In December 1978, Chris Rea felt “it was all up for me”. He’d released his debut album — Whatever Happened to Benny Santini? — that summer but he wasn’t happy with the mix. He was being dropped by his manager and his recording contract was up. He’d been banned from driving and his record company wouldn’t pay for a train ticket to get him home to Middlesbrough.
So his wife, Joan, drove down the M1 in the couple’s beaten-up old Mini to collect him (and their last remaining £220 in cash) from Abbey Road Studios and take him home for Christmas. On the way back it started snowing. They got stuck outside Nottingham, waiting for a snowplough to clear drifts from the road.
“We kept getting stuck in traffic,” Rea told The Guardian in 2016. “I’d look across at the other drivers, who all looked so miserable. Jokingly, I started singing: ‘We’re driving home for Christmas…’ Then, whenever the street lights shone inside the car, I started writing down lyrics.”
After a six-hour journey, the couple made it through their front door at 3am. “It was so cold inside the house that the snow tumbled on to the doormat and didn’t melt,” recalled Rea. There was one letter on the mat from a US performing rights organisation. It turned out that his song “Fool (If You Think It’s Over)” had charted across the pond and there was a cheque for £15,000. “We went from being down to our last £220 to being able to buy a house,” he said.
