George Melly

Alan George Heywood Melly, jazz singer and writer: born Liverpool 17 August 1926; President, British Humanist Association 1972-74; married 1955 Victoria Vaughan (one daughter; marriage dissolved 1962), 1963 Diana Moynihan (née Dawson; one son, one stepdaughter, and one stepson deceased); died London 5 July 2007.

The worst thing you might say about George Melly is that he was respectable. He was a man who had invented himself out of a provincial middle-class upbringing to become a Surrealist flâneur, an incisive critic, and a vivacious entertainer in outrageous suits, "the Oscar Wilde of English jazz", as his friend the artist and writer Philip Core dubbed him. Yet his essential honesty - his passions and his vices - militated against any sense of artificiality, and combined with his intellect and generosity to install him as a minor British institution all of his own.

He was born Alan George Heywood Melly, "a rickety-looking baby with a wobbling head", in Liverpool in 1926. The Mellys could trace their ancestry back to 16th-century Geneva; his father, Francis, was a businessman who would rather have pursued his true vocations of shooting and fishing. For that reason, his last words to his son, before his death in 1961, seemed like a benediction: "Always do what you want to. I never did."

But, where his father was "remarkably tolerant", Melly's mother Edith Maud, known as Maudie, was "terribly concerned about other people's opinions". He later ascribed this to her Jewishness - her family, the Isaacs, were Polish - "and marrying into my father's family, rather posh liberal Catholics. She wanted me to be Noël Coward, which may be why I imitate him so much." However, Maudie was also decidedly liberated, and believed

that it was healthy for children to see their parents naked. Thus it was that my brother, sister and I were invited into the bathroom to watch my father shave and my mother in the bath, or my father in the bath and my mother on the lavatory. I am unable to analyse the effect of this on my sexual development, but it certainly gave me something to boast about to my schoolfriends.

Melly retold his Liverpudlian upbringing in Scouse Mouse (1984), a Proustian evocation set in a "large comfortable ugly house in the Victorian suburbs", with a nanny, cook and parlour maid - as well as minor roles for Edwardian aunts, and local "unfortunates . . . an errand boy with so large a goitre bulging from his neck that he had to lean sideways on his heavy bicycle", and "a huge man, the son of a police sergeant, who was simple and had been, so they said, castrated because he had molested children".

As a boy, Melly loved the music hall, as did his mother, who cultivated her own "theatrical circle" from the Liverpool Playhouse - among them Robert Flemyng and Michael Redgrave - as well as figures from the dance world such as Robert Helpmann and Frederick Ashton; Melly was slippered at his prep school, Parkfield, for insisting that he would rather go to the ballet than a rugby match. Bill, his younger brother, was a more conventional boy; later, a sister, Andrée, appeared, whom they both adored.

Melly came home from his first term at Stowe "spouting Eliot and Auden and raving about Picasso and Matisse" - to be told by Maudie that he was "an affected bit of goods". He also discovered Surrealism - in a reproduction of René Magritte's Le Viol (a female face with breasts for eyes and pudenda for a mouth), in the London Bulletin; and jazz, in the shape of Bessie Smith's "Gimme a Pigfoot (And a Bottle of Beer)": "This woman roaring around, singing that line, made me think, 'Well, this is what I want!' "

In 1944, aged 18, Melly enlisted in the Navy "for no other reason than I found the uniform 'more amusing' ". He now pursued a series of gay affairs, chronicled with disarming candour in his second memoir, Rum, Bum and Concertina (1977). He fell in love, "not with a seaman, but with one of the rich, idle homosexuals I met in London pubs". The "very beautiful young man" in question was Perry Edgebaston, with whom he wandered down Piccadilly, each carrying huge bouquets from Harrods.

It was a Quentin Crisp fantasy (indeed, Melly met Crisp at that time; the naked civil servant admired his bellbottoms), but Melly managed to avoid the law which threatened Crisp: "I sailed through it all with an innocent belief in my own inability to be caught and imprisoned." But it was art which truly caught his subversive instincts. Having written to E.L.T. Mesens, Magritte's friend and editor of the London Bulletin, Melly met Mesens at a Surrealist "seance" in the Barcelona restaurant in Beak Street, Soho. It was a potent encounter. Surrealism promised "a magic kingdom where misery and regression were banished for ever and poetry reigned supreme". Melly's apprenticeship consisted of ringing strangers from a telephone box and quoting lines of Surrealist poetry at them - a prank for which he was nearly arrested.

