British musician Chris Rea dies at 74 | Culture | EUROtoday

The British musician Chris Rea, who signed hits like It’s all gone, Driving Home for Christmas, Josephine, On the Beach o The Road to Hell, He has died on the age of 74, in accordance with a spokesperson for his household. “He passed away peacefully in hospital after a brief illness,” the assertion mentioned. Rea fused blues, pop, soul and delicate rock on 25 studio albums. He offered greater than 30 million albums and had a number of hits in Spain within the Eighties. His music loved a style for melody, good preparations and deep voice. It was excellent for taking part in on radio stations for grownup audiences.

Chris Rea was born in Middlesbrough (Cleveland), in 1951, right into a household of Italian origin that lived from an ice cream parlor. Young Rea labored there, saving to purchase an excellent electrical guitar, one thing he bought on the age of 19. Shortly after, he joined Magdalene, David Coverdale’s former group, who since 1973 was the vocalist of Deep Purple after which Whitesnake. Magdalene recorded a novel single in 1974, earlier than renaming themselves The Beautiful Losers, a nod to Leonard Cohen’s novel, which the next yr have been acknowledged as “best new band” by Melody Maker. They didn’t profit from that point out: the emergence of punk rock It revolutionized the foundations of the sport on the British scene and erased him from the map.

His first success got here within the United States, the place his 1978 tune, Fool (If You Think It’s Over), It peaked at quantity 12 and earned him a Grammy nomination for finest new artist. “There are people around me who push me to become a momentary star due to the acceptance of my latest works. I try to reject this pressure and I would like to be like musicians like Eric Clapton or Mark Knopfler, who keep their music above all else,” he mentioned in an interview with EL PAÍS.

The late Eighties have been his most commercially profitable interval: lastly accepted regardless of usually putting himself outdoors of mainstream pop traits, Dancing With Strangers, In 1987, he started a streak of six albums among the many high 10 within the United Kingdom, two of them reaching number one. In the nineties and particularly within the 2000s, his success regularly decreased.

In 2016 he suffered a stroke and in 2017 he collapsed on stage throughout a live performance in Oxford. Rea had been married to his companion, Joan, for many years. The couple has two daughters: Josephine and Julia.