Heading
Close X
Menu
A MINI TWIST ON A CHRISTMAS CLASSIC.
If you’ve ever turned on the radio in December, you’ve definitely heard the song, "Driving Home for Christmas”. The classic holiday hit was written in 1978 by Chris Rea, but didn’t become a song, much less a modern classic for almost a decade. At MINI we thought we’d honour the song and the holiday with a little poem and music video of our own, but the whole story is even more of a festive fairy tale.
It starts, like the best stories, from a pretty hopeless situation. Chris Rea was still a young and relatively unknown singer-songwriter when in the winter of 1978 he was faced with the prospect of a rather sad Christmas: he was almost out of his record contract and his manager was leaving him. Standing outside Abbey Road Studios, he was stranded in London, he couldn’t get back to his home in Middlesbrough, as the record company wouldn’t pay for his train ticket.
That’s when his wife Joan came to the rescue, making the 400 km+ drive down to London in their Austin Mini, to bring her husband back home. On their way back the snow began to fall and they were constantly stuck in traffic. Rea began looking at the other drivers and they all looked miserable to him, so he, almost jokingly, started putting down the words that would become his song. Song writing can really be that spontaneous, although we’d like to think being in a cosy Austin Mini helped.
That song he wrote turned out to be the famous Christmas hit, "Driving Home for Christmas"! Fast forward over 40 years and this classic festive tune has received a new twist, a MINI twist...
As Chris Rea never intended to write a Christmas hit, and the song was never released as a single, there was no music video ever produced for it. We thought this was a shame and felt that a song this good deserves a music video, and its connection to MINI meant that we wanted to give it one! So, we asked our dedicated MINI community to help us create a music video, a fitting tribute to one of the all-time great Christmas songs, all with Chris’ blessing (he may even make a special appearance...)
Watch the video below.
We hope you enjoy the Driving Home For Christmas (in a MINI) video just as much as we did here at Williams MINI, and it gets you in the mood for your festive playlist when you're driving home for Christmas - in your MINI!
