A Different View with Dave O’Connell

The ironic timing of singer Chris Rea’s death last week didn’t escape anyone’s attention, given that many of them might have heard about it as they were actually driving home for Christmas.

But my mind wandered back to another December occasion – all of 42 years ago now, when a young junior reporter from the Connacht Tribune headed out to the Corrib Great Southern with photographer Stan Shields to spend an hour in the company of possibly the most relaxed man in the music business.

Even then it was weird to get unfettered access to a singing star; these days it would be easier to get to sit down for a pint with the Pope.

But as you may have gathered in tributes over the past week, Chris Rea was no ordinary singing star; he wore his success lightly and, quite frankly, appeared at times that he’d much rather be doing other things. Or at least he wouldn’t fret if fame all went belly-up.

He was welcoming and gracious to a young reporter, shooting the breeze as though he hadn’t anything better to do – ignoring the actual fact that he was just over an hour away from a sold-out gig in Leisureland.

Fair to say he didn’t take himself or his fame too seriously; he had long since acquired enough perspective to see it all for what it was.

But he left an indelible mark on me – for his candour, his patience, his openness and most of all the fact that he had all the time in the world for a teenage reporter who had little or nothing to offer him in return.

I was looking back at the piece I wrote that December of 1983, and apart from wincing at some of the writing, what struck me was how different it was to the usual showbiz interviews.

That had nothing to do with me; it was because, when you asked Chris Rea a question, he actually took the time to think about it before answering.

I can still see him sitting in the Corrib Great Southern’s hotel bar, wearing an old football training top given to him by Liverpool’s Craig Johnston, and smoking – looking nothing like a man who had taken Ireland by storm on the back of his Water Sign album which was one of those LPs you’d find in every house in the country that year.

Like all overnight sensations after more than a decade on the road, he could see it for what it was – welcome and financially beneficial, but not going to dramatically change his life.

“I don’t think about what I do. I don’t take it that seriously to be very honest. People say you should say ‘Oh the pain and the struggle’ but I don ‘t really take it that seriously,” he said that night.

He wasn’t even irked by the asinine questions of a would-be rock hack, wondering if he was bothered that his success had come in many places but not really in his native England.

“It would probably help my record company and producers and people in other foreign countries who look to England, because they seem to think, for some strange reason, that is where it all happens. I don ‘t actually agree with that,” he said.

“That’s probably why I don’t do it. You see I don’t go for it; I don’t dress up in a glitter fashion and spend hours trying to woo people from the NME.”

And yet he had all the time in the world for the Connacht Tribune.