2004 album from the acclaimed British singer/guitarist, the follow up to his hugely successful Dancing Down the Stoney Road (2002), Although Rea scored a top 20 hit in the U.S. with 'Fool (If You Think It's Over)' in 1978 and has recorded many critically successful albums, much of his best material remains deleted or unreleased in the U.S. Like many artists of his caliber, he's held in great esteem and remains a top selling artist all over Europe. Because of his huge fan base, he has continued to concentrate on that region instead of trying to break the American market. Fortunately, there are still plenty of American fans who are devoted to the man and his music. Blue Jukebox, released on Rea's own label, features 13 tracks and includes a full color 20 page booklet of song lyrics and artwork.

With the success of the band Incantation and ethnic South American music in 1982-1983, Chris Rea introduced his sixth album, Wired to the Moon, with the track "Bombollini," which was over six minutes of jungle-sounding drums and the haunting sound of pan pipes. The ethnic flavor continued on the second track, "Touché d'Amour," which was reggae in the unashamed style of lovers rock. However, Rea wasn't going to disappoint his fans altogether, small in number though they were in the U.K., having built a career over several albums of soft rock tracks and midtempo ballads with Dire Straits-style guitar breaks, and the rest of the tracks on Wired to the Moon fell easily into this category, especially "Shine, Shine, Shine" and "Holding Out," which were lovely emotive ballads. Meanwhile, "Ace of Hearts," the title track, and the final song, "Winning," were soft rock numbers – almost MOR – crying out for daytime radio play or a top-selling commercial artist to cover them (but neither of these came about). Yet again, the record company released just one single from a Rea album.

Though Chris Rea has been around for nearly 25 years now, it's good to go back to his beginnings as a songwriter and guitarist who carved out a niche for himself with a late-night brand of very British formalist rock & roll that owes as much to J.J. Cale as it does to Dire Straits. But it's the late-night sound that is his trademark and it was in evidence on this, his very first outing. He has help from drummer Dave Mattacks, keyboardist Pete Wingfield, percussionist Ray Cooper, bassist Dave Paton, and a host of other dignitaries.

Chris Rea remained one of the best-kept secrets in the music industry, releasing five albums between 1979 and 1983, none of them reaching even the Top 50 in the charts. All were very well received by both the critics and the public who knew the secret. His secret was a brand of late-night rock that had an element of class, not dissimilar at this stage of his career to the early-'80s Dire Straits albums, but totally out of step, and proudly so, with the music of the time – new romantic, power and synth pop. He opened the album Water Sign with the song "Nothing's Happening by the Sea," which was so far laid back it was almost horizontal, with a harmonica instrumental break, and the album closed with a nod to synth pop on the track "Out of the Darkness." "Love's Strange Ways" was a similarly slow-moving Dire Straits-style number with an acoustic guitar picking out some notes throughout the song. "Let It Loose" had a driving rock beat, as did "I Can Hear Your Heartbeat," the only single taken from Water Sign.

Success continued to elude Chris Rea on his third album, Tennis, on which he began to experiment with slightly longer songs and more free-form jamming, the songs "Every Time I See You Smile," "Stick It," and the title track all being over five minutes long. For Tennis, he enlisted the assistance of Raphael Ravenscroft on saxophone fresh from his crowning moment on the Gerry Rafferty "Baker Street" single and Pete Wingfield on keyboards, among many other musicians to contribute to this album, but Chris Rea himself stamped his personal mark on the album, writing all the songs, providing vocals, guitar, and keyboards, and he even dispensed with the need for an outside producer. Hence the Elton John feel of his Gus Dudgeon-produced previous album, Deltics was gone, aside from on the ballad "Every Time I See You Smile," and it was replaced by a variety of styles including the horn-driven "Forever and Ever," the gospel song "Stick It" that closed the album, and the reggae-tinged, guitar-led instrumental "Friends Across the Water".

