I have reached that stage in life where the people I respect and admire are exiting stage left, including the late much-missed John Walker.
The latest to leave is Chris Rea – an English musician who met with initial success in his homeland (“Fool if you think it’s over”), but whose insistence in following the beat of his own drummer relegated him to the sidelines there. He became much more popular in Germany and Russia.
For some reason, he was the lead actor in a 1999 English black comedy “Parting Shots” – back when black comedies did not have to feature people of African ancestry. Rea plays a frustrated man whose doctor gives him only a few weeks to live. He decides to hunt down all the people who made his life miserable. The rest of the cast was a veritable Who’s Who of English movies – John Cleese, Bob Hoskins, Oliver Reed, etc. Worth watching again, in memoriam.
We share that interest, sir. I did not really become aware of him until after his long battle with cancer had started. I missed the German years, which were apparently a significant part of his life.
Times change! It is hard to imagine that anyone in Germany today would make a music video which presented US troops in such a positive light like Chris Rea’s “Texas”.
