‘Nothing to Fear’: Chris Rea’s plea for peace amid the so-called ‘immigration crisis’
In politics, there’s a problem called ‘salience’. This is the ability for one particular topic to gain paramount prevalence in the news, smoke-screening all others. The current story dominating headlines in recent times has been the so-called immigration crisis. Chris Rea saw right through it.
With a voice that could stir honey into tea from a thousand paces, the singer from Middlesborough was salt of the earth in every which way. He lived the unglamorous life of a travelling poet, more concerned with his humble craft rather than anything else. Along the way, he mustered up a broad back catalogue with philosophical tracks like ‘God’s Great Banana Skin’, even a charity football single with Bob Mortimer, and, of course, the festive classic, ‘Driving Home for Christmas’.
His life was dogged by illness, but he remained upbeat and attached to his art. As he put it himself, “I am in that unique little club where I went into music because I love music, not because I wanted to be rich and famous.” That also meant he was willing to stick his neck out, utilising his craft to help create positive change rather than chasing commercial returns.
With ‘Nothing to Fear’, he did just that. It’s a song that urges people to cut through the noise of what they hear on the news, and with great empathy, realise the truth that we’re all human, just trying to get along. Rea was wise to this even back in 1992, telling John Pidgeon, “‘Nothing to Fear‘ is a song about a European guy welcoming Muslims.”
“We have nothing to fear,” he said, “there’s gonna be no problem.” For Rea, the paranoia in the press was a drummed-up distraction that he was all too familiar with. “There is always somebody, isn’t there. You know, it was once the Russians, we all had to be frightened of the Russians, then we had to be frightened of the Chinese, and at the moment, for the last year, it’s been this… the coming of the Muslims thing.”
Sadly, it has been that same ‘thing’ for a while now, making Rea’s plea for peace all the more pertinent. In fact, there’s an eerie prescience to the bold yet characteristically plain-spoken way he addressed media coverage on immigration, “You get these very dramatic documentaries on the television, which frankly, you know I’m a bit weary of. Mainly it’s a load of sensationalist footage, strung together.”
With a modest and warming melody, Rea beautifully provides the inverse, human perspective with ‘Nothing to Fear’, as he so often did. “This is the other side,” he said. All Muslim guys I know are great guys, and frankly, basically it’s been me saying I don’t mind living next door to one. A lot of people wonder, they have this fear of what’s it all gonna be about, but their values, their basic values are very, very good, and, in my view, needed in many cases in Europe.”
In a clever fashion, Rea enacts this message via the familiar medium of a love song. “I like to do double meanings and things like that, I was always a great poetry fan. And, the song also applies to a man and a woman, or any relationship, in it’s beginning, and it’s basically saying, you know, you’ve got to show each other that there’s nothing to fear.”
That was basically Rea’s message for life. He travelled the world using his art to break bread with the masses. His songs found communion and connection, sung with a voice that could rattle rafters like a flat-packed wardrobe in a hurricane. If music is about bringing people together, then he achieved that without ever setting himself apart, in the best possible way, and in every which way, too.