Later, Melly worked at Mesens's London Gallery in Beak Street, using a £900 "dowry" from his father to buy his own paintings to sell through the gallery. He also entered a bizarre love triangle with Mesens and his wife Sybil, when, in their flat one night, Sybil announced, "For Christ's sake stop going on about sex. If you want a fuck, George, come into the bedroom." Edouard "sat there in his socks, watching".

Melly found he preferred women to men: "It was just a matter of taste," he said later, "not a moral decision. Suddenly, I just liked girls' legs better than boys' arses." There was one downside, however, when Mesens claimed that Melly had sired the child which Sybil subsequently had aborted.

The winter of 1946 Melly spent sailing "rather aimlessly" along the South Coast and to the Mediterranean. During one cruise he found himself fiercely defended by a fellow rating known as "the Baron", who announced, "Anyone who says a word against fucking Picasso get fucking done over. Have you got that, shirt?" Melly's subversion in the Senior Service also resulted in another brush with authority, when his locker was found to contain pamphlets by Herbert Read and Bakunin. He told the commanding officer "that they were Anarchist literature and whenever possible I distributed them among the sailors". But the officer merely confiscated the pamphlets, and sent them back to Melly when he was demobbed. Melly realised this was the way England dealt with revolution: mild indifference. "Siberia it wasn't. They just wouldn't take it seriously."

Having returned to civilian life, Melly discovered the Surrealist Group had disbanded. He would have to look for a new means of subversive expression. He found it in "revivalist" jazz, based on the black jazz of the 1920s. "Too lazy to learn an instrument", he decided to sing, and through the Melody Maker discovered the London hangouts of "gods" such as Humphrey Lyttelton (who called him "Bunny-Bum" on account of his dancing). Melly joined Mick Mulligan's Magnolia Jazz Band, playing New Orleans classics at "all-night raves" and unglamorous provincial halls. He broke open Benzedrine inhalers to stay the course, slept in brothels, and confronted violent assailants with Dadaist verse by Kurt Schwitters (only to get head-butted for his pains) - hair-raising adventures which he documented in Owning Up, published in 1965.

His emotional life was as erratic. He met his first wife, Victoria Vaughan, in a Soho club: "She had wonderful legs." They married in 1955, but within a year their marriage was "in a very bad way". "We had nothing in common," Melly confessed:

She went off to Italy with someone I'd had an affair with and my sister had been fond of, so he'd had the whole family. She returned, seduced me and announced she was pregnant but the baby wasn't mine. I said I would accept the child, a girl, but then they vanished. It turned out I was her father . . .

Melly resumed his musical career, recording jazz and blues material for Decca, as well as other EPs; and in October 1962, after a violent affair with a black snake-charmer named Cerise Johnson, which left him literally "bleeding and bruised", he met his second wife-to-be, Diana Moynihan (still married to her second husband), at Muriel Belcher's Soho drinking den, the Colony Room, Melly's favoured club. (Discussing Belcher, Dan Farson remarked to Melly that the Colony "was a place where you could take your grandmother and possibly your father, but not your mother". " She rather liked my mother," replied Melly. And among those sometimes bitchy personalities, he showed his generous nature, as Jonathan Fryer noted: "If anyone ever needed help, like a bed for the night, or a free act to help raise money at a charity gig, George Melly would be the first to step forward.")

He was smitten with Diana:

She was an amazing beauty but I really fell in love when I talked to her. We married when we were expecting our son Tom.

The new relationship coincided with the end of Melly's touring with a band - but only because he saw that jazz was about to be overtaken by a new pop culture, one to which his eyes were opened when his band shared an early billing with Tommy Steele:

a low continuous hum began to rise from the auditorium. It was like a swarm of bees getting ready to swarm . . . The teenagers were very young. The manager used to say: "We had another rock concert last night. Not a dry seat in the house."

In his book Revolt into Style (1970), Melly would describe Steele's success as "the first British pop event".

