Chris Rea's new album is a magnificent throwback to old-school pop packaging - only vinyl and CD. And a courageous stand against "the download industry" - by Kate Mossman

Five years ago, Chris Rea's wife told him to clear out a drawer in their bedroom. "Everyone's got one of those drawers where there's, you know, one cufflink - the broken one," he says. "And you don't even know where the cufflink came from, because you've never bought a pair of cufflinks in your life." He came across two long-lost blues LPs by Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Blind Willy Johnson that he'd bought at the age of 22. He was unable to listen to the records because he no longer had a record player, and he sat down on the bed and started to cry.

Rea was recovering from a life-threatening disease called pancreatitis. It put him in hospital with a one-in-four chance of survival and when he came out, weighing just eight stone, he faced a six-month recuperation period and an uncertain future. The drawer-clearing exercise was his wife's attempt to keep his mind occupied - "she didn't like to think of me getting depressed" - but it turned into a personal epiphany. At the bottom of the drawer, Rea came face to face with a lost musical persona, his "deeply serious, Charlie Patton blues side", which he'd been obliged to ignore in favour of "terrible LA bossa-nova production" during the 1970s and '80s for the sake of chart success.

The smell and feel of the old records reignited an emotional connection with the album as an object, bringing back memories of a time when "you would order a record and take it home, and you'd have a night in, facing the speakers. You'd light up your magic cigarette and have a whole night just listening to it."
Rea decided to make an album that would restore a physical relationship with music. It had to be visual as well as audio - to counteract the rise of "invisible" downloads, outwit the random "cherry-picking, sweetshop selection procedure" of the iPod - and transport the listener back to an older consumer climate. He had time on his hands, and his post-op mind was working in mysterious ways: he dreamed up a band that had never existed - a pastiche instrumental group from the late '50s called The Delmonts, and their later incarnation in the equally fictitious Hofner Bluenotes.

Rea recorded the band's "back catalogue" in three studio albums. The Delmonts motor their way through 16 tracks, each one a clean-cut slice of the unmistakable "Strat and tremolo" sound created by Hank Marvin. Some songs are covers of hits by The Shadows and The Ventures, and others are convincing mock-ups, like the light-hearted, built on the 007 signature tune. The Hofner Bluenotes move into huskier, more grown-up territory with titles like The Shadow of A Fool and Looking Glass Blues. The band's story is told in a picture book illustrated by Rea himself. Chris Rea Presents The Return of The Fabulous Hofner Bluenotes is a strange project indeed.

None of the tracks will be available to buy separately on iTunes. "You've got to buy the book or you don't get nothing," he says gruffly. He's done it on his own label, absorbing all the production costs: "It's not expensive. I'm going to let it all go out for about 30 quid. You'll get a piece of something - something to touch, and 88 pages to look at while you're listening to the music."

It's a high concept, perhaps - a musical experience intensified through the use of pictures. The book contains photos of wet, cobbled streets in northern steel towns (Rea grew up in Middlesbrough) and shining catalogue shots of Hofner guitars. "They were the cheap guitars," he explains. "You couldn't afford the American ones, so a lot of dreams started on the Hofners. I remember looking through the windows of the music shops, and the posh guitars looked like Jedi Knights or something. They were the ones that The Shadows used to play. They used to let us touch them."

The book puts the music in a kind of "everyman's" context. It's about being a fan - the golden era of instrumental pop, viewed from the outside by a boy who never quite got in. Rea was born in 1951, too late to have been a member of The Delmonts himself, but he's there on the cover illustration, second from the left: "I drew up the thing and then we had it done graphically, like they used to do in the 1950s." If there is an autobiography here, it's a loose and rather humble one: "I always loved the idea of Tin Pan Alley. I wanted to be in the Brill Building in New York with Carole King, writing fabulous little diamond tunes for other artists. I've got cupboards full of the stuff."

Cupboards and bedroom drawers. Rea is running a DIY record industry at a time when the big labels are claiming that downloads make things more "artist friendly" and "consumer focused". He has another five album-books in the pipeline, one of which is "the whole world and life of dance. It's a suite that goes one step further, where you get a book and a DVD too - so you're looking at something rhythmical on the screen while you're listening to the music." He speaks as a fanatical hobbyist, or a man who's come back from the brink of death and no longer cares what the industry thinks of him.

"The music executives are drifting away from the music, and I think that given the opportunity to buy books like this, many people will take it." There's evidence that it works, he maintains. Other bands have already tried out different ways of presenting their music - putting albums out as downloads and then releasing the same material in luxury boxed sets - "like, er, what do they call them fellas?" Radiohead.

Chris Rea Presents The Return Of The Fabulous Hofner Bluenotes is out now on Jazzee Blue.