One of my favourite modern Christmas songs is Driving Home For Christmas by Chris Rea.
This is the story of how he came to write it (info from the Guardian website)
Chris Rea, singer-songwriter
The story of Driving Home for Christmas is like a classic festive story. It was 1978, coming up to Christmas. It was all over for me: I was just about out of my record contract, and my manager had just told me he was leaving me. I just needed to get home to Middlesbrough from London, but the record company wouldn’t pay for a rail ticket, and I was banned from driving.
You do some crazy things when you’re young. My wife got in our old Austin Mini, drove all the way down from Middlesbrough to Abbey Road studios to pick me up, and we set off back straight away. Then it started snowing. We had £220 and I was fiddling with it all the way home. We kept getting stuck in traffic and 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.
We eventually got home at 3am. It was so cold inside the house that the snow tumbled on to the doormat and didn’t melt. There was one letter – from PRS America. My song Fool (If You Think It’s Over) had been a hit in the US, so there was a cheque for £15,000. We went from being down to our last £220 to being able to buy a house. The song went in my old tin full of unfinished stuff.
Some years later, my career had turned around and [keyboard player] Max Middleton and I were testing two new pianos. We started joking around, playing this Count Basie-type thing. I pretended I was Nat King Cole. Someone said: “That’s a great tune, that. You should get it down.” I went back to my tin, and the words to Driving Home for Christmas fitted perfectly.
I’d never intended to write a Christmas hit – I was a serious musician! So initially, the song came out on a B-side. Then a DJ flipped it over and started playing it, so Max suggested we re-record it and add some strings. Max played the distinctive jazzy intro, we did a classic 1950s Christmas carol-type arrangement, and loved it. At first, it was another radio hit – but then it started re-entering the Top 40 every year.
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I love the idea of a musician having a tin of un-finished work – like a crafter with unfinished objects and works-in-progress and I reckon he’s done quite well out of this piece since 1988!
