‘Driving home for Christmas’ is my song today.
There are three things that tell me that Christmas has started and is in the air. One is seeing the first lit-up Christmas tree of the year and the second is hearing ‘Silent Night’ being sung at Midnight Mass. The third is being in my car, turning on the radio and hearing my favourite Christmas song across the airwaves, sung by Chris Rea as I drive home.
Each time I hear this seasonal song I think about all the families all around the world who are waiting in pleasurable anticipation for the ‘coming home of a loved one’. I also think of those many thousands of travelers ‘coming home’; most in cheerful expectation of the happy faces waiting there to greet them, but also some who are coming home with a heavy heart to attend the funeral of a loved one who sadly died in their absence. They will also be a few ‘Prodigal Sons’ travelling back home in trepidation. They may have left home many years earlier either in disgrace or with bad feelings between themselves and another family member, and are now apprehensive of the type of welcome they will receive on arrival; especially if their return home is totally unexpected
!
‘Driving home for Christmas’ is a popular Christmas single written and composed by Chris Rea and released in 1988.
The song peaked at Number 53 in the UK Singles Chart in 1988, and re-entered the chart in 2007, peaking at Number 33. It reached a new peak of Number 14 in 2017. Although it had modest charting, the single has a brief chart appearance every year in the Top 40 and is featured among the most popular Top 10 Christmas singles. This song is like a good bottle of wine that tastes better and more familiar yearly.
In an interview for the BBC Radio 4 programme, ‘Today’ in 2009, and ‘The Guardian’ in 2016, Rea said he wrote ‘Driving Home for Christmas’ many years before its first recording. The song was written when Rea needed to get home to Middlesbrough from Abbey Road Studios in London. His wife had come down to drive him home in her Austin Mini to save money because it was cheaper to drive than travel by train, as Rea was just out of record contract and the record company was not willing to pay for the rail ticket. The inspiration for the song came as they were getting stuck in heavy traffic, while the snow was falling. Rea reportedly started looking at the other drivers, who ‘all looked so miserable’. Jokingly, he started singing: ‘We're driving home for Christmas ...’ Then, whenever the street lights shone inside the car, he said that he started writing down lyrics. Rea said ‘Driving Home for Christmas’ is a car version of a carol that he wrote initially for Van Morrison to sing, but did not manage to get it to him, and eventually recorded it himself.
Rea never played the song live until one year at Hammersmith Odeon when he recalls (Rea’s own reported words), ‘The gig was on 21 December, so the road crew kept badgering me to do it. I told them if I’m going to sing this f...ing song, we’re gonna do it properly. So, we hired 12 snow cannons. When we started the song, you couldn’t hear it for the noise of the crowd, and we let go with the machines. We put three feet of artificial snow in the stalls. The venue charged me £12,000 to clean it up’.
The song was used in Christmas commercials for the supermarket chain 'Iceland' in 1997, 1998 and 2011 and has grown in seasonal popularity ever since. Love and peace. Bill xxx
There are three things that tell me that Christmas has started and is in the air. One is seeing the first lit-up Christmas tree of the year and the second is hearing ‘Silent Night’ being sung at Midnight Mass. The third is being in my car, turning on the radio and hearing my favourite Christmas song across the airwaves, sung by Chris Rea as I drive home.
Each time I hear this seasonal song I think about all the families all around the world who are waiting in pleasurable anticipation for the ‘coming home of a loved one’. I also think of those many thousands of travelers ‘coming home’; most in cheerful expectation of the happy faces waiting there to greet them, but also some who are coming home with a heavy heart to attend the funeral of a loved one who sadly died in their absence. They will also be a few ‘Prodigal Sons’ travelling back home in trepidation. They may have left home many years earlier either in disgrace or with bad feelings between themselves and another family member, and are now apprehensive of the type of welcome they will receive on arrival; especially if their return home is totally unexpected
!
‘Driving home for Christmas’ is a popular Christmas single written and composed by Chris Rea and released in 1988.
The song peaked at Number 53 in the UK Singles Chart in 1988, and re-entered the chart in 2007, peaking at Number 33. It reached a new peak of Number 14 in 2017. Although it had modest charting, the single has a brief chart appearance every year in the Top 40 and is featured among the most popular Top 10 Christmas singles. This song is like a good bottle of wine that tastes better and more familiar yearly.
In an interview for the BBC Radio 4 programme, ‘Today’ in 2009, and ‘The Guardian’ in 2016, Rea said he wrote ‘Driving Home for Christmas’ many years before its first recording. The song was written when Rea needed to get home to Middlesbrough from Abbey Road Studios in London. His wife had come down to drive him home in her Austin Mini to save money because it was cheaper to drive than travel by train, as Rea was just out of record contract and the record company was not willing to pay for the rail ticket. The inspiration for the song came as they were getting stuck in heavy traffic, while the snow was falling. Rea reportedly started looking at the other drivers, who ‘all looked so miserable’. Jokingly, he started singing: ‘We're driving home for Christmas ...’ Then, whenever the street lights shone inside the car, he said that he started writing down lyrics. Rea said ‘Driving Home for Christmas’ is a car version of a carol that he wrote initially for Van Morrison to sing, but did not manage to get it to him, and eventually recorded it himself.
Rea never played the song live until one year at Hammersmith Odeon when he recalls (Rea’s own reported words), ‘The gig was on 21 December, so the road crew kept badgering me to do it. I told them if I’m going to sing this f...ing song, we’re gonna do it properly. So, we hired 12 snow cannons. When we started the song, you couldn’t hear it for the noise of the crowd, and we let go with the machines. We put three feet of artificial snow in the stalls. The venue charged me £12,000 to clean it up’.
The song was used in Christmas commercials for the supermarket chain 'Iceland' in 1997, 1998 and 2011 and has grown in seasonal popularity ever since. Love and peace. Bill xxx
