[2][3][4][5] He had already become "a major European star by the time he finally cracked the UK Top 10" with the single "The Road to Hell (Part 2)".

[6] His many hit songs include "I Can Hear Your Heartbeat", "Stainsby Girls", "Josephine", "On the Beach", "Let's Dance", "Driving Home for Christmas", "Working on It", "Tell Me There's a Heaven", "Auberge", and "Julia".

[24][27][25] Rea was also influenced by Blind Willie Johnson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe[27] as well as by the playing of Ry Cooder and Joe Walsh.

[29] Due to his late introduction to music and guitar playing, Rea commented that when compared to Mark Knopfler and Eric Clapton, "I definitely missed the boat, I think".

[34] Whatever Happened to Benny Santini?, Rea's debut studio album, was released in June 1978, produced by Gus Dudgeon.

I arrived in Hollywood for the Grammy Awards once and thought I was going to bump into people who mattered, like Ry Cooder or Randy Newman.

[44][45] Rea had a difficult working relationship with Dudgeon and the other "men in suits" who he felt "smoothed out" the blues-influenced elements of his music.

[47] From 1983, Rea's music began to better reflect his wishes and capabilities, despite pressure from his record company due to the accumulated costs of the production for his first four albums.

[30] Water Sign performed far better than Rea or his team expected in Ireland and Europe, selling over half a million copies in just a few months.

[48] He established a loyal following in West Germany, and believes this audience saved his career as there was no "image-led market", but only "by music and by word of mouth".

[30] It was not until 1985's million-selling Shamrock Diaries, with its hit singles Stainsby Girls and Josephine, written for his wife and daughter respectively, that UK audiences began to take notice of him.

[50][51] By 1987, Rea was finally in a position to pay off the £320,000 debt he owed to the record company, and started to make significant earnings.

Facing the prospect of never singing, touring or performing in public again, he characteristically embarked on a radical career shift and went into movies.

[63] In 2000, he underwent a Whipple procedure,[27][47][64][65] which resulted in the removal of the head of the pancreas and part of the duodenum, bile duct, and gall bladder.

[26] Since having this surgery Rea has had problems with diabetes and a weaker immune system, necessitating the need to take thirty-four pills and seven injections a day.

[68] He was disappointed with the music business when Michael Parkinson, who supported him to do Dancing Down the Stony Road, told him songs longer than three minutes were not played as often on radio anymore.

[73][74] Rea released the compilation Still So Far to Go in October 2009 which contained some of his best known (and lesser known) hits over the last thirty years as well as songs from his "blues" period.

The set contained two feature-length films on one DVD written and directed by Rea along with three accompanying CDs - two of which featured the music from the DVDs and the third being a stripped back version of the related studio album.

The United Kingdom part of the tour commenced in the middle of March and finished on 5 April at Hammersmith Apollo in London.

[81] In September 2017, he released his twenty-fourth album, Road Songs for Lovers, and embarked on a European tour starting in October until December.

[86] In December 2020, Rea guest starred on the Christmas edition of Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing, where he discussed his health issues over the years.

[87][88][89] On 18 October 2019, Rhino released 2CD deluxe editions of five of Chris Rea's most commercially successful albums, Shamrock Diaries,[90] On The Beach,[91] Dancing With Strangers,[92] The Road To Hell,[93] and Auberge.

[19][29] Rea wrote the title track and music score for the 1993 drama film Soft Top Hard Shoulder.

[99][100] He wrote and produced the 1996 film La Passione, partially inspired by Rea's childhood experience of falling in love with motor racing and F1 Ferrari's driver Wolfgang von Trips.

[3][101] Rea was the lead actor in the 1999 comedy film Parting Shots, alongside Felicity Kendal, John Cleese, Bob Hoskins and Joanna Lumley.

[19] Rea, ironically, played a character who was told that cancer gave him six weeks to live and decided to kill those people who had badly affected his life.

[26]In 1994, Rea was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and underwent a life-saving operation to remove his pancreas, gallbladder, and a portion of his liver.

[81] He has taken the opportunity to get involved in Formula One on a few occasions, including as a pit lane mechanic for the Jordan team during the 1995 Monaco Grand Prix.

[116] In a 2017 interview, amid the 2017 general election, Rea supported Jeremy Corbyn and even wrote a song called "What's So Wrong With A Man Who Tells The Truth?

[76] He is sceptical about the idea of unification of Europe because with a common European market "you [...] force different people to live together [when] they simply do not want to",[76] recalling the downfall of Yugoslavia.