‘It feels like I had my right arm cut off. We weren’t just musical partners but a way of life’

EIGHTEEN long months have now passed since the curtain came down on one of the most enduring music double acts of all time. With a string of singalong “rockney” classics such as Gertcha and Rabbit, Chas & Dave sold millions of records and worked almost constantly for more than 40 years, feted by everyone from Led Zeppelin to American hip-hop star Eminem.

But the death aged 74 from throat cancer of singer and pianist Chas Hodges in 2018, poleaxed his bandmate Dave Peacock, and the passing of time has not made it any easier.

“It feels like I had my right arm cut off,” admits Dave, now also 74. “Me and Chas weren’t just musical partners, we were a way of life.

“I lost my wife Sue 11 years ago this July and I’ve never dreamt of her and I’ve been dying to have a dream about her. But ever since the day Chas died, I’ve dreamt about him every single night. I had one particularly vivid dream that we were working out this tricky tune and, halfway through, Chas said to me, ‘I don’t know why we’re learning this because we’re not going to do this on stage.’ And I thought, ‘Oh no, we’re not, what’s the point of learning it then?’ We even used to have our own language and would make up our own words. We called it the ‘Chas & Dave language’ and we spoke with our eyes to communicate and instinctively knew what each other was thinking.

“Chas is on my mind all the time. There are things I keep discovering and I think, ‘I’ll tell Chas that’, and of course I can’t. I want to talk to him about our football team, Totttenham Hotspur, and I go to pick up the phone but realise he’s not there.”

When Chas died in September 2018 of organ failure, Dave was among the first his wife Joan called.

“He had been having chemotherapy but he tackled it courageously,” says Dave. “He never let the cancer weigh on him like a burden. He had even written new lyrics for an old song, Hook, turning it into anthem.

“He never spoke about the end of his life, even when we’d gone out fishing, which he was fanatical about, just a couple of days before he died. “Needless to say, it totally took me by surprise when he passed away in his sleep. He got pneumonia in the end. But I didn’t feel cheated that I didn’t get to say goodbye to him because, cor blimey, I must’ve said just about everything I wanted to say to him in the past 50 years. “When we were on the road or sitting around in hotels, we talked about life and death for ever, so I didn’t have to say a final ta-ta.” Despite their popular image as East End pub entertainers, it turns out Chas & Dave were never Cockneys at all. They both grew up in the working class suburbs of north london and got to know each other in 1963. “Chas was thumbing a lift one day and a schoolmate, Brian Juniper, pulled up to give him a lift. I was the bass player in Brian’s band,” recalls Dave. “Chas was just 17 and I later found out he was only 18 months older than me. We kept in touch because we had similar tastes in music.We loved Fifties music and we had identical musical upbringings.”

BSling Your a cancerbanishing

UT it was almost another 10 years before they started writing songs together. Before that, they were in various groups. Chas in The Outlaws and then Cliff Bennett & the Rebel Rousers, while Dave played in The Rolling Stones (not the famous one, an earlier band that didn’t find fame).

But it was when Chas was on a tour of America with his band Heads, Hands & Feet in 1970, that he had the idea of performing in his London accent rather than singing with an American accent to a US audience.

On his return, he approached Dave about forming a band where they