Copied (without permission) from Guitarist magazine...
Chris Rea mourns the state of the music business but tells Neville Marten that the guitar is only having its 'Cortina period'...
Chris Rea's a good bloke. He's also a genuine musician, a true lover of the guitar and a man who cares passionately for the defenceless in society. Listen to his track Tell Me There's A Heaven and you won't be surprised that he's donating all the profits from his new Fender Signature 'Pinky' Strat to the NSPCC.
With more albums than he cares to remember under his belt - "I stopped counting after 15" - and steady success throughout a career spanning more than 20 years, you'd think the Middlesbrough slide supremo would be content to sit on laurels well padded by royalty payments. But Chris doesn't really chase the dollar: he'd rather be at home with the family.
"I've never been huge in America because I've never had that person in LA with a sabre and flag," confesses old gravel-voice. "Also, I became so successful in the UK and Europe that I didn't really have the time to go there. When I'd finished three or four months in Europe, I wasn't going to tell my family that I was off to do America for five months.
I made a conscious decision that my family shouldn't have to pay any sort of emotional price - that's sacred to me - so that meant I wasn't going to be a big star in America and therefore wasn't going to be mega rich. I've done very well, but I didn't even see it as an option. I just didn't want to not be with my family. I like them!"
Success-wise, Rea doesn't see himself in the big league, although a glimpse of his stunning house and studio in Berkshire would make those songwriting guitarists in bedsit-land practise that little bit harder. Chris also finds himself in that 'difficult' position of the established artist: he's not straight out of modelling school, he actually plays a musical instrument and dares to write his own songs. So he'll never be flavour of the month. "I do have big trouble being marketed these days," he agrees. "I think they'd have dropped me years ago, except for some strange reason I'm still there in the public perception. And I've got to be one of the very few music-orientated people who are still here after 20 years. I've had just enough record success - I could have one track that does well in one place, but I've never had a hit that's been huge all over Europe."
Not being in the Phil Collins financial league has its benefits "The up side is that you don't get elevated in the media to the extent that people start knocking you," says Chris. "When you get that big, you get knocked just because it's your turn."
Rea's definition of success shows a man who sees his music as a long term career - not a short-term profit exercise for the record company. "I've always said I'd rather be at number 17 in the charts all my life than at number one once. I'd like to think I'd always have a job. Nowadays that alternative isn't available to young musicians; you have to be up there in the pop charts and in the video charts or you don't exist. And the sub-culture of albums doesn't exist any more. My daughter doesn't sit down with an album and listen to it from start to finish. Nobody does. It's just an assorted mess of singles."
This is far from the rantings of an old cynic. Simply the experience of a musician who feels he still has something to offer, but doesn't really know who's going to listen to it. Musically, Rea straddles a line that weaves between blues and CD-generation rock, with the occasional bit of 'Radio Two easy listening'. "Yeah, Radio Two," sighs Chris. "People actually don't like the connotation of the words 'Radio Two'. When artists find themselves being played on Radio Two, it's almost like they've been demoted, which is bollocks. If they'd called it 'Rock Alternative' or something, people would love it."
As a guitarist, Rea's a bit of an oddball in that he plays most things - even regular lead guitar - in open E tuning. "That's just how I started," he shrugs. "The first three-note tune I ever learned was in that tuning and it's just natural to me now. My problem came when I started to play in normal tuning! I can play in normal tuning now, but I'm not as fluent as Albert Lee or Clapton. And I keeping getting the two scales mixed up, especially on stage. There are many nights where I'll get carried away: because I don't look at what I'm playing, I'll have the wrong guitar in my head and I'll suddenly play the wrong notes (laughs)."
Chris confesses to never having learnt the licks or songs of other guitarists: "No, I never learned Beatles songs because I was always travelling down my own road with the slide. I never even learned Robert Johnson. There's never been any turn-on for me to play anyone else's stuff; actually making music is what gets me going."
Chris's first two years of playing were confined to his bedroom, "just making tunes up" on a four-track Portastudio. "I wish I'd kept tapes of those years because there were some really crazy things going on - no-one's given you any rules yet. I'd have two open G guitars playing slide with an E slide in the middle, all on one four-track recorder. I used to experiment all the time with how many guitars I could get on one four-track; building up these weird sounds. Most of them ended up covered in hiss cos of the bouncing: you don't have to worry that about now everything's digital." Rea then bumped into a band in his home town of Middlesbrough, who just happened to be looking for a slide guitarist. Another stroke of luck put him in front of the microphone... "Well, first of all there were no slide guitarists in Middlesbrough, so I got the job," says Chris. "But they also liked the fact that I was writing my own stuff. The singing really was accidental. One night our singer couldn't make a gig and, as I was the songwriter - the only other one who knew the words - I got the job that night. And that night changed everything."
Despite his singing/songwriting/guitar-playing status, Chris never really saw himself as a frontman. "No, my ambition was always to do a Noel Gallagher: to be the bloke who played the guitar in a band and wrote stuff for someone else to sing. The great God In The Sky Of Genuine Music would say the thing is to find a great singer, whereas today record companies just look for someone who'll do, as they have other reasons than music for making a record. So we've lost that culture too."
