ROCKER CHAS
Shortly before Christmas, as their family prepared to host festivities, a niggling feeling began to trouble Chas Hodges – one half of the country’s much-loved cockney duo Chas and Dave.
Struggling to swallow, the abundance of food could only have made it more apparent something was not right with the star’s health.
But, wanting to preserve his wife’s preparations for the festive season, the singer said nothing, instead waiting until the New Year, when a doctor would confirm his worst fears – cancer.
“You’re bowling along merrily and suddenly your life goes upside down,” says Joan, Chas’s wife of 50 years.
By February, with a cancerous tumour located on his oesophagus, the 73-yearold was forced to cancel a string of live dates to have chemotherapy.
Speaking for the first time since beginning the treatment, Chas reveals that, after just one session, he’s telling the disease to “sling yer hook” with an overwhelmingly optimistic outlook.
“The chemo seems to be kicking in,” he announces proudly. “I have had a dull ache in the middle of my chest where my oesophagus is for quite a while and it seems to have gone away. It feels fine now. The doctor said I might start to feel the effects early. They’re optimistic that it’s going to knock it back.”
Unfazed by his diagnosis, which he describes as being “like a blocked sink” in his gullet, Chas is determined to face his treatment with a smile – and even a song. He turned up at Mount Vernon Hospital, in Northwood, North West London, for his first treatment wielding a guitar, ready to entertain the nurses and fellow patients.
But, with his left arm hooked up to a drip throughout a gruelling seven-hour chemotherapy session, there would be no performances of the duo’s hits from a career spanning more than four decades.
Instead, Chas – accompanied, as he is at every stage of his battle, by Joan – would find another way to use his chemotherapy sessions productively. “I wrote a couple of songs,” he reveals. “There’s one called Sling Your Hook, directed toward cancer.” “It’s brilliant,” adds Joan. Describing his tumour as an “unwelcome visitor who won’t be staying around long”, the lyrics also insist he “will not tolerate” the deadly disease.
Since January, the talented pianist has undergone a “whirlwind” of examina- tions to determine his illness. Prior to the operation, he underwent a PET scan to check his body using a radioactive dye injected into the veins.
The most troublesome part of the procedure, the couple insist, was the resulting radioactivity emitting from Chas.
“He had to sit at the back of the car while we were travelling home,” giggles Joan. “We had to keep a hand’s distance away at all times, because he was so radioactive.
“They told me we couldn’t kiss until midnight, because he’d have zapped me,” she continues. “He zaps me anyway when he kisses me, but that’s just love. On the stroke of midnight, we kissed.”
Despite their brave faces, the rigorous routines have taken their toll on Chas.
“I feel weary,” he admits. “The doctor