Ushered on stage by the trumpeter John Chilton as “the Dean of Decadence”, George Melly would launch energetically into his theme song, Good-Time George, with lyrics describing most varieties of sexual peccadillo. Along with his outlandish striped suit and fedora, Melly’s knowing leer and explicit gestures, borrowed directly from the great blues singers of the 1920s, bluntly ironed out any ambiguities in the words.

Melly liked to project an image of somewhat genteel debauchery, nurtured by the success of his 1972 cult album Nuts, with its equally risqué title song, and by the subsequent publication of his memoir of National Service in the Royal Navy, Rum, Bum, and Concertina (1977), describing his youthful homosexual adventures. His return to music in 1974, after ten years away from performing, as an Observercritic, allowed Melly to trade effectively for three decades on the voyeuristic tendencies of those who wished to see a well-known columnist making a fool of himself in public.

As it was, he successfully recaptured the enfant terrible persona he had created with Mick Mulligan’s jazz band in the 1950s, and which he brilliantly summarised in his first volume of autobiography, Owning Up (1965).

In reality, this musical persona, expressed in such setpieces as Frankie and Johnny, complete with simulated lovemaking and murder, owed as much to British music hall (and Melly’s passionate interest in Punch and Judy) as it did to any American blues or vaudeville singer, although the repertoire in which Melly chose to specialise was always the classic blues and jazz of the 1920s.

Related Internet Links

• Slowing Down; Take a Girl like Me; TLS review

George Melly

Jazzman and writer whose decadent mask disguised a many-sided critic whose writings chronicled his life and his times

• Goodtime George Melly, jazz legend and art collector, dies

• By George, he's still got it

• Mick Mulligan

Related Internet Links

• Slowing Down; Take a Girl like Me; TLS review

Background

• George Melly, jazz legend, dies

• By George, he's still got it

Multimedia

• The life and times of George Melly

Related Links

• George Melly, jazz legend, dies

• By George, he's still got it

• Mick Mulligan

Yet George Melly was far more than (as he once described himself) a middle-aged Britisher who claimed to be able to sing the blues. He was an enthusiastic expert on surrealist painting, a self-taught guru on pop culture (on which his best writings were collected into the 1970 book Revolt into Style), an insightful film and television critic, a socially aware cartoon “bubble-filler” and a brilliant autobiographer, whose collected works (including an anthology of his “Mellymobile” Punch columns) offer a pointed, savagely witty, and mercilessly accurate portrait of every decade in English life from the 1930s to the 1980s.

In private, and in more than a few public bars, he was also known as a passionate fly fisherman with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the whirlpools and eddies of the Usk, near Crickhowell. His lesser-known hobbies included a long addiction to riding a moped round London, which led him to write occasional pieces for Practical Moped, and to be a judge in the 1979 finals of “Miss Moped Wales”.

Alan George Heywood Melly was born in 1926 into a long-established middle-class Liverpudlian family. After prep school at Parkfield in Liverpool, he attended Stowe, where he was introduced to jazz and blues records by a friend called Guy Neal. There also began his interest in Surrealism, through the writings of Herbert Read, and the friendship of Tony Harris Reed.

During his National Service, Melly and Reed (who was stationed with him at Pwllheli) began subscribing to E. L. T. Mesens’s surrealist journal Message from Nowhere, and in due course, Melly submitted some pieces for publication. Through this he met Mesens, and on being demobilised in 1947, Melly went to work for Mesens at his London Gallery.

At Mesens’s suggestion, Melly’s father invested £900 in gallery stock on George’s behalf, and this became the basis of Melly’s significant private collection of surrealist works, of which the most celebrated was Magritte’s Le Viol.

Soon after he started work at the London Gallery, Melly discovered that live revivalist jazz could be heard in London, and he began attending Humphrey Lyttelton’s weekly dances at the Leicester Square Jazz Club, where his unorthodox style of dancing earned him the nickname “Bunny Bum” from the members of Lyttelton’s band.

Determined to sing, he was rebuffed at Leicester Square, but was encouraged at the jazz club on Eel Pie Island in the Thames at Twickenham to join the fledgeling Cy Laurie Band, with whom he sang his first public gig. That group did not last, but in the autumn of 1948 Melly joined the Magnolia Jazz Band led by the trumpeter Mick Mulligan.

During the ensuing 15 years Melly and Mulligan became synonymous with a jazz lifestyle that involved imbibing copious amounts of alcohol, frenetic and varied sexual activity at all hours of the day and night, and attempting to give the impression of being professional musicians while on the bandstand. Soon after Mulligan’s band was formed, the London Gallery closed, and Melly’s day job went with it, although he was always to retain his interest in surrealism.