George Melly, jazz singer, art critic and author, dies aged 80
Published: 06 July 2007
The jazz singer, art critic and author George Melly died at his London home yesterday. 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 Independent