Best known for his string of late-'80s MOR blues-pop hit singles, Middlesbrough's biggest musical export Chris Rea has spent the best part of the noughties reinventing himself as a Tom Waits-esque troubadour with a series of ambitious and often gargantuan-sized albums focusing on the vintage slide guitar blues sounds that influenced his hugely successful 30-year career. More up to date than 1994's The Best Of and more extensive than 2005's Heartbeats, Still So Far to Go is the husky-voiced guitarist's first hits collection to place as much emphasis on his later more revered and prolific output as his more familiar and commercial airplay staples. Spanning four decades, the comprehensive two-CD, 34-track compilation features material from his 1978 debut Whatever Happened to Benny Santini? (his biggest U.S. hit, "Fool [If You Think It's Over]") right up to 2005's mammoth 11-disc offering Blue Guitars ("Somewhere Between Highway 61 & 49"), including the 1996 soundtrack La Passione ("When the Grey Skies Turn to Blue") to his self-penned film of the same name.

Liberated from the shackles of major-label demands and the strictures of other people's expectations, Chris Rea has nailed his newly unadulterated colours–the blues, of course–firmly to the mast on the eloquently tranquil jazz of Blue Street, the follow-up to his corner-turning personal exorcism Dancing Down the Stony Road and one of four simultaneous releases on his newly created and independently minded Jazzee Blue label. Unashamedly self-satisfying, as chilled-out as a cool pool on a baking summer's day and almost entirely instrumental (the vocals do finally appear on "Still Going to a Go Go", one of those time-honoured hoarse-throated cogitations on the way life deals the cards) this is another refined offering from a man who just loves the sweet, slow sounds of collectable vintage guitars and whose former role as the archdeacon of the drivetime adult-rock chorus seems strangely distant.

Road Songs for Lovers is the twenty-fourth studio album by British singer-songwriter Chris Rea, released on 29 September 2017. Rea stated there was no initial intention to make a new album, but after a bad medical condition in 2016 he started to write new songs which eventually led to a band regroup, and first album release in six years. The songs were inspired by traveling on the road to London, seeing couples in cars and questioning the "people's love stories inside cars". According to Rea, most of the songs are about a boy-girl relationship in the car. He has stated that his favorite song is "Last Train", the lyrics of which are not about the typical meaning of the last train which goes home, but taking the last train in a desperate situation without knowing anything about its direction. Deluxe 2-Disc Set includes Bonus CD Live At The Montreux Jazz Festival, Saturday, July 5, 2014.

Chris Rea was a rock star with the sort of gravel voice that was ideally suited to singing the blues, or was he a blues star who occasionally lent his talent to performing rock. The Road to Hell & Back was his 28th album in total including five different greatest-hits compilations, but was his first live album. Recorded at various venues during his 2006 tour from Warsaw to Moscow and Plymouth, Oxford and Brighton, all the tracks show a tight, together band, the Fireflies led by Chris Rea, not in the best of health but enjoying performing to appreciative, sometimes too polite audiences, who applaud in all the right places (at the end of each song).

If you thought that Chris Rea's reasonably priced 11 CD boxset called Blue Guitars, featuring over 130 songs, was a bit too much to take in at one time, then this two CD distillation might be more your style. Here, the best 22 tracks from the box are compiled on two CDs for your sampling pleasure. Includes 'Where the Blues Come From', 'The Soul of My Father's Shadow', 'Lucky Day', 'Who Killed Love' and more.

After seven albums, Chris Rea was finally beginning to get the hang of what makes a commercial success. He had not changed his style throughout the 1980s, but now it was 1985 and the synth pop sounds and new romantics were both long gone – and in their place were stadium-filling anthemic rock or power ballads. Shamrock Diaries was a mix of soft ballads like "Chisel Hill" and "One Golden Rule" along with saxophone-led uptempo numbers such as the title track and the feel-good song of the summer, "All Summer Long," which would have made an ideal single had Magnet decided to release it. Shamrock Diaries was written very much with family in mind, particularly considering the two singles released: "Stainsby Girls" was a tribute to his wife, Joan, who had attended Stainsby Secondary Modern School; and "Josephine" was written for his eldest daughter.

~ All Music