Back on the road with Chris Rea
27th January 2010
COME SO FAR, STILL SO FAR TO GO...Simon Honywill is back on the road with Chris Rea.
"In the fickle world of modern music, longevity is something that most artists hanker after but very few achieve. However there is an ever increasing collection of musicians and songwriters whose audiences have grown up with them, and in many cases remained faithful after the initial flurry of widespread public acclaim has died down. One such artist is Chris Rea, now into his third decade as a performer. Once amongst the biggest selling British names in the business, he still writes a great song and is recognized as one of the best slide guitar players around, and as is evident from the current 50 date tour of Europe, Russia and the UK, he is very much still in demand. Chris would probably tell you that he has to tour because he doesn’t know how to do much else, and it gives him somewhere to play where he can turn up the volume a bit without upsetting the neighbours, but the fans are flocking to see the man who has a back catalogue of the kind of songs most people can only ever dream of writing.
In order to avoid any neighbourly aggravation, Rea, his 5 piece band and crew are visiting some of the coldest parts of Europe, during the coldest winter for decades. In temperatures that will cause cables to snap and flesh to stick to metal, it’s fortunate that all of the shows are indoors. That said, the load ins and outs are pretty challenging (gloves are advised), and particularly inconvenient is the frozen toilet on the crew bus. Aah the rigours of life on the road. In Dresden, on the second night of the tour, I could feel my face slowly starting to go numb in the relatively short time it takes to load the sound system on the truck – the thermals are certainly going to get a drubbing as we head off into Eastern Europe, across to Ukraine and back up through Russia.
The tour once again sees RG’s providing a system that will do the big sound of this band justice (there are three guitarists including Chris) in venues ranging from small arenas to intimate theatres. A full complement of Synco forms the loudspeaker system, with wedges too (for the first time with Rea), and flexibility is the order of the day as the sound system configuration is hardly ever the same from one gig to the next. The Chris Rea policy of only ever using a single truck is also a major factor in the sound system spec – it’s all geared up to be as compact as possible and there are absolutely no flight cases that do not pack properly in the truck. The team members are old hands at the Rea coalface – Mark Edwards forms the other half of the RG’s FOH star turns, and Steve Carr is working the stage end with RG’s old fave Justin Grearly on monitors, having taken over from Joe Campbell, who was tied up with The Prodigy (and so he should be!).
At the time of writing it is early days on the tour, but this marks my sixth tour with Chris, the first being back in the late 90’s. I’ve been all over the place with him, and have been charged with the responsibility of representing his sound both live and on record. The relationship is tight, and there is a level of understanding and trust that guarantees the kind of results his audiences have come to expect. Stretching ahead is a tour schedule that if nothing else looks very cold, and in this day and age it’s a long one. Every night the song that we all look forward to the most is Chris’s recent single – the appropriately titled and extremely rocking Come So Far, Still So Far To Go. Life imitating art, I would proffer".