George Melly: 1926-2007

"George was a dear friend, a uniquely gifted character and a true original. He'll be sadly missed."
-Van Morrison









Melly On Van's Contribution To The Ultimate Melly:

It’s 11am and George Melly, clad in kaftan and eye patch, is eating breakfast — a banana, a chocolate digestive and a nip of Famous Grouse. His charming but heavily moulting cat Ollie purrs on his lap. I’m at his West London home to discuss the veteran singer’s new album — The Ultimate Melly — a surprisingly joyous affair achieved despite the onset of deafness, vertigo, bad knees, impotence and numerous other maladies described in detail in last year’s bout of autobiography, Slowing Down.

He gestures me to a chair shaped like a hand and offers the bottle. But, alas, we’re off to a bad start. I compliment him on the rollicking duet with Van Morrison that opens the album, Midnight Cannonball, and the reclusive Irishman’s contribution to Backwater Blues, a 1927 anthem to a New Orleans flood disaster once sung by Melly’s great hero Bessie Smith.

The singer looks slightly pained. “Yes, but Van Morrison’s secretary or minder or whoever rang up to say that he would like it to be known that he is not to be used as a selling point, and that if we do, he will withdraw his consent and create chaos.”

But isn’t the album out already? Melly chews his banana thoughtfully. “Yes, but he could put an injunction on it. Stop more copies.” So, note to Mr Morrison’s lawyers: I had to drag it out of him.

It turns out that Morrison and Melly met at the Brecon Jazz Festival some years ago. “I was in the audience and he asked me up on stage. Diana [George’s wife of 44 years] is a rabid fan and she nearly ended up under the seat with embarrassment. But she gradually came out because it went well and the audience liked it.”

Melly then steers the conversation on to his other guest artists — Jacqui Dankworth, the Swingle Singers — on what is, he assures me, his best album yet. Truth is that any album from Melly, now 79, might be counted a minor miracle. His body has taken a pounding during a life that has veered, sometimes chaotically, between jazz singing, boozing, writing, Surrealist art appreciation and liberal dollops of sex. Oh, and he used to smoke 70 a day.

Also, by the laws of fashion, the ancient brand of jazz that he purveys — discovered while he was at Stowe public school — should have been killed off by the rock’n’roll boom of the late Fifties. “The band knew something was up when we did a concert with Tommy Steele,” Melly recalls. “We did our set and the audience was quieter than usual. Then Tommy Steele came on and these small girls exploded into shrieks. Our trombonist, Frank Parr — famously depressive — said we would all be on the breadline.”

But Melly, of course, had a good Sixties after turning to writing — both books and journalism. “I did so well because they were amazed that a jazz musician could put a sentence together.”

He got to know the new pop stars — The Who, Mick Jagger — and rather liked them. Perhaps it’s not surprising since he pioneered the rock lifestyle before rock was invented. “A few rock’n’rollers read my book about the old jazz scene, Owning Up, and tell me (affects Mockney accent), ‘It ain’t changed, ’as it?’”

Melly’s marriage to Diana did not preclude a string of affairs by both parties — George started his sexual life gay but had moved to heterosexuality by middle age. Diana wrote of the vicissitudes of an “open” marriage that worked rather better for husband than wife in her own fine memoir last year, Take a Girl Like Me.

She detailed other difficulties of living with Melly. To counteract his growing deafness, she once gave him a mobile phone that vibrated. When he complained that it did not work, she discovered that he had been carrying round an electric razor. But, as Melly puts it, a marriage that “began with passion is ending with compassion”.

So does Melly have any regrets? About the fags, about the mistresses, about the Magrittes he had to sell to pay his tax bills? He takes a nip of Scotch and declares with a flourish: “I think of myself as a plump, masculine Edith Piaf. Je ne regrette . . . rien.”

George Melly, 80, Jazz Singer With Flair for Extravagance, Is Dead

George Melly, an eccentric known as a jazz and blues singer, an expert on Surrealism, an author, a raconteur and a cultural critic — as well as a clotheshorse for loud zoot suits, jaunty fedoras and glow-in-the-dark ties — died yesterday at his London home. He was 80.

He died after suffering from emphysema and dementia, his wife, Diana Melly, told The Associated Press.

Mr. Melly’s largest fame came for helping revive and define old-time jazz in the Britain of the 1950s and ’60s. A mix of Dixieland, old-time British music hall styles and authentic blues, this brand of jazz came to be called “trad jazz” — “trad” meaning traditional.

Though jazz reviewers often despised the banjos and bowlers of trad music, it drew an enthusiastic following that has not completely disappeared even as other jazz genres have mostly superseded it. Mr. Melly, whose specialty was imitating the blues legend Bessie Smith, performed his last concert a week ago, wearing African robes and sitting in a wheelchair. He finished his final album the day before he died.

His showmanship knew few bounds as he generously nourished his image as “the dean of decadence” and “good-time George” with three tell-all autobiographies, onstage dirty jokes and outrageous tidbits for newspaper reporters. In 2001 he told a reporter for the newspaper Scotland on Sunday that becoming impotent was like being “unchained from a lunatic.”

“As a surrealist, I quite enjoy having dementia,” he said in an interview with Time Out London last month.

His achievements belied his perhaps affected silliness. He wrote well-reviewed books on Surrealist, Pop and naïve art, including “Revolt into Style” (1970); was a critic of pop music television and film for The Observer, the London newspaper; and wrote bitingly pithy words for a popular cartoon strip.

Alan George Heywood Melly was born in Liverpool on Aug. 17, 1926, the son of a wool broker and an actress who may have intentionally raised him to be unconventional. In “Scouse Mouse, or I Never Got Over It: An Autobiography” (1984) (scouse refers to a Liverpool native and his dialect), Mr. Melly recounted that his mother wanted him and his siblings to see their parents naked, usually in the bathroom, as a matter of routine. Mr. Melly was 16 when he first heard Smith sing “Gimme a Pig Foot” and fell in love with her and her music. In an interview with The Herald, a Scottish newspaper, in 2005, he said he found jazz “a marvelous antithesis to suburban Liverpool life, and we went wildly at it.”

At Stowe, an English boarding and day school, he loved to listen to crackly 78s by Smith, Fats Waller and Jelly Roll Morton. He joined the Royal Navy at the end of World War II because he thought the uniforms were nicer than those of other services. Then he was given desk duty and was not allowed to wear the bell-bottoms he had admired. He never saw combat and was almost court-martialed for distributing anarchist literature.

After the war he found work in a Surrealist art gallery in London and drifted into jazz music. He sang with Mick Mulligan’s Magnolia Jazz Band during the trad boom. He made successful records but gave up music in 1962 to concentrate on writing.

In 1974 he returned to jazz with John Chilton’s Feetwarmers. They toured theaters, colleges and pubs all over Britain, and their Christmas performances at Ronnie Scott’s, a popular jazz club in London, became a tradition. For his personal Act II, Mr. Melly chose first to affect the look of an American gangster with black suit, black shirt, white tie and hat, then switched to eclectically garish outfits when, as he put it, “the moths got to the crotch” of his gangster get-ups.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Melly is survived by his son, Tom; his daughter, Pandora; his stepdaughter, Candy; and his four grandchildren, according to The Associated Press.

In the 2001 interview with Scotland on Sunday, Mr. Melly discussed getting older.

“Billie Holiday sang what I feel in one verse,” he said: “I ain’t got no future, but Lord, Lord, what a past.”