Rea Garvey

Who is Rea Garvey?

Raymond Michael "Rea" Garvey is an Irish singer-songwriter, guitarist and solo artist.

Garvey was born in 1973 and grew up with seven sisters. In 1997, Rea Garvey left his band The Reckless Pedestrians and home town of Tralee, Ireland to go to Germany with not a lot of money and a demo CD in his pocket. He put an ad into local paper Stockacher Anzeiger stating, "Singer requires band for recording and live shows". Mike Gommeringer saw this ad and accurately assumed it must have been Garvey, whose original band he had once seen play live. The twosome met up and subsequently recruited Uwe, Sebastian and Philipp. Their first gig was played on New Year's Eve 1998 in Stockach. "Reamonn" is the Irish for "Raymond". In order to secure a recording contract, they set up a showcase at Logo, a small club in Hamburg, in front of 16 representatives from various record labels in 1999. The band was quickly offered several contracts, settling on signing with Virgin Records Germany.

Over the 11 years, that Rea Garvey was frontman of Reamonn, they saw chart-topping success, with a number of gold & platinum selling albums and several sold out European tours. In 2011, after the release of the bands best of album/DVD "Eleven", and a best of tour, the band parted ways. Rea took this time to pursue a solo career, which gave birth to his first solo album "Can't Stand the Silence".