Fittingly enough from the perspective of someone whose biggest hit was a Christmas song, Chris Rea died at the end of December, clocking off at the ripe old age of 74, and thus not quite achieving the life expectancy of the average British male (which is 79, though he did dramatically exceed the life expectancy of someone born in Middlesbrough, which at around 38 has remained unchanged since the industrial revolution). But speaking of this benighted corner of what was once an empire on which the sun never set, Chris is now officially the first of the Rea-Knopfler-Sting North East Unholy Trinity to pop his clogs, perhaps because he didn’t take up Tantric Yoga later in life, but instead developed stomach cancer and withdrew from the public eye.
I leave it to the reader to decide which of those two trajectories could be considered less rock’n’roll, but anyways, of the aforementioned Tyne-Teeside guitar mafia, only Knopfler remained true to his soft rock roots (i.e. never evolved or experimented whatsoever in over half a century of making music). By contrast, Gordon Sumner famously transitioned from objectionable mock-reggae moron with cringey “observational lyrics” to New Age MOR-peddling spiritualist charlatan rambling on about how “fragile” the human experience is, whereas Chris signally absconded from mainstream success and limp wristed radio rock, electing instead to play endless blues covers in front of 12 middle-aged guitar perverts in Central European nightclubs. Maybe that helped him feel better in his twilight years, but for we the living, his legacy will forever be defined by albums like this one; 1989’s The Road to Hell, which marked the height of his commercial success, and even saw him crack the upper echelons of the Billboard Top 100 – a flirtation with superstardom that he never capitalised on because he refused to tour the US, god love him.
Musically, in fact, there’s not too much going on here – it’s the kind of unremarkable, post-Brothers in Arms, late-80s guitar treacle that yer dad would happily have put in his Mondeo’s CD player while driving up and down the M6 in 1993. Glossy reverb, politely gated drums, studiedly economical sliding guitar – it’s perfectly listenable, but little more than a very competent rendering of an all too familiar genre. The first half is great – the moody moral outrage of “You Must Be Evil”, the languid escapism of “Texas”, the elongated prog-like structure of “Looking For a Rainbow” – but the second half is a bit limp, aside from the spiky and cynical “That’s What They Always Say.” This is MOR soft rock at its absolute best, but MOR soft rock it remains, and none of these songs would be out of place on one of those compilation CDs that they used to sell at petrol stations next to the high visibility vests and porn magazines.
Only the title track is a real killer, a cinematic slice of – in fact, piano-driven – pop rock. Ostensibly it’s about being stuck in traffic but, underneath the hood, it comprises a searing critique of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. Far from being the “upwardly mobile freeway” of the neoliberal imagination, by the end of the 80s, Thatcherism had transformed broad swathes of the North into post-industrial hellscapes, in which “the perverted fear of violence haunts the smile on every face”, and where bodies of water “boil with every poison you can think of.” It’s quite a feat to convert such bitter socio-political observations into an end times-worthy transatlantic radio hit, but Chris pulled it off, and most impressively of all, he managed to hawk an assortment of Dire Straits B-sides off the back of it.
Either way, the gravelly voiced Old Testament prophesying of “The Road to Hell” points to the fact that Chris very much knew what he was talking about, that he was the real deal. The son of Irish and Italian Catholic immigrants seemingly fated to wait tables in a Middlesbrough cafe, Chris Rea was heir to the kind of proletarian authenticity that the luminaries of Britpop spent most of their careers mortifyingly endeavoring to counterfeit. I like his music, I’m not blown away by it, but a couple of his songs will live forever, none more so than “The Road to Hell”, when he futilely invited an indifferent world to take a good look at what had gone down in the north of England under the insidious rubric of “managed decline.”
Rating: * * *
Standout track: “The Road to Hell (Part 2)”