The Slides of March: Chris Rea 75

Chris Rea - Josephine

Drilling into March like an oil rig in the rapidly tightening Strait of Hormuz, we've got a milestone birthday post about a songwriter I personally had not really heard until he passed away last Christmas.

I mean, of course I'd heard of him, the name was very familiar. I knew that big song of his, but it took for him to die for me to discover that it was his, because dumbass me thought it was some late-'70s Yacht Rock combo like Ambrosia or Player.

I guess in the final analysis, that song -- he was nominated for the Grammy for Best New Artist for it -- kind of messed him up from the start. He had spent his whole life up to the time Fool (If You Think It's Over) became a hit becoming proficient at slide guitar, only to have people think he was a keyboard guy. A Piano Man in the mold of Elton John or Billy Joel -- who was the 1978 Best New Artist, even though he'd been releasing records since 1971 -- because that's what they saw him doing on TV.

This kind of set him against the record company immediately, compounded by the fact that he hated touring in the typical album-tour-album monotony-cycle of the late 1970s when he debuted.

Then you pile on the inevitable demands they were making of someone who saw himself as a Blues musician paying homage to Elmore James, being shaken down for more Smooth Rock hits with lotsa Fender Rhodes hot tub flourish and sorry, dial back all that slide stuff, will ya?

He was in demand to do giant tours of America, but blew them off to raise a family, a decision he claimed to later regret "for five minutes" every time he saw an expensive race car he wanted to buy.

This was a big part of his story, the idea that he raced cars and dabbled as a professional at it.

He was often ill, with bouts of peritonitis and diabetes throughout his life. He even once suffered a stroke mid-song during a 2016 performance in Oxford, England. This left him compromised for awhile, but he continued to perform. Just not in the US, despite the large sums of cash being dangled.

Allegedly one of comedian David Letterman's all-time favorite songwriters, his music -- to this relative newbie, anyway -- sounds like the Scottish Bruce Springsteen, if you were to dial down the sentimental schmaltz and made all the songs about relationships exclusively, and not the socioeconomic circumstances of the relationship participants. But that's just my subjective idea of it from a short time of exposure, so take what I'm saying with a whole office park full of salt factories, will you?

He also had huge Christmas songs, which were significant hits and are still holiday staples in Europe and Australia. Which makes it even more ironic that he passed away three days before Christmas last December, after what was announced, with the trademark indeterminacy that often accompanies such things, as a short illness.

One of those criminally undersung artists with a small cult of rabidly devoted, ride-or-die fans and supporters, the world seems a bit less without the songcraft and gravel-soaked vocal delivery of Chris Rea.

Rather than my usual fruity approach, where I try to circulate some new ROIO that hasn't been around yet in a given form, this time I decided to work on what surely must be the mother of all Chris Rea bootlegs.

Like I was saying, he was tremendously popular in Australia, so it's fitting his most legendary unissued live performance hails from the mid 1980s, down Sydney way.

Chris Rea

Lyric Theatre

Entertainment Centre

Sydney, Australia

10.3.1987

CD1

01 Nothing's Happening By the Sea

02 Stainsby Girls

03 I Can't Dance to That

04 Windy Town

05 Ace of Hearts

06 Candles

07 Midnight Blue

08 Josephine

09 Fool (If You Think It's Over)

10 On the Beach

11 Loving You Again

CD2

12 Joys of Christmas

13 I'm Gonna Buy a Hat

14 I Can Hear Your Heartbeat

15 Let's Dance

16 I Don't Know What It Is but I Love It

17 Steel River

18 It's All Gone

19 September Blue

Total time: 2:02:52

Chris Rea – vocals, keyboards & guitar

Gary Kemp – keyboards & saxophones

Jerry Donahue – guitar

Kevin Leach – keyboards

Eoghan O'Neill - bass

Martin Ditcham - drums

preFM master of the full concert broadcast over 104.1 2DAY-FM

spectral analysis has music to 19 kHz, confirming a preFM source

edited, denoised & retracked -- with channels slightly rebalanced -- and somewhat remastered by EN, March 2026
833 MB FLAC/direct link

I didn't do all that much to this -- justifiably considered a flawless, definitive performance by most people I read talking about it online -- except rebalance the stereo field ultra-slightly and bring some of the detail to the fore, especially in the highs, with the Legacy Limiter in Audacity.

I'll be back with more milestone birthday bombshells soon, seeing as how this March is, for whatever reason, big for those. But if anyone looking for an introduction to the very underrated Chris Rea -- or anyone already there, and just needing a version of this classic bootleg that now scrapes up to 19 kHz and doesn't lean to one channel -- wants to join me in getting to know his very worthy world of introspective, Blues infused tunes, you've come to the right place today to burn some 75th birthday, memorial Candles!--J.

3.4.1951 - 12.22.2025