As a guitarist known for his melodic style, it's not surprising that another form of music he misses is the instrumental. "I don't see why Noel Gallagher shouldn't be able to make a record without any singing on it at all. When I was 17, I'd go round my sister's and listen to stuff and I'd say that one in every three was a guitar or piano instrumental. I've done loads of instrumentals. Actually, I've got a bit of a cult following in Germany from bootlegs of stuff I did for B-sides and bonus tracks. Some of the nicest bits of music I've done are things that the record company hasn't been bothered about."
Before the days of Let's Dance and Road To Hell, Rea was a bit of a cult figure whose albums were plundered by singers looking for hit tunes. One of his earliest successes came when Elkie Brookes covered his song Fool If You Think It's Over. Recent months have seen a different kind of Rea cover version. "There's been a spate of the new type of covering, where people take something I've done and turn it into a dance thing. We've had over ten of them in the last year. It's interesting. I'd like to stick up for that kind of music because it's still inventive and creative. I really love Norman Cook [Fat Boy Slim] and Apollo 440, and I thank them for waking me up!"
Like Jeff Beck and Gary Moore, Chris sees computer music not as a threat to the guitar, but a way of bringing something fresh to the table. "That stuff is no different in its simplicity from some of the records we call classics," he insists. "Listen to Houndog... you don't need a degree in musical philosophy to get it, and that's what rock music should be. Guitarists should take heart and not give up - guys like Eric Clapton shouldn't be saying music is dead. It's no different to Picasso painting something simple, like a nine-year-old might do, even though he's talented enough to paint a landscape that's as good as a photograph.
"Eric actually gave me the idea for 'Road To Hell Part 2' by using the sound of a sampled guitar. I recreated the sound of Robert Johnson in a room and it's on a loop. I even sampled the sound of the river out here to reproduce the hiss! And on another track, Last Open Road I took some blasting guitars, put them in a sequencer and I had a lot of fun doing it. You know, some hip-hop reminds me of the old blues records and actually gives me a shiver. The old bluesers'd just play one bottleneck riff and tell a story over the top, which is exactly what a lot of hip-hop and rap does.
"I know a lot of your readers will get a little bit political about this - you know, it's not real music, it's cheating and all that. But when you open up to it, it's just another way of making music. In the industry now a lot of guys resent live musicians and it's actually becoming difficult to do a live tour, because the crews aren't used to dealing with the problems of live music. They want to know why you haven't got your stuff on hard disk! We'll be going live with the album, we always do, because my audience likes 'live'. We'll be using real musicians, too!"
While happy to use technology for his own musical ends, Rea is concerned at the way computer production is proliferating the music business generally. "What seems to have happened is that, whereas a few years ago individuals were being creative by sampling stuff, now the business has taken it all over and replaced the musicians. The best example is the Latin track on the Spice Girls record. I heard this through my daughters, and the music was as tight as you like - Cuban, Brazilian, somewhere between the two. I played it to some musician friends without telling them who it was and they started listing all the famous percussionists in the world... but it was the Spice Girls! We worked it out that if they'd used real musicians and the technique to record it so perfectly, it would have cost ?340,000! But everyone's using the same bloody computer now, which is a big shame for a lot of players. I've actually heard record company people say that a live session now sounds sub-standard, because it's not as tight as when it's done with computers."
While Chris mourns the present state of music - or more accurately the music business - he reckons the guitar will have its day again. "I call it 'the Cortina period'", he grins. "When the Ford Cortina came out, everyone thought it was an awful car, but now everyone says that they were really special. At the moment the guitar is just having its 'Cortina period'! "What I'm hoping is that, when people hear my record, some young kid might hear the slide guitar and want to know more. We're already approaching that point - my youngest daughter looks at her Dad's music as if it's from some old blues guy anyway! I've done a lot of tracks on this new album where I've used computer drums with real drums to set up old-fashioned, blues-type rhythms - they had their Cortina period ten years ago, but now they're sounding fresh again. You go round the corner after a few years and find that the 'new world' is exactly how you used to love it anyway. So tell Guitarist readers the best thing they can do is sample their favourite lick and play it over and over!"
According to Chris, there's at least as much guitar on 'Road To Hell Part 2' as on any of his previous records. "Well, the opening track I Can't Get Through has three types of guitar on it for a start. It's got Pinky slide, Joe Walsh Les Paul-type slide and James Brown funk guitar, all on one track. In the old days you wouldn't have been allowed to do that. "Some kids don't know what a real guitar sounds like. Some people have heard some real scrunchy guitar on the new record and gone: 'My God, what's that?'"
The guitar is alive and well on Chris's albums, but it's unlikely to be of the 'widdly-whoop' variety. "I was never a fan of widdly-whoop really; that fast stuff didn't have the feel. If you sit there perfecting scales it loses all dynamics - give me an earthy groove every time. It's funny, because all that ended once the Sony PlayStation came out, and the funny thing is my youngest thinks that sort of music comes from a PlayStation game!