Christmas Notes: “Driving home for Christmas”

From the book “Note di Natale” by Davide Pezzi (with a preface by Arturo Stàlteri) published by VoloLibero we are currently publishing some of the 95 songs covered by the author in the 300 pages of the volume; we tried to choose the least “predictable”.

This is a story worthy of a movie, a Christmas movie of course. Of those necessarily with a happy ending. The protagonist is Christopher Anton Rea, known by the name of Chris Rea, father from Frosinone and Irish mother, but born and raised in Middlesbrough, in the north of England. Rea has made twenty-five records, two of which have topped the UK album charts, but it hasn’t always been a bed of roses for him.
Although “Driving Home for Christmas” was published in 1986, its story begins several years earlier, in December 1978.

In June of that year his first album, “Whatever Happened to Benny Santini?” was released, but it turned out to be a flop, and now things are falling apart for him: his recording contract has expired and his manager she said she’s leaving him. He also has to travel home to Middlesbrough from London – almost 400 kilometers – but his driving license is suspended due to alcohol problems, and his record company has no intention of paying for his train fare. The icing on the cake: all his and his wife’s belongings amount to £220… So his wife Joan gets into their old, beat-up car.
Mini and crosses half the country to pick it up. «You do crazy things when you’re young – said the singer – My wife got into our old Austin Mini, drove all the way from Middlesbrough to the Abbey Road studios to pick me up and we went straight back. Then it started snowing…”

Around Nottingham they are stuck in the snow waiting for a snowplow to arrive, and all the way home
begins to take on the contours of an odyssey. «We kept getting stuck in traffic and I looked at the other drivers, who all seemed very unhappy – recalls Rea – Jokingly, I started humming “We’re going home for Christmas…”.» So, to pass the time while the wife is intent on driving, every time the light from the street lamps shines
inside the car Rea writes the phrase of a song.

After a grueling six-hour journey, Chris and his wife walk through the door at three in the morning. “It was so cold in the house that the snow fell on the doormat and didn’t melt,” the singer continued. But then, just like in a Christmas film, a small miracle happens: on the snow-covered doormat there is a letter from an American organization for artists’ rights, equivalent to our Siae: his single “Fool (If You Think It’s Over)”, which went completely unnoticed in England, instead entered the American charts, and inside the envelope there is a check for 15,000 pounds. .

The journey into the snowy hell of that frozen December, and the discouragement that had invaded him, quickly become a memory, and Rea puts the text he wrote not in the proverbial drawer, but in a tin box where he puts all the notes for songs that maybe will never be born. Years pass and in the meantime the musician’s career takes off. One day, we are in 1986, while Rea and the keyboard player of his group, Max Middleton, are trying out some new keyboards, the singer jokingly improvises some chords and a very 1940s melody. The colleague is impressed and tells him: «What a beautiful melody, that. You should write a song about it.” Rea returns home, rummages through her box of unfinished songs and realizes that those words scribbled in the light of the street lamps under the snow, “Driving Home for Christmas”, fit the melody perfectly. However, the musician is very determined to be taken seriously as a rock musician, and has no intention of compromising his credibility with a Christmas song. «I never intended to
write a Christmas hit – he later said – I was a serious musician!”

The song thus ended up being published as the B-side of the single “Hello Friend”, which was released in 1986 as the third single from the album “On the Beach”, but, as often happened, some deejays began to spin the record and also broadcast the back. The keyboardist then suggests making a new recording of the song with a new arrangement in the style of
the Christmas songs of the fifties, adding a jazzy introduction and strings. With the new look “Driving Home for Christmas” was released as a single in November 1988, but upon its release it did not reach the top of the charts, stopping at 53rd position.

However, as with several other Christmas songs, it will begin to reappear regularly in the charts each Christmas reaching number ten in 2021, and was voted twelfth among England’s favorite Christmas songs in a 2012 poll by television channel ITV. In 2009, an original video was made in aid of the Shelter charity.
Of the project, Rea said: “I wanted to do something special this Christmas and what better way than to help keep a roof over people’s heads when they need it most: at Christmas. By partnering with Shelter, we hope we can make a difference.”

Chris Rea never performed the song live until 21 December 2014 at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, when he gave in to the insistence of the entire tour staff. “I said, ‘If I’m going to sing this fucking song, we’re going to do it right!’” he said, so twelve snow cannons are rented, and when the song starts it snows heavily in the theater. In the end there is a meter of artificial snow in the stalls, and the singer is charged £12,000 to clean it all up.

“Driving Home for Christmas” has been covered by numerous artists, demonstrating its now status as a “Christmas classic”, including Tony Hadley and our own Mario Biondi in 2013. In the meantime, obviously Chris Rea has made peace with the Christmas song that he didn’t want to record: «I was terrified that the song could ruin all the credibility I had left, but now we laugh about it. If I ever got stuck on the highway today I would roll down the window and start singing ‘I’m Driving Home for Christmas’ to the people in the cars next door. They love her. It’s like giving them a gift.”