The Christmas Classic Born in a Traffic Jam, a Mini, and Mild Despair

It was 1978. Chris Rea, now a man with the gravelly voice of a man who has spent too much time shouting at traffic cones, was utterly knackered. His record contract had just expired like an old tax disc, his manager had buggered off, and he needed to get back up to Middlesbrough from London for Christmas. Trouble was, the record company wouldn’t cough up for a train ticket, and to add insult to injury he’d just been banned from driving. Yes, banned. Like some drunk uncle with a suntan and a flip-flop fetish.

So what does a sensible musician do in that situation? He phones his wife. And rather nobly, she drove all the way from Middlesbrough to Abbey Road in an old Austin Mini, which is not exactly an Autobahn capable vehicle to rescue him. Then it started snowing. Proper English Christmas snow: the kind that makes you wonder if the world is actually just a giant salt-free ice tray. 

There they were, stuck in traffic like everyone else, an army of miserable motorists in an increasingly hopeless queue. Rea looked at them and thought: This would make a great song. In fact, he started singing to himself, “We’re driving home for Christmas…” and that’s how the song began, right there in the bore-on-wheels nightmare that is British Christmas traffic. 

When they eventually arrived home at 3 a.m. yes, three in the morning the house was so cold the snow hadn’t even bothered to melt off the doormat. Waiting inside was a letter with a cheque for £15,000, royalties from another song that had done well in America. That, dear reader, is the exact moment Rea went from being completely broke to theoretically being able to buy a house.

But here’s the twist: despite now having the makings of a classic carol-ish tune, he didn’t release Driving Home for Christmas straight away. No. It sat in a tin full of unfinished stuff like an old oil filter in a garage until some years later when Rea and his keyboardist started messing about with some pianos. They dusted it off, added jazzy chords, a 1950s carol vibe, and strings and lo and behold: suddenly everyone wanted to hear about being stuck in traffic at Christmas.

Rea probably didn’t set out to write the most relentlessly played Christmas song in the land he was, as he said, a serious musician and not some bloke who writes jingles for retailers, but every December you’ll hear it on the radio, in supermarkets, and inevitably stuck in your head like a rogue sat nav voice you can’t mute. 

So there it is: a song about snow, traffic jams, a heroic wife in a tiny car and a bitter-sweet dash for home. Which, in my true fashion, sounds like a proper Christmas to me.