FILM SOUNDTRACKS have become an essential and lucrative ingredient in the success of most major artists these days. But when rock luminaries start producing and directing their own movies, it s usually time to run for the hills. From Neil Young s ill-fated flop Journey Through The Past to Paul McCartney s big budget catastrophe Give My Regards To Broad Street, the history of rockers dabbling in celluloid has been a fairly dismal one.
Clearly unfazed by this state of affairs, Chris Rea has become the latest muso to throw caution to the wind and go down the cinematic route. La Passione is an autobiographical tale based around the story of a young boy s infatuation with the racing driver Wolfgang von Trips and his red Ferrari. With an accompanying soundtrack album of the same name featuring a 58-piece orchestra and 16-piece brass section, the movie was written and produced entirely by Rea.
It s about romance, fast cars and 1960s Italian music, he explains. At first it was going to be just an album of fantasies, but I added a bit of dialogue, wrote a comedy plot and turned it into a film. We had to fit the images around the finished music which was tricky it s normally done the other way around.
Despite the inevitable accusations of rock-star-gone-mad self-indulgence that ll no doubt ensue, Rea clearly views this high-risk project as necessary to his continued artistic health.
The alternative was much worse, he ponders. The alternative in this case being another Chris Rea album in 1996 that sounded exactly like a Chris Rea album that came out in 1991, 1993 or 1994. I ve seen a lot of people over the past few years becoming a self-parody of themselves and I wanted to avoid that.
Also, a lot of people noticed that my albums had begun to sound like soundtracks; The Road to Hell, Auberge and Espresso Logic they all sound like they came from a movie. It s not because Chris Rea s soft, which is how a lot of rock journalists would have it, it s just the approach I use.
According to Rea, it was film and not music that first inspired him to greater heights. When I was young, I spent a lot of time at a little cinema in Stockton-on-Tees where they used to show foreign movies, French and Italian films. I was fascinated by them and I drew a love of music from them.
car enthusiasts
The main focus of La Passione evolves around the character Joe, who works in his dad s ice-cream parlour by day but discovers when he goes out at night that girls think he smells nice. He decides to utilise the family s famous vanilla essence and incorporate it into his aftershave invention from which he makes his fortune.
Joe, like Rea, has a passion for Ferraris but finds that owning them is not as rewarding as dreaming and fantasising about them. It s about keeping your passions at arm s length and not indulging them too much, explains Rea. It s autobiographical in the same way that a Scorsese movie is generally based around Brooklyn. I come from an Italian background and an ice-cream background, and yes, I m completely smitten with Ferraris.
Just what is at the root of this obsession Rea has for cars? An inordinate amount of his songs have a car theme and utilise road imagery, including many of his best known hits such as The Road To Hell and Driving Home For Christmas .
I m aware of it now, he laughs. It used to be a subconscious thing. The only problem is, people think I want to convert the whole fucking world into being car enthusiasts. The truth is, I write most of my songs in the car sitting in a traffic jam.
We live in a traffic jam culture I had a cracker of a one last week actually, in the very same place that I wrote The Road To Hell it s getting fucking worse! The film is partly based on that whole thing we sit there in our Vauxhall Astras in the rain and dream about driving a red sports car somewhere on the Mediterranean.
Presumably, given his success rate over the past few years, his record company would have been much happier with yet another quintessential Chris Rea album the type of one he so earnestly wanted to avoid?
They would have preferred me not to have done this. But I always have problems with the record company. They were so convinced that The Road To Hell would flop that it was made with a sister album which was going to be brought out as soon as it stiffed. So Auberge was made at the same time but was held back for a couple of years when The Road To Hell became my biggest album ever. Anyway, what s wrong with the notion of Girl In A Sportscar , (the first single from La Passione) being a hit? It s a ridiculous world that we live in musically, so anything can happen.
Rea s last album proper was Espresso Logic which was released in 1993. One of the reasons for the delay in the follow-up was a serious bout of illness that struck him suddenly. A routine operation turned into a nightmare for him when he had a post-operational abscess, and he had to endure five more operations over a period of seven weeks.
I don t remember anything about it when it was actually happening, he explains. I ve a lot of internal stitching and the pain was there for a whole year. I also lost three and a half stone and I was very weak for a while.
Now fully recovered, Rea is working on a new album a proper Chris Rea album which he hopes to tour later this year. We definitely won t be doing this one live, he confirms. It isn t your normal film or your normal album. My greatest love is still music but I don t want to be as predictable as I was in the past. Hopefully the way things happen in the future you ll wonder what I m going to do next, whether it s a musical or film idea. n