Chas & Dave's decision to sing in their own voices, about who they were and where they were from, changed British cultural history

Chas Hodges did not create a novelty pub act. They were up there with the very best

When Chas Hodges and Dave Peacock first started making music together, close to six decades ago, a large proportion of the British music scene was pretending to be something it wasn’t.

Gene Vincent, Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis were inspiring Tom Jones and everyone else to sing in a transatlantic accent.

But when Chas & Dave started playing together, in the early 1970s, they made a clear decision to – as Hodges would later put it to a television documentary maker – “sing in our own accents, sing songs about who we were, and where we were from”.

From this choice came a sound that, in the decades since, has flooded hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives with pure, unadulterated, toe-tapping, hip-swinging, lyric-shouting joy. But it has also left them misunderstood. Chas Hodges was a supreme musician. He learnt the piano as a session musician, gazing over the shoulder of Jerry Lee Lewis.

The cockney wail that rings out over, say, “Ain’t No Pleasin’ You”, has left many part-time listeners imagining the duo to be some kind of pub-singing novelty act, an East End version of The Wurzels.

They were – and the use of the past tense here has summoned the tears again – absolutely nothing of the sort.

As recently as April this year they were collaborating with Pete Doherty (one of their biggest fans) and The Libertines, as they had done with Jools Holland, Eric Clapton and all manner of others.

They were from northeast London, a time and a place that is as consistently mythologised as it misunderstood. They came from a land of jellied eels and pie and mash and pearly kings and queens that never quite existed. If it had done, there would be Chas & Dave songs about it: but there aren’t.

Instead they sung the poetry of everyday life, with a music that is as infectious as anything that’s ever been sung.

“You won’t stop talkin’/ Why don’t you give it a rest?/ You’ve got more rabbit than Sainsbury’s/ It’s time you got it off your chest.”

One of my most treasured memories of recent years is seeing my little nephews, two and five years old, erupting with the same joy as the rest of their family at the first bars of “Rabbit”, and instantly demanding it be played again. Such demands are now a daily occurrence, including, I am told, this morning, in between Chas's death and its announcement.

I am a fully paid-up Chas & Dave superfan. I have been to probably 50 gigs, the last one being at the Royal Albert Hall this summer, when they played brand new songs from their first album with new matieral in decades. That it was my last will take some time to sink in.

Chas & Dave, the band, leave behind a core of outstanding songs big enough to rival the very best. Certainly more than enough for an outstanding night out.

That there will be no more aisles in no more auditoriums to flood in to at the first sound of “London Girls” is hard to imagine. There will be no more beers on the sideboard here. No more reds, no more screwing back, no more yellow, green, brown, blue pink and black. Poor ol’ Mr Woogie. Someone took boogie away.

They captured an era that is not so much passing as passed. For the last few Christmases, Channel 5 has broadcast Chas & Dave’s Christmas Beano, the yuletide concert set in a mocked-up pub that was first broadcast in 1982. It is said to be consistently the channel’s best-rated show of the year. Certainly it has always been compulsory viewing in the Peck household.

It’s reasonable to surmise that gathering round a piano and belting out old Harry Champion songs about cucumber and piccalilli is perhaps not something the youth of today or the future will find themselves doing.

But if Chas Hodges and Dave Peacock had never decided to sing songs in their accents, about who they were and where they were from, there would be precious little else to remember it by.

That Hodges had been receiving treatment for oesophageal cancer for almost 18 months has rendered today’s news somewhat inevitable for some time. Any fan of any band, even if its a comparatively new one, will probably admit that going to watch the same singers, the same songs, time and again, for a decade or more will cause you to reflect on the passing of time. That nothing lasts forever. That everything must come to an end.

Chas Hodges died in the early hours of 22 September 2018. I’d like to think he knew it was International Rabbit Day.