The jazz singer, art critic and author George Melly died at his London home yesterday [Thursday, July 5, 2007]. Melly, 80, had been suffering from lung cancer for the past two years, but refused treatment so that he could continue performing.
It was a decision fitting to a man of considerable achievement - he had published numerous books, including three volumes of autobiography, was an acknowledged expert on surrealism, a broadcaster, raconteur and award-winning critic, and had written the words to the cartoon strip Flook - but who appeared content to let his life be his greatest canvas.
And what a life: as ramshackle, garish and joyous as the voluminous purple suits that hung around his massive frame, in which he was regularly to be seen at art openings, book launches, and his own performances, which continued right until the end. Only last month he was touring the country with the Digby Fairweather band.
Born in Liverpool in 1926, Melly was educated at Stowe, where he developed his passion for jazz. "I was passing an open study window," he wrote in his memoir Owning U, "and heard the most beautiful sound in the world. It was Louis Armstrong playing 'Drop That Sack'." By the time he was a regular attender at Humphrey Lyttelton's Saturday evening gigs in Leicester Square, Melly described himself as an addict. "I had resolved to become an executant," he wrote. "Too lazy to learn an instrument, I had decided to sing."
First in the 1950s, with Mick Mulligan's Magnolia Jazz Band, and then from the 1970s onwards with John Chilton's Feetwarmers, Melly was to become the finest singer in the British revivalist jazz movement. Beginning in 1973, his Christmas residency became an institution at Ronnie Scott's.
Only last year, he released an album on Candid records, The Ultimate Melly, with guest appearances from Van Morrison and Jacqui Dankworth.
It was also at Stowe that Melly discovered the pleasures of sex. He always denied the claim that he had seduced the former Sunday Telegraph editor Sir Peregrine Worsthorne on the art room chaise-longue. Nevertheless, he had a long stream of lovers of both sexes and was married twice, the second time in 1963 to Diana, who survives him. Melly was not reticent about his sexual escapades, documenting some of them in his book Rum, Bum and Concertina, and they remained a source of curiosity to his audiences. "An audacious minority of the public was eager to know if George was still homosexual," remembers Chilton in his recent book, Hot Jazz, Warm Feet. "We answered by saying that in the distant past he had been but then became bisexual on his way to being a mighty camp heterosexual."
Described by Diana as "fat and fairly famous", friends remember Melly as a man of irrepressible energy and enthusiasms but also as possessing a scholarly knowledge of both art and music. The fun and the seriousness went hand in hand. Asked by the gallerist James Birch to open his Salute to British Surrealism exhibition at the Minories Gallery in Colchester in 1985, Melly challenged Jennifer Binney, of the Neo-Naturists artists group, to see who could strip fastest. "The entire art world had come from London for the opening," recalls Birch, "and there was George wandering around naked."
Seeing Melly naked was a sight not confined to a few. One of his party tricks was to take his clothes off, get down on all fours, and rearrange his genitalia to impersonate a man, a woman, and then a bulldog.
He continued to be active, both socially and professionally, till the end. Most recently he was growing a beard in order to star in a film he was planning about Christ and the apostles. Neither had his appetite for partying diminished. Invited to a birthday dinner for the actor and singer Richard Strange, Melly misheard the address and arrived early at a pub near Strange's Kennington home. "When he realised we weren't there he went on to virtually every pub in the area and had a drink at each one," recalls Strange. "He eventually arrived at my house being carried bodily by two gay barmen, just in time for a singalong. Typically, George was the only one who knew the filthy versions of all the songs."
The worlds of art and music have lost both an entertainer and an
intellectual with the death of George Melly. In the words of his friend
James Birch: "He was a brilliant man - the last of a generation of
bohemian all-rounders."
***
The New York Times, Friday, July 6, 2007
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 [Thursday, July 5, 2007] 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.”
***