrified beyond belief. That's why I wrote 'Evil' as well. Because I found out later, from someone in that news team, that it would not have been a news item had they not had the footage. What they did was pornographic! So we told Josie that everything was OK, that the man was now an angel, but I was thinking:
Who's gonna tell me?"
Chris writes many songs from a female perspective. Chiefly because, he explains, he lives in a three-quarters female household.
"I live in this strange world that goes on a spectrum from pre-Raphaelite to Walt Disney. And I love it." Not very laddish, are you Chris?
"No. But the son of an Italian immigrant who sits playing slide guitar above a coffee bar isn't exactly be a lad, is he?"
Surely machismo is paramount in Italian culture? "Yeah, but it's a bit more balanced. Italian men don't run away from the family to watch rugby down the pub. In Italy, there's nothing wrong with liking beautiful things. Imagine if you went up British lads leaving a pub and handed them a lily. Imagine asking them to admire its beautiful curves, its smell, the strange cool space inside it. Just imagine how they'd react! But if we could teach them that, we'd be on the way to getting things back to how they should be..."
Suddenly, Chris snaps out of this poetic reverie. "Oops! There goes another 100,000 record sales! I can just see all those record executives throwing the
CD out the window of their BMWs. 'Chris Rea-what a fucking poof!' Hurgh hurgh hurghhh!!!"
Maybe, but all the better for it. So tell me there's a heaven. And tell me there's a space reserved there for a sewer-mouthed, soft-centred anarchist teddy bear like Chris Rea.