Top 50 Chris Rea Quotes

I actually, truly do love my family. It’s not a public relations exercise.

I never had a desire to be famous.

The first time I arrived in Hollywood for the Grammy Awards, I thought I’d bump into people who mattered, such as Ry Cooder or Randy Newman. I was disappointed to see the people I’d always thought of as pop stars. They would charge around the stage rather than enjoy the music.

You can’t have F1 without Ferrari – you just can’t have it. It’s part of the theme that is the red car, and a lot of it is to do with the colour.

The record companies didn’t want ‘Stony Road,’ and it ended up being a gold album. They didn’t want ‘Blue Guitars,’ and we did 165,000 books.

You do some crazy things when you’re young.

My father used to control the wholesale of many ice-cream items in Middlesbrough. He was central distributor for most of the region.

The Italian side of my family were gypsies, and we are little hard so-and-sos.

I love being on tour. That’s the best job in the world, if only I had a different body.

Touring is easy. My wife will be with me a lot of the time. We get spoilt rotten, and all I have to do is go on stage in wonderful places and play music.

None of my heroes were big rock stars, and I thought, ‘This isn’t how it’s meant to be.’ It wasn’t about making music so much as selling it.

Music is a saviour for me.

I read an article about 60 being the new 30 the other week, and I think it’s very true. Our generation has not done what previous generations did and just got old and sat in a corner.

‘Fool If You Think It’s Over’ is still the only song I’ve ever not played guitar on, but it just so happened to be my first single, and it just so happened to be a massive hit. It was in the U.S. Top 10 for seven weeks.

I’ve had nine major operations in ten years. A lot of it is to do with something called retroperitoneal fibrosis, where the internal tissues attack each other.

I played a gig at the Montreax Jazz Festival once – and on a song called ‘It’s All Gone,’ I had to do free-form slide solo. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done – because I wasn’t thinking about it.

The operation left me very emotional. I cry a lot anyway. I’ve always been the type to feel hurt easily, but now I hit rock bottom.

I’m lucky to be alive. I’m one of only 40 people who have survived the surgery I had, and when you’ve been that close to dying, you re-evaluate what’s really important to you – and it’s nothing to do with fame and money.

I live halfway between London and the airport, which means I can operate my European career and get home every night. It costs a lot of money, but it’s worth it.

When ‘The Road To Hell’ happened, I didn’t know what I was doing. Your diary fills up, and you have no objectivity. At home, you’re trying your best to fit in. Sometimes I’d race from Heathrow to find myself sitting in a village hall watching my kids. It felt really weird. I didn’t enjoy it.

I’ve given up my Ferrari – the idea of going through my village in a 488… You can’t drive them on English roads.

I will be happy if I am 60 because I was not supposed to be 60.

I have found out who are my real friends, thanks to the illness and hospitals.

Back in 1997, I got to race a Ferrari at the famous Monza circuit in Italy – a dream come true.

I bought a Hofner guitar and amplifier for 32 guineas, then spent ages trying to make a bottleneck. At that point, I was meant to be developing my father’s ice-cream cafe into a global concern, but I spent all my time in the stockroom playing slide guitar.

Nothing was ever clean enough for my father. You could never clean as good as he could; you could never clean as fast and as thorough as he could.

Once I faced the fact I was going to deal with illness for the rest of my life, I got on with what I really wanted to do.

I’d never intended to write a Christmas hit – I was a serious musician!

My heroes were gospel blues players like Blind Willie Johnson, Charley Patton, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, not whoever was number one.

I am in that unique little club where I went into music because I love music, not because I wanted to be rich and famous.

My family is the No. 1 priority. Next is the motor-racing season.

I feel I’ve had three careers in one, really. There was the ‘Benny Santini’ stuff; that came with a general sense of, ‘Who the hell is he?’ And then there was ‘The Road To Hell’ stuff, and now there’s the blues stuff.

That is the music that I have always wanted to play: real, genuine guitar music.

I think all the business stuff – the promotion, the hype, the high-power lunches, and the permanently injected smiles – is boring.

I spend as much time as I can in my garden, and if I’m not writing songs or gardening, I’m painting.

Five times a week, I do two hours running and gym work. That’s to help with things like blood circulation. Also, it is good to be in shape in case I need to go into hospital again.

I had to put me foot down with the first record company. It was about 1975, when singers were being given names like Gary Glitter and Alvin Stardust, so they wanted to call me Benny Santini just because me dad’s an Irish-Italian with an ice-cream business!

In a funny way, the illness spurred me on. I thought to myself, ‘I’ve got to get through this operation to make a blues album.’

Eric Clapton’s scales – when he comes off a high note and it’s time for a refrain or a little bit of a rest, he peals off scales going downwards that are so good it’s unbelievable.

Rock n’ roll was my art school. For many people from working-class backgrounds, rock wasn’t a chosen thing, it was the only thing: the only avenue of creativity available for them.

Dad was a distant figure, autonomous, a cross between the Pope and Mussolini. He was very Italian, as were all of my uncles, although they were second generation.

It’s impossible for a couple to bring up two children without having lots and lots of arguments.

When I was young, I wanted, most of all, to be a writer of films and film music. But Middlesbrough in 1968 wasn’t the place to be if you wanted to do movie scores.

I do have this big weakness: I over-cooperate with people. People say it’s because I’m Irish-Italian from Middlesbrough, and me dad was always like that, y’know – ‘Get the job done.’

To say that losing your pancreas is a sad thing is not an overstatement. They had to take my pancreas away, my duodenum, and it’s damaged for ever.

I remember my first day at grammar school, being the only person who was me. Everybody else was like everybody else, and there I was, tanned, in a freezing cold playground in the middle of Middlesbrough, wondering what on earth I was doing there.

I think I’ve lost that ability to slow things down – that ability drivers have to calculate what’s coming by you at tremendous speed. I used to have it.

‘Course, ‘Santini’ bombed in England, y’know. It came out at the height of the New Wave, which couldn’t have been a worse time for a solo singer trying to sell rock melodies.

It’s bleak behind the Iron Curtain, although they do have the strongest vodka I’ve ever had in my life.

My father’s family were Italian ice cream men, and the knowledge was passed on, so I ran an ice cream van while I was dating my wife.