Holiday classic was written on road home
‘Driving Home for Christmas’ nearly Chris Rea’s swan song
There are road songs and then there are Christmas songs.
“Driving Home for Christmas” is the quintessential holiday season road song.
“I’m driving home for Christmas,” sings Chris Rea. “It’s gonna take some time, but I’ll get there.”
It’s a Yuletide tune heard over car radios, home stereos, headphones and in shopping malls all over the world.
Having appeared on countless seasonal music compilations in the past three decades, it’s become a popular Christmas homecoming song, conjuring memories for listeners.
But it was almost the British singersongwriter’s swan song, as the tune was conceived at a time when Rea was on the verge of being dropped by his record company.
And that’s why its origin is as enchanting as the festive season it captures so well.
The story begins in 1978 when Rea was heading home for Christmas with his wife, Joan. They were driving from Abbey Road Studios in London to their Middlesbrough home, about 350 kilometres north.
His career was in a slump as his recently released album hadn’t fared well on the U.K. pop charts, and he was seriously contemplating getting out of the music business and into running a restaurant.
Traffic leaving the city was bumper to bumper, it was snowing and he was thinking about a bouncy seasonal melody that had come to him in the studio sessions.
“There was a little tune in my head that just felt Christmasy,” he recalled in a 2009 BBC interview. “I wound the window down at the lights and wished this person (in the car next to their Austin Mini) a happy Christmas.”
“I take look at the driver next to me,” as the song goes. “He’s just the same.”
Rea said he “scribbled the lyrics down” on a piece of paper as he and his wife continued on their way home, finally arriving early the next morning.
“What I always remember,” Rea said. “We opened the door of the house we were just about to lose the mortgage on, and the snow fell into the hall and it didn’t melt — it was that cold — and there was one letter on the floor.”
Remarkably, it contained a cheque for publishing royalties for his song “Fool If You Think It’s Over,” which turned out to be a smash hit in the U.S., hitting #12 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
The single that originally failed to chart at home in the U.K. climbed to #1 on Billboard’s adult contemporary chart and it was soon nominated for a Song of the Year Grammy.
“It was like a Christmas story,” Rea said in the interview.
Although Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are” took the prize, Rea’s career was revitalized and he’s been at it ever since with 23 studio albums, numerous compilations, 72 singles, including 33 that were hits in Britain and across Europe, such as “Josephine,” “On the Beach,” and “The Road to Hell.”
But it wasn’t until 1983 that Rea went back to Abbey Road Studios to record his now famous “car version of a carol,” as he put it. The record came out the following year.
Despite suffering a serious health setback in the 1990s, Rea survived pancreatic cancer, and in 2009 “Driving Home for Christmas” was re-released along with a holiday music video, the proceeds of which were donated to Shelter, an organization that helps the homeless.
The song has become a musical holiday staple around the globe and it’s been covered by a variety of artists over the years.
In 2014, a video produced by U.K. animator Neil Whitman featured a polar bear driving home to the North Pole for Christmas to be with family and friends, as the song plays on the car radio.
“Oh, I can’t wait to see those faces. I’m driving home for Christmas, yeah.”