I met Chas a few times and I’m not sure I can adequately convey just how lovely he was. (1/14)
But it wasn’t just his openness and friendliness. He was so comfortable inside his own skin. That’s what made the biggest impression. He totally had a sense of who he was & seemed delighted & a little bit amused by the way his life had turned out. (2/14)
From being enlisted to play in Joe Meek’s house band, aged 16, just months after buying his Hofner bass guitar, he simply didn’t look back. (3/14)
He toured the world with Jerry Lee Lewis in 1963 and used the opportunity to learn piano from the very best. It also seemed to amuse him that people hadn’t notice just how much of his style in Chas & Dave was taken from Jerry Lee Lewis. (4/14)
Then he joined Cliff Bennett & The Rebel Rousers and toured with The Beatles. He talked about hearing Yellow Submarine for the first time (when Paul McCartney played him an acetate of Revolver) and wondered if it was a wind-up. (5/14)
Then when everyone was growing their hair long and trying to sound like The Band, he joined Heads Hands & Feet and made a string of great records that fell into line with that aesthetic. (6/14)
As you might know, he moonlighted on Labi Siffre’s I Got The… and ended up being sampled by Eminem. (7/14)
Chas & Dave was his way of returning to what he knew best. You can take the man out of Edmonton, but you can’t take Edmonton out of the man. (8/14)
“We’d been around a while. We knew the importance of only doing songs that you really believed in. Because if one of them takes off, you’re going to have to sing it for the rest of your life...We didn’t want to get into that situation.”
(9/14)
(9/14)
You’d have to be insane to form a group like Chas & Dave and expect to have hits, but they were doing what they loved. It came from the heart and people picked up on that. open.spotify.com/track/1EanCk1t… (10/14)
I remember him talking about writing Snooker Loopy by The Matchroom Mob by imagining the seven dwarves singing it. He said he knew it was going to be a hit when his son came home from school and told him that all the children were singing it. (11/14)
Ain’t No Pleasing You was their biggest hit. Once again, it amused him that people didn’t pick up the American influence. He was basically trying to write a Fats Domino song. (12/14)
And after a recording hiatus, they returned with some of their very best work. Here’s their final performance on Later with Jools Holland. (13/14)
Anyway, that’s kind of all I wanted to say. From a distance, he just struck me as a paradigm of how to live your life well, and I wanted to convey some of that. RIP Chas Hodges (1943-2018) (14/14)