"And so I left the jazz world and became a journalist." Melly took up music criticism, and wrote speech balloons for the Daily Mail's " Flook" cartoon; his film criticism for The Observer was exemplary (he won IPC "Critic of the Year" in 1970). He and Diana moved into a large house in Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town, "surrounded by the trendy media" (a subject he explored, with Barry Fantoni, in his 1980 book The Media Mob). He lectured on art, from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Surrealists, and also wrote screenplays. Smashing Time (1967) starred Rita Tushingham and Lynn Redgrave as two "North Country girls" enjoying "farcical adventures in Swinging London"; Halliwell's thought it had "plenty of coarse vigour but no style or sympathy". In 1970, he dramatised Take a Girl Like You, based on the novel by Kingsley Amis and directed by Jonathan Miller - starring Hayley Mills as another "North Country girl" in London with "man trouble", in the shape of Oliver Reed.

The disruptive Sixties suited Melly: he was arrested, at last, at a Ban the Bomb march, and shared a cell with Lynn Redgrave's sister Vanessa. And, having ever despised organised religion, he subsequently became President of the British Humanist Association. Yet he felt there was "something missing" in his life. He began singing again, with John Chiltern's Feetwarmers at New Merlin's Cave, a dilapidated King's Cross pub, riding there on his moped. In 1972, the Beatles' former PR, Derek Taylor, arranged for him to record an album, Nuts, featuring Fats Waller and Count Basie classics. The follow-up, Son of Nuts, came out in 1973. It was "awash", in Antony Hatfield's words, "with gorgeous innuendo", and included his signature tune, "Good Time George", written by Chiltern.

In 1974 Melly resigned from The Observer and joined the Feetwarmers full-time, adopting the suits that became his trademark. Unable to fit into jeans, he found a second-hand clothes shop which claimed, "We fit anybody." He emerged, like Mr Benn, in a sharp Thirties-style suit, complete with fedora. When moths ate that, he had new versions made, in ever more vivid colours, chalkstripe versions of Max Miller's stagewear; Melly knew that, to be a convincing front man, he must look the part. It was an extension of his authorial voice, as his entry in Philip Core's encyclopaedic Camp (1984) suggests, a multi-sexual semi-aesthetic camp which is funny . . . by the wry tone . . . in which the author laughs at his own flamboyant life, and apologises for its very success.

Melly's stage appearances were surreal performances in themselves. John Walsh used to watch him sing at the Half Moon pub in Putney:

His introductions were tremendously stylish, like Leonard Sachs crossed with Anthony Burgess: "There are regrettably few songs that concern themselves with Terpsichorean rivalry, and even fewer that carry undertones of lesbian incest. So I'm happy to be able to sing you, 'I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate'." Too fat to tap-dance, he used to mark the climax of "Happy Feet" by clasping the bass drum and languidly lifting one leg behind him, so that the drummer could beat a torrential solo on the base of one perfectly fitted co-respondent shoe.

Musically, Melly stayed true to vaudeville jazz:

I've always had this belief that jazz should be entertainment. The purist white critics over the years have tended to be rather contemptuous about this Liverpudlian, half-Jewish, public school fool, but now they've started coming round a bit. If you do something long enough, and you get old enough . . .

That fact was proved by his 30 years' performing with the Feetwarmers, and almost as many Christmas gigs at Ronnie Scott's.

Melly remained a devoted subversive. He fell out with Roland Penrose, founder of the ICA, when Penrose invited the Duke of Edinburgh - "that saloon-bar philistine" - to open a Picasso exhibition, and refused appointment as CBE: "I didn't see the point of accepting an honour from a Hanoverian sovereign of a former empire." He also championed outsider art, made by the marginalised; mental patients or down-and-outs who created "strange creatures and people . . . It helps to be a bit dotty," he observed in 2004. "There is a spontaneity and necessity to outsider art that is missing from people who go to art school."

Indeed, Melly's Revolt into Style is a classic of pop criticism, for which he was acclaimed by Clive James as "the first really top-drawer intellectual" to examine pop culture, while John Coleman noted in The Observer, "George Melly might have lived his life to write Revolt into Style." From Colin MacInnes to Cliff Richard, from Mary Quant to the Rolling Stones, Melly cited the reference points for a post-war generation:

Pop in this country evolved from its primitive beginnings (1956-7), through its classic period (1963-6) towards its noisy and brilliant decadence (1969-?) . . . It lit up the contemporary landscape as if by a series of magnesium flares . . . the evolution of a new kind of culture, neither " popular" nor mandarin.

