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Stocki got a surprise ticket for Chris Rea in Belfast (Mark Edwards, the keyboard player on Stevenson and Samuel's Gracenotes was playing piano - and very well too!)...it was a most pleasant surprise - until the hits! 

Chris Rea? What ever happened to? I lost him on his first journey on the Road To Hell   and apart from a tip off to buy 2002’s Dancing Down the Stony Road, I had not considered him much since. So, not many expectations as I sat back in unexpected seats for this live gig. Well, that is not exactly true because knowing a little bit about the pedigree of the band I knew that there was enough resources to make it impressive. And boy did this band play. For over an hour, we were treated to the precision of improvised jazz and the soul confronting the intensity of the blues. With a simple but powerfully effective lighting set that gave a street light hue and Rea’s lean and swarthy goateed bohemian look, it felt like a Parisian street scene. It was as if they had taken huge pieces of pavement on the Champs Elys to have a summer evenings jam. It was a  revelation, a magnificent reinvention that I was glad to have stumbled upon.

First song in and I was struck by the power of Rea’s voice; how I had forgotten. Live it is especially big, deepest smoky blue with that husky rasp. The writing too is more accomplished than the days of the hits. Songs from the new album The Blue Jukebox  and the album that set him firmly in his new Jazzie blue direction, the aforementioned  Dancing Down the Stony Road had a poetry that the blues rarely rises to. Where Rea’s  jazzy bent touches the blues there is always a little Gospel hopefulness to avoid nihilistic  depression. There are “Restless Souls” and people who have been down “Long Roads” and  found themselves pained by Steel River Blues BUT the struggling seems to always be climbing on the scars to rise above the adversity and be able to ask the witness to say Amen in a spiritual kind of a way. And, of course, everything is held together by the   gripping guitar playing, particularly slide, from an array of guitars. Mr. Claptons claim to   deity would look a little vulnerable and heretical in the presence of this man these days.

It was well over an hour into the show when a funny thing happened; the audience  clapped as they recognized the introduction to the first of the oldies, “On the Beach.” I  hadn't noticed the lack of obligatory hoopla which is nowadays simply nerds showing off their superior knowledge or pretending to. I noted the strangeness of the moment. And so  Chris after playing all this jazzy blues fed the MOR fans from his past with the additional hits “Josephine,” “Road To Hell,” and “Let’s Dance.” It was a real insight to the shift in Rea’s career but also the sadness of the fans who want what is familiar rather than what is better. For these hits Rea’s band slipped into neutral. There was less challenge, no need   to push their talents like they had been up until this point. Suddenly, there was the   realization that at last Chris Rea is stretching the prowess of his vocation as an artist  when for too many years he was constrained to make music that sold and got an   immediate response from crowds like this one who remained placid during the dramatic  and musically exquisite renditions of “Somebody Say Amen,” “Long Is the Time,” “Hard Is the Road,” “Easy Rider,” “Sun Is Rising,” “Let It Roll,” or “Steel River Blues” to go buck daft with a standing ovations after the dumbed down write a three minute single “Lets Dance.” 

It was a little sad. That the fans who would claim their loyalty watched him reach for his  muse and then dismissed such courage by suggesting they really preferred him coasting  through the bland. I guess Rea like everyone else has to please the average music fan so  that they continue to come along and make it financially viable for the rest of us to enjoy  the real artist. Rea’s change of direction has already brought him down from the 8,000  venue to the 2,000. As he satisfies his own soul by continuing to head in his own  musical journey it may come down to a 300 venue but I want to let you know now that by then he will be utterly unmissable! This was a stunning surprise - until the hits! 

Steve Stockman  7/11/2004