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Despite his knack for slick pop, the principled and passionate Chris Rea never took the easy road

The late musician bristled against his record companies, his producers and fame itself – but that friction ignited both his AOR hits and his raw, spirited take on the blues• Chris Rea, rock and blues singer-songwriter, dies aged 74• Gallery: a life in pictures• Comment: Driving Home for Christmas captures the season’s true spiritFor an artist best-known for a string of slickly commercial adult-oriented rock hits – Josephine, On the Beach, The Road to Hell, the Yuletide perennial Driving Home for Christmas – Chris Rea’s career was a rather more fraught business than you might have expected.He had something of the splendidly grumpy refusenik about him. His debut single, Fool (If You Think It’s Over) was a transatlantic hit, earning him a best new artist Grammy nomination (he lost to Billy Joel, an artist the single had garnered comparisons to), but Rea announced that he “despised” the song: “It’s just not me.” He chafed at his record company’s expectations: his 1978 debut album, Whate...


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