Chas & Dave are set to bring their Christmas show to the O2 Forum in Kentish Town on December 10

THEY have become national treasures, a rock ’n’ roll combo whose careers started in the late 50s and who have worked with everyone from Joe Meek and Jerry Lee Lewis, to inspiring Eminem and The Libertines.

Now Rockney royalty Chas & Dave are bringing their annual Christmas show to the Forum in Kentish Town on December 10.

Chas recalls how influenced he was by his mum Daisy, a top-notch barrelhouse-style piano player, and touring as a bassist with Jerry Lee Lewis as a youngster, which made him switch to playing the piano.

“I loved my mum’s piano-playing style,” he recalls. “I loved the way she played it, but it wasn’t of my era as a kid. And I didn’t want to play the piano, I wanted to go to the football and go fishing. My mum wanted a musician in the family but I wasn’t interested.

“There was a piano teacher who had taught Mike Smith from the Dave Clark Five and he heard my mum play the piano in a pub in Edmonton. His name was Mr Elf and he was a right little character, something out of Dickens, with a little beard, and he heard my mum play and told her he would teach me for free, but I just wasn’t interested.”

The success of Lonnie Donegan and skiffle saw Chas decide he wanted it play an instrument – but the guitar, not the piano.

“My mum got me one from my Uncle Alf and she learnt to play it before me,” he says “I joined a skiffle group in 1958 and then we went to see Jerry Lee Lewis in Edmonton, and I saw him play the piano. Later I toured with his band, and that was it for me. I watched him play and taught myself that way.”

More recently, Chas & Dave’s work as session musicians in the 60s and 70s has been used by rapper Eminem on his worldwide smash hit My Name Is. They had played on a soul tune by Labi Siffre called I Got The.

“I hadn’t heard of Eminem and I’d not heard the tune,” admits Chas. “It was my son, Nik [who now plays with the band on the drums], who told me about it. He said, ‘Dad, you are on a worldwide hit’. I’d thought M and M was an American Smartie.”

Chas says he likes the way the riff has been worked into something completely new.

He says: “Eminem liked the riff and re-used it, but it wasn’t really us – it was all down to the work of Big Jim Sullivan. He was the big session man in the 1960s. You’d find he was behind 70 per cent of all the pop hits at the time. He’d do all the arrangements.”

Chas recalls recording the riff the rapper used in a studio in Wembley.

“I had a good gig doing sessions for people,” he said. “It helped pay the rent and food. We got a lot sessions through Big Jim. He produced and arranged it, it wasn’t our own idea, he just asked us to do this or that and away we went.”

And he likes the fact a riff they played more than 40 years ago has inspired someone working in a totally different genre.

Chas adds: “One of the greatest feelings I get is when someone says, ‘I am playing piano because of you’ – to know you have inspired someone is awesome. The same when our work is sampled.”

• Visit www.chasndave.net/