Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Venue: Boćarski dom / Zagreb / Croatia
Concert date: 02/15/2012
Attendance: 2500
Ticket price: 270.00 HRK (standing) / 290.00 HRK (seated)
Christopher Anton Rea, known to everyone (in short) as Chris Rea, is one of the most respected, beloved and successful English singer-songwriters around. He’s defined above all by that unmistakable rumbling, tipsy-rough, mid-to-low register voice that strokes every pair of ears so sweetly, and by a guitar style leaning hard on the roots of blues, where you can’t miss the generous helping of slide guitar. He etched himself into listeners’ minds with a rotation of radio-friendly little tunes with an “evergreen” pedigree, especially a handful of big hits he strung together after he’d already reached the status of a widely known and universally respected performer in the British Isles and on the old European continent. And when he brought “The Road to Hell (Part 2)” to the charts, there was no more question that Rea belongs in the league of the world’s biggest artists. Over his career he has sold more than 30 million albums.
On 5 September 2011, Chris Rea’s new studio album “The Santo Spirito Blues” came out. And that kicked off a new concert tour. Only this time he didn’t stop in Ljubljana, as he did two years ago, but a bit further south, in the Croatian capital Zagreb, where he filled the Boćarski dom hall (normally used for boccia competitions) to the last corner, with the floor split into “standing” and “seated” sections. By eye, there must have been around 3,000 Chris Rea fans squeezed into the hall that evening.
So the tour was meant to promote the new studio material, which Chris created after a break of more than 10 years. If we linger a little on the特 details of “The Santo Spirito Blues”, the expanded edition comes as three CDs and two DVDs, more broadly known as “The Santo Spirito Project”. It includes the all-new studio album “The Santo Spirito Blues” and two films. Chris Rea wrote the music and the screenplays for both, and he directed them too. The first film is a raw and brutally honest chronicle of bullfighting, set to neo-classical and Spanish “gypsy” music, while the second follows a man in Florence searching for the essence of his life’s truth, on a path he never wanted, or ever imagined he’d find himself on.
The opening played out the same way. The mood built slowly, with projections from the film, until the play of colored light, in harmony with the melody and its hypnotic effect, lays you down in some parallel world. Then, against the familiar backdrop of guitar figures, the sextet led by Chris walks on stage and fires off The Last Open Road from the new album “The Santo Spirito Blues”. Still, Chris and company didn’t dwell on the new record for long. He quickly led the crowd deeper into the heart of his musical character, enchanting us with a mix of his biggest hits and the sweet indulgences of his colossal 11-CD set from 2005, “Blue Guitars”.
Chris Rea and the refined musicians of his sextet for “The Santo Spirito Blues” tour, Anto Drennan on guitar, Sylvin Marc on bass, keyboardists Max Middleton and Neil Drinkwater, and drummer Kirt Rust (who joined Chris’s regular backing crew right before the tour), delivered an even stronger live experience than two years ago in Ljubljana.
This lineup is pure “poison” in a live setting. From the first second to the last of a nearly two-hour show, it held the audience in a firm, sweetly intoxicating, hypnotic grip, with an added dash of protective bitterness from the blues sin. The crowd only shook itself out of its sweet daze when Chris egged them on with gestures from the stage. There were moments when Chris’s unique interpretation, that sensual blend of manliness, defiance, but also bitter pain and melancholy, came into its own on a journey to the very “essence” of a musician’s artistic character: in Easy Rider (with a superb dose of raw Delta Mississippi blues slide, masterfully backed by Drennan), through Somewhere Between Highway 61 & 49 (the pairing of the two guitarists works full force again!), and in the opening stretch with Work Gang and Where The Blues Come From. With the stunning rhetoric of the slide guitar solo improvisations, they especially thrilled the male half of the audience. These rough-edged, direct slabs of blues authenticity were balanced in the set by hits like Josephine (early on), then Julia in the middle, Stony Road, and toward the end Stainsby Girls and The Road to Hell (pt II). The gradual knocking on women’s hearts hit its peak of the night in the closing big triad of pop-flavored crowd-pleasers, On The Beach, Let`s Dance and It`s All Gone. The man knows his stuff. He knows how to combine sincere passion for music with a troubadour’s talent for blowing a little soul into the ladies’ ears. And that’s his road to success. There was plenty of nostalgia that night. Plenty of memories of the calm days of the eighties, when the world was still young and innocent. Pictures from the past that the soul never erases, and that are born again and again at moments like these.
The sextet is remarkably tight. The sound in the hall was excellent from the first second to the last, and at a few points Chris’s low-register solos were harder to hear, but that didn’t spoil the overall feeling of perfection that Rea and his crew conjured up, with his velvety, warm and endlessly seductive vocal never letting him down for a moment (in this respect Rea ranks alongside the highly lucrative “golden” voices of the Knopfler and Gilmour type). The experience hit much harder because the atmosphere was so intimate, which we can thank the venue itself for, packed to the last corner with a loyal crowd and without any sense of arena scale (there were no stands). The chosen location proved to be extremely well suited to this kind of Chris Rea show. Similar heavyweights like Joe Bonamassa, Jeff Beck, Jack Bruce, Peter Frampton, or (I almost slipped up) Gary Moore (may he rest in peace) could easily play here in the future too, as could the newly formed supergroups Chickenfoot and/or Black Country Communion,…
A Chris Rea concert? The magic of a first-class ear massage, with no recipe other than total surrender to the esoterica of voice, stature and sentiment of retro blues rhetoric, drizzled with a gentle dab of pop prettification.
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist
1. The Last Open Road 2. Work Gang 3. Where the Blues Come From 4. Josephine 5. Easy Rider 6.`Til the Morning Sun Shines on My Love and Me 7. Looking for the Summer 8. Julia 9. Stony Road 10. Come So Far, Yet Still So Far to Go 11. Somewhere Between Highway 61 & 49 12. Stainsby Girls 13. The Road to Hell (Part 1) 14. The Road to Hell (Part 2) —encore— 15. On the Beach 16. Let`s Dance 17. It`s All Gone —fade-out exit— 18. Santo Spirito Blues – The Films (excerpt)
Photo Gallery
