Musician, songwriter and one half of Chas & Dave

Born: December 28, 1943;

Died: September 22, 2018

CHAS Hodges, who has died aged 74, was an English musician and songwriter with one of the most attention-grabbingly diverse careers in 20th century rock music. It says much for what he achieved that perhaps one of the least unusual elements was his steady and much-loved time as one half of Chas & Dave alongside Dave Peacock, which began in 1975 and brought the duo significant UK success, particularly throughout the 1980s.

The pair’s biggest songs – like Gertcha (1979, their first hit), Rabbit (1980), the misty-eyed pub symphony Ain’t No Pleasing You (1982, their biggest hit at number 2) and the snooker-themed Snooker Loopy (1986) – were enjoyed across generations and seen as something of a novelty at the time for their creators’ unabashed use of cockney dialect and moulded barrow boy image of flannel shirts, braces and pork pie hats. Yet these were anything but a gimmick, as many imagined them to be at the time.

Both North Londoners by birth and upbringing, Chas & Dave were as authentic in-character during their partnership as they were out of it. Their most popular songs were fast, bawdy, often very funny, yet with a streak of hot musicianship which came from the heart of classic 1950s rock ‘n’ roll and swept through contemporary pop-rock, the blues and – most of all – the kind of authentic, piano-based pub rock they had grown up with.

Hodges and Peacock were also consummate players, informed greatly by the pair’s past career as session musicians. Hodges’ CV, in particular, was a striking roll call; recruited by the producer Joe Meek as a teen, he was in the British backing bands of Jerry Lee Lewis and Gene Vincent (his piano-playing was informed by studying Lewis onstage), and he played alongside future Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore in Mike Berry and the Outlaws.

In the mid-1960s Hodges and Peacock both played in Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, who had two hits including a cover of the Beatles’ Got to Get You Into My Life; Hodges later liked to explain that Paul McCartney was a Chas & Dave fan, and of how he would send McCartney each new album the pair produced, receiving a letter giving McCartney’s thoughts in return. In the 1980s, Hodges said, he played piano during an impromptu jam at a wedding with a band which included McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, making him briefly “the fourth Beatle”. He also played in Head, Hands & Feet with Albert Lee and The Rockers with Roy Wood and Phil Lynott.

Chas & Dave’s music was deeply rooted in the heritage of working class Londoners; they even named their own second album Rockney, a portmanteau of ‘rock’ and ‘cockney’. The pair had been compared in the past to a very specific kind of folk music and there’s a ring of truth to that, in that their songs are a celebratory, evocative document of a way of 20th century life and language which is under threat from the ongoing gentrification of London; this essence is most readily found on their early, pre-success albums, including the debut One Fing ‘n’ Anuvver (1975), Rockney (1977) and Don’t Give a Monkeys (1979).

The duo’s first commercial heights appeared to be over in 1991, when their Tottenham Hotspur FC song When the Year Ends in One failed to graze the charts. Yet they continued to tour successfully for a large hardcore of fans, and their shows – particularly in London – retained an enduring reputation for lively entertainment. Their past session work for the singer Labi Siffre also meant that their playing on his 1975 track I Got The… was sampled on Eminem’s huge international hit My Name Is in 1999.

When their critical reassessment came, as it tends to for artists who have been out of the spotlight for some time, it was from an unlikely source; in the 2000s, while his own band the Libertines were enjoying round-the-clock attention from the music press, Pete Doherty expressed his love for the pair and – aside from a brief 2009 split when Peacock retired following the death of his wife – they returned to public activity. They supported the Libertines live, adding to a list of celebrity fans who had been excited to share a stage with Chas & Dave, including Led Zeppelin and Status Quo.

In 2005 the pair played the Glastonbury Festival, in 2008 they released the Hodges-written autobiography All About Us, and in 2012 BBC Four made a documentary about them named Last Orders. The album That’s What Happens, their first in 18 years, was released in 2013, with contributions from Jools Holland and Hugh Laurie, and production from Elvis Costello and Billy Bragg collaborator Joe Henry. Five years later, 2018’s final album A Little Bit of Us was a stripped-back affair, played and produced by the duo themselves, with a little piano from Hodges’ daughter Kate.

Charles Edward Hodges was born in 1943 to a lorry driver father who died when Hodges was four and a mother who played piano in bars to support the family. As well as music, he was known as an allotment gardener, and wrote a column about it for the Daily Express.

Although chemotherapy treatment was successful following an oesophageal cancer diagnosis in 2017, he died of organ failure in September 2018, and is survived by his wife Joan and their children and grandchildren.

DAVID POLLOCK