Driving home for Christmas is anything but a pain in the Rea

The tradition started when I was at university, now far too many years ago for my liking, as a way of energising the long, traffic-clogged drive from Keele in Staffordshire to the West Country in the pre-Christmas gloom.

Given the time of year, the journey was livened up with a CD of Christmas music. Well, I say livened up, but as someone whose musical tastes have never been entirely mainstream, I’m generally enraged by the tiny handful of clichéd, saccharine festive songs you hear ad nauseam at this time of year.

Sorry, Mariah, but All I Want For Christmas is less of your tedious sleigh bells and a touch more musical variety.

But I digress, because that Christmas compilation CD was there for just one purpose: the ceremonial playing of Chris Rea’s Driving Home For Christmas.

Because I was, of course, driving home for Christmas. Still, timing was everything. My hometown of Clevedon is located at junction 20 of the M5, just after the split-level Wynhol viaduct.

Cue up the first few piano notes on the climb out of Portishead, and the middle instrumental would finish just as I crested the hill and Clevedon came into view. Magical.

It’s a tradition I still partake in if I’m heading west for Christmas, although the compilation CD has been replaced by Spotify, mercifully allowing the rest of the journey to be accompanied by Christmas music more to my questionable tastes. (I’ll take The Killers and Fountains of Wayne over your Slade and Shakin’ Stevens.)

It’s clearly a ridiculous tradition, but I’m surely not alone in soundtracking a drive home for Christmas with a spot of Chris Rea.

Frankly, his exclamation of ‘top to toe in tailbacks’ somehow resonates even more if the traffic if rubbish (which, to be fair, it usually is). Sure, it’s cheesy as hell and stuffed with the inevitable jingling bells, but there’s a grounded reality to it.

Rea wrote it in the 1970s, when he’d been recording in London but his record company was too cheap to stump up for a train ticket back to Middlesbrough for Christmas, so his wife drove down and picked him up in a Rover Metro.

Given the royalty cheques he’s likely to cash every December, Rea has probably forgiven his record company: it’s doubtless paid for a good chunk of his Ferrari collection.

Will I listen to a Chris Rea song at any other time of year? Absolutely not. The man has fine discernment where classic cars are concerned, but his music isn’t to my taste. But for those few magical minutes in December, it just works. 

And it’s also a reminder about the power of the car to unite friends and families. So if you’re driving home for Christmas, enjoy it.