News & Jukebox Chart

Music to drink beer to…

In the business of providing music for the UK’s pubs via a network of market-leading jukeboxes, there are some acts that resonate for more reasons than others.

Take Chas & Dave for example. To some – slightly cheesy Cockney chappies who had plenty of “rabbit” and who were a mainstay of 80s primetime TV shows. To others they are proper pub musicians and keen observers of the social mores of a time – that was perhaps already gone even during their heyday. That was a time when a pub was not a place you went for food or to take the family, instead a pub was still a male dominated bastion of manly beer drinking, with a piano of course for the odd sing-song.

Chas & Dave are not among the most widely played artists on today’s pub jukeboxes although they do in fact appear on one track that does still get a lot of credits down the pub. Here’s a good pub quiz fact – did you know that as session musicians Chas & Dave played on the Labi Siffre song “I Got The” which was famously sampled on Eminem’s, ‘My Name Is’?

Chas & Dave have actually reformed in recent months and announced this week that they will put out their first album in almost 2 decades. Their rise to fame is intrinsically linked to pubs – not only did they play in London pubs (Truman’s Beer put them on a circuit of their pubs before they signed for EMI) but also many of their songs were also inspired by pub life.

“I’m in Trouble was one,” Dave told The Guardian newspaper this week. “We saw a bloke in a pub. Barman picked the phone up, and the bloke was going: ‘No! I’m not here.’ Barman talked to the man’s wife: ‘No, he’s not here, darlin’.’ Bloke says: ‘Oh, I’m in trouble.’ And we wrote a song.”

In short, Chas & Dave provided music to drink beer to and that’s what we do here at Soundnet too. If you want to know more about the music we provide to the nation’s favourite jukeboxes get in touch with…

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