Britain isn’t a great island for road songs. It’s not big enough, really, for you to hit the road and drive. And if you try, you may just end up stuck in traffic on the A1, where the late Chris Rea found himself in Christmas 1978, his wife behind the wheel of her Mini, he beside her as they tried to get from Abbey Road Studios in London to their home in Middlesbrough, 220 miles away.
He wrote the song on a whim, scribbling down the lyrics whenever passing headlights illuminated the car interior (as he told this paper’s Dave Simpson in 2016), then put it away with his other unfinished scraps when he got home. Eight years later, he paired his lyric with some jazzy chords he’d written and a song was born. At first, he shoved it on a B-side, but in 1988 he rerecorded it for a compilation, put it out as a single, and … it was not an instant hit. Instead it was a slow burner that went from radio playlists and department store PA systems into people’s hearts over many years.
It was a slow burner because it’s not grand. Christmas songs tend to wallop the listener over the head with emotion – often joy, usually signified by copying the sound of A Christmas Gift to You by Phil Spector down to the last sleigh bell. Sometimes it’s a particularly overwrought love, as on The Power of Love, or Stay Another Day, or almost all X Factor winners. They insist on a hugeness of emotion to match the symbolism of the season.
Driving Home for Christmas didn’t do any of that. Sonically, it was a pre-Spector record, pre-rock’n’roll in fact – with twinkling pianos and Sinatra-grade strings over a gentle beat – so it’s not packed with the signifiers of contemporary Christmas hits. Lyrically, well, nothing much happens, very much like driving up the A1. He’s not even longing for home, or craving his baby’s love, or fighting the traffic to get there as quick as he can. He’s just sitting in traffic, looking forward to getting home.
Christmas 1988 was not a vintage season for festive records. Mistletoe and Wine by Cliff Richard was the Christmas No 1, but there was no other Christmas song until Alexander O’Neal’s Christmas Song at No 30. Mary’s Boy Child (Megamix) was at 52, with Driving Home for Christmas at 53.
But Driving Home for Christmas, precisely because it doesn’t impose itself, didn’t wear out its welcome in the way some Christmas songs do. Its refusal to don the sonic bells and whistles of the second half of the 80s means it hasn’t dated: it was designed to sound nostalgic, and with so many ideas of the perfect Christmas crystallised from the pop culture of the 1950s and 60s, its particular nostalgia has never aged.
Rea couldn’t go the whole hog and namecheck the A1 and the landmarks on the way to Teesside, because you can’t do road songs in Britain. Instead, when he’s “top to toe in tailbacks”, he knows there’ll “soon be a freeway”. Not in Lincolnshire, there won’t.
Nevertheless, its emotional restraint captures a truth for most of us – that Christmas is rarely a time of incredible drama, but one of smaller pleasures and simple joys. Most of us will never hear sleigh bells jingling, ring-ting-tingling either. Nor, if we have any sense, do we wish it could be Christmas every day. But almost all of us have sat in an unmoving car, surrounding by the grey drear of winter, and wished we were at the other end of the journey. “I take a look at the driver next to me, he’s just the same” is perhaps the most affecting line.
Driving Home for Christmas was first released as a B-side because Rea thought Christmas songs were novelties, and he didn’t want to draw attention to it. It may be an atypical song for him, but it’s not a novelty. It’s a perfect cardigan in which to envelop yourself.
