I have found out who are my real friends, thanks to the illness and hospitals.
— Chris Rea
The thing that frustrated me is that some people think success is all measured by money.
It's bleak behind the Iron Curtain, although they do have the strongest vodka I've ever had in my life.
I think all the business stuff - the promotion, the hype, the high-power lunches, and the permanently injected smiles - is boring.
'Course, 'Santini' bombed in England, y'know. It came out at the height of the New Wave, which couldn't have been a worse time for a solo singer trying to sell rock melodies.
I live halfway between London and the airport, which means I can operate my European career and get home every night. It costs a lot of money, but it's worth it.
I read an article about 60 being the new 30 the other week, and I think it's very true. Our generation has not done what previous generations did and just got old and sat in a corner.
Rather than missing home when I'm on tour, I miss tour when I'm at home.
The Italian side of my family were gypsies, and we are little hard so-and-sos.
Back in 1997, I got to race a Ferrari at the famous Monza circuit in Italy - a dream come true.
Touring is easy. My wife will be with me a lot of the time. We get spoilt rotten, and all I have to do is go on stage in wonderful places and play music.
Dad was a distant figure, autonomous, a cross between the Pope and Mussolini. He was very Italian, as were all of my uncles, although they were second generation.
Nothing was ever clean enough for my father. You could never clean as good as he could; you could never clean as fast and as thorough as he could.
I played a gig at the Montreax Jazz Festival once - and on a song called 'It's All Gone,' I had to do free-form slide solo. It's the best thing I've ever done - because I wasn't thinking about it.
In a funny way, the illness spurred me on. I thought to myself, 'I've got to get through this operation to make a blues album.'
Eric Clapton's scales - when he comes off a high note and it's time for a refrain or a little bit of a rest, he peals off scales going downwards that are so good it's unbelievable.
My ambition, a long time ago, was to be a film music writer. A compromise then was to be the guy who wrote songs for a band and played slide guitar. Then the singer didn't turn up for an audition, and I was the only one who knew the words. That was it - bingo! Life took a different course.
Once I faced the fact I was going to deal with illness for the rest of my life, I got on with what I really wanted to do.
That is the music that I have always wanted to play: real, genuine guitar music.
I never got the chance to put drums on 'Watersigns,' because the company was in a rush to release it - and me.
My family is the No. 1 priority. Next is the motor-racing season.
After I got back my career and my artistic freedom in 1982, my golden rule is the music must never suffer.
I never had a desire to be famous.
I feel I've had three careers in one, really. There was the 'Benny Santini' stuff; that came with a general sense of, 'Who the hell is he?' And then there was 'The Road To Hell' stuff, and now there's the blues stuff.
I will be happy if I am 60 because I was not supposed to be 60.
As soon as I paid the mortgage off in 1988, I started racing cars.
I spend as much time as I can in my garden, and if I'm not writing songs or gardening, I'm painting.
None of my heroes were big rock stars, and I thought, 'This isn't how it's meant to be.' It wasn't about making music so much as selling it.
I remember my first day at grammar school, being the only person who was me. Everybody else was like everybody else, and there I was, tanned, in a freezing cold playground in the middle of Middlesbrough, wondering what on earth I was doing there.
I've given up my Ferrari - the idea of going through my village in a 488... You can't drive them on English roads.
I think I've lost that ability to slow things down - that ability drivers have to calculate what's coming by you at tremendous speed. I used to have it.
I'd become a corporate rock musician. I worked for 'Chris Rea.' He felt like another person. I even talked about him in the third person.
I'm never happy with anything I've done! If you sat me down and played everything I've ever recorded, I'd just sit there going, 'No... that could be better.'
When 'The Road To Hell' happened, I didn't know what I was doing. Your diary fills up, and you have no objectivity. At home, you're trying your best to fit in. Sometimes I'd race from Heathrow to find myself sitting in a village hall watching my kids. It felt really weird. I didn't enjoy it.
The first time I arrived in Hollywood for the Grammy Awards, I thought I'd bump into people who mattered, such as Ry Cooder or Randy Newman. I was disappointed to see the people I'd always thought of as pop stars. They would charge around the stage rather than enjoy the music.
I love being on tour. That's the best job in the world, if only I had a different body.
I've always felt that if people just came to one of my gigs, all would be revealed.
I had to put me foot down with the first record company. It was about 1975, when singers were being given names like Gary Glitter and Alvin Stardust, so they wanted to call me Benny Santini just because me dad's an Irish-Italian with an ice-cream business!
I actually, truly do love my family. It's not a public relations exercise.
The record companies didn't want 'Stony Road,' and it ended up being a gold album. They didn't want 'Blue Guitars,' and we did 165,000 books.
'Fool If You Think It's Over' is still the only song I've ever not played guitar on, but it just so happened to be my first single, and it just so happened to be a massive hit. It was in the U.S. Top 10 for seven weeks.
Five times a week, I do two hours running and gym work. That's to help with things like blood circulation. Also, it is good to be in shape in case I need to go into hospital again.
My father's family were Italian ice cream men, and the knowledge was passed on, so I ran an ice cream van while I was dating my wife.
Being on the road isn't hell - it's pure pleasure now.
I'm lucky to be alive. I'm one of only 40 people who have survived the surgery I had, and when you've been that close to dying, you re-evaluate what's really important to you - and it's nothing to do with fame and money.
My father used to control the wholesale of many ice-cream items in Middlesbrough. He was central distributor for most of the region.
You can't have F1 without Ferrari - you just can't have it. It's part of the theme that is the red car, and a lot of it is to do with the colour.
The operation left me very emotional. I cry a lot anyway. I've always been the type to feel hurt easily, but now I hit rock bottom.
I didn't start until I was 21, and most people I know were 13 when they had their first guitar - I missed that time where you sit in your bedroom all day for years and accidentally you're doing classical training, although you're not thinking of it that way. It's not as easy, as you get older, to do all that kind of practice.
Ferraris are lovely cars, but I just don't want to be seen in them.
