Chas & Dave
In the lead up to seeing Chas & Dave I found myself getting genuinely excited, and this doesn’t happen too often these days. There’s just something about them that invokes feelings of happiness and goodwill, and their constant presence throughout our lives made this show feel like something other than just another gig.
The Waterfront was rammed when I arrived, which worked out nicely for support act The Lovin’ Handful as they got to play to a packed house. They’re a local cover band whose act is to perform songs in a skiffle/roots style. I don’t really like cover bands, but stood and watched the first five songs of their set - sadly I found myself incredibly bored by them. They were tight, certainly, but I didn’t really understand the point of covering songs like Bad Moon Rising or Up The Country when they were already recorded more or less in the style that they performed them in. I’ll watch over 100 bands this year and that will be the only one I see not playing original music – fine for the pub, but I feel another local act could have made better use of this opportunity to play to more people.
By the time Chas & Dave strolled on stage the crowd were raucous and beery and absolutely ready. Opening the set with Gertcha was perfect, straight in with a well-known song and the Saturday night celebration was underway. I’d positioned myself directly in line with Chas, and watching his hands glide over the ‘Joanna’ was brilliant – it was effortless. There’s no denying after his recent health scare Chas looked a little frail, but pretty much the biggest cheer of the night was heard when he told us he’d been given the all clear. Dave looked almost exactly the same as I remembered him and played brilliantly - in fact the interplay between the two was the best thing about the show. Over the course of an hour we got every song we could have wanted to hear, including their medley of old East End classics and war time hits. There was definitely a spell of about 10 or 15 minutes where the energy levels in the crowd dropped a bit when the band played songs that I’m guessing a lot of us didn’t recognise, but coming back with Snooker Loopy meant that lull was instantly forgotten.
Any set featuring the song Rabbit is always going to be a huge amount of fun, but it was the final two songs of the night, Ain’t No Pleasing You & The Sideboard Song that I will never forget – the former was a big old lovely soppy arms-in-the-air singalong, as good a four minutes of live music as I have ever experienced. The latter was the perfect end to the night, a proper right old Cockernee knees up and exactly what we’d all come for.
Let’s face it, Chas & Dave are a folk band really – keeping the old songs alive, paeans to their roots in the pub culture of London. At times the music seemed utterly timeless. With Chas’s son on drums, the three musicians on stage provided a brilliant hour of live music, and with a show a lined up for the Albert Hall next year it looks like we’ll get to appreciate them for some time yet.
