There was much more to Chris Rea than the hit singles – a multi-talented artist whose first loves were the blues, racing cars, cinema and journalism.

It was not until the second time I met Chris Rea that I discovered that the man whose hit singles had made him a household name harboured a deep passion and talent for the blues.

It was in the mid-2000s and I left his home, an old mill in Cookham laden with an armful of CDRs that he burned for me in his studio once he discovered I was a fellow enthusiast, each one comprising self-penned blues instrumentals.

It was a long way from Driving Home For Christmas though not so far from the bottleneck guitar breaks that illuminated The Road To Hell, and he seemed far more comfortable chatting about the blues than he did about traffic jams – though cars were another of his great passions.

The first time I’d met Rea, in the mid-’90s, it was to discuss a film he had written and produced about an German racing driver who had been his childhood hero growing up in Middlesbrough. La Passione was (as the title suggests) a passion project: a semi-autobiographical story of the son of Italian immigrants who dreamed of becoming a racing driver.

It was inspired by his own childhood obsession with a German driver called Wolfgang von Trips, whose brief career with Ferrari ended when he was killed in a crash with the British driver Jim Clark in 1961. The story was based on his own experience as the son of an Irish mother and Italian immigrant father who owned an ice-cream factory and chain of cafes in Middlesbrough.

The film was the story I’d gone to cover but it took a different turn as Chris described how he had almost died from peritonitis. A few years later he got pancreatic cancer and had half his stomach removed in a 12-hour operation and I found myself once again meeting him to cover a health story.

Visiting his home, an old mill in Cookham where he had converted the garage into a state-of-the-art recording studio, I found that his horrific health problems had given him a new lease of life as he indulged his passion for the blues.

He enthused about his own independent label, Jazzee Blue, and the series of instrumental albums – all featuring his signature slide gutiar – which would later be issued as a box set called Blue Guitars, revealing yet another talent and passion with his own cover artwork.

The collection was named after his first instrument, a 1961 Hofner V3, that he bought in a second-hand shop in Middlesbrough, though he later preferred to play a 1962 Fender Stratocaster in homage to one of his musical heroes, Ry Cooder, and ended up playing an Italian Maranello.

In an industry filled with egotists and chancers, Chris Rea was one of the good guys: a working-class boy from an industrial town in the North East who got to follow his dreams through passion and hard work (though he often said his first ambition was to have been a journalist). 

Trivia fact: When he joined his first band, Magdalene, Rea replaced future Deep Purple singer David Coverdale.