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.”

The Ultimate Melly is out now on Candid.

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