And yet, compared to jazz, Melly considered pop music to have produced few geniuses. He rightly traced pop art's antecedents to his beloved Surrealist and Dadaist movements; and, in photography, he likened David Bailey and other fashion photographers of the period to those of an earlier age, such as Cecil Beaton - as socially mobile, in their own way, as each other.

George Melly's writing on art was consistently interesting. He considered his friend Francis Bacon to be the greatest British painter since Turner . . . I especially like the excellent way he was able to use paint not to imitate reality but to make it real.

Melly's excellent It's All Writ Out for You (1986) championed the outsider artist Scottie Wilson; and he further pursued the theme in Tribe of One: great naïve and primitive painters of the British Isles (with Michael Wood, 1991). His elegant editing of Edward James's Swans Reflecting Elephants: my early years (1982) established the importance of James's Surrealist patronage, and in 1997 he published Don't Tell Sybil: an intimate memoir of ELT Mesens. Hooked!, his 2000 book on fly fishing (a passion which persuaded him to part with works by Magritte and Picasso to buy a mile of Welsh river, close to his country home there), was spiced up with a passage about masturbating over a trout:

I put that bit in early because not many people are interested in reviewing a fishing book unless something startles them.

In 1998, the National Portrait Gallery commissioned Maggi Hambling to paint his portrait. Melly was pleased with the result:

My wife says that whenever anything worries me I instantly turn it into a joke. But I do have a slightly melancholic side, and I think that is captured here.

In 2001, Melly's 75th birthday was celebrated by a six-part Radio 2 series, Mellymania!, for which he went in search of his early influences, among them the risqué Lancastrian comedian Frank Randle; and the equally outré, cross-dressing Duggie Byng, one of Maudie's "theatrical circle". Melly had a lively broadcasting presence: his chairmanship of Channel 4's Gallery quiz in 1990 had produced an extraordinary selection of Bohemian panellists - as though the Colony Room had been evacuated for the afternoon - with the likes of Hambling, Dan Farson and Michael Wishart brought out blinking into the glare of the studio lights (Wishart told me he prepared for his appearance with a line of sulphate and a large Martini).

Melly remained a man-about-town into the 21st century: I remember chatting to him after a performance in the suitably surreal environs of the Barbican, an airport-lounge limbo in which his gangster-suited resplendency stuck out like a zebra in a teashop. He was by then arthritic and very deaf, and wore an obvious hearing-aid, which gave him the air of a portly Johnnie Ray.

He lived for many years in North Kensington, with his second wife, Diana, upstairs, and him below: "We sleep in separate rooms like the Queen and Prince Philip. We've both had affairs and weren't discreet." One close relationship was with the art critic Louisa Buck, who met Melly when she was a 24-year-old art student, and who remembered him with deep affection and admiration. In Diana Melly's own funny and affectionate account of their largely "open" 44-year marriage, Take a Girl Like Me (2005, subtitled "Life with George"), she wrote frankly of her own affairs - with the young men, for example, who reminded her of her son, Patrick, by her first marriage, and who died, aged 24, a heroin addict. She also noted that, when Melly's latest mistress had threatened to cut her head off, she retaliated by Tippexing out her lunch appointment in his diary.

Melly's own Slowing Down, published a few months later, detailed the iniquities of old age and ill-health without self-pity, a tale of detached retinas, enemas and diarrhoea, having to pee in the street and being trundled about in a "granny-mobile" surreally brand-named " The Eagle"- as well as memories of his fetish for women's socks and an affinity for the late Queen Mother, on account that "she drank too much, loved the company of queens and overspent wildly".

George Melly's upstairs-downstairs existence seemed a metaphor for his glitter-gutter life. Despite a tendency to dark irony - "No good deed should go unpunished" was a favourite dictum - he was true to his father's words; he had always done what he wanted, gloriously. Ill-health and advancing years had circumscribed his adventures; but, as he declared to one writer, in that rich, fruity voice, "Billie Holiday sang what I feel in one verse: 'I ain't got no future but lord, lord, what a past.' "

Philip Hoare

His penchant for Surrealism and his own brand of anarchy meant that George Melly had no time for religion, writes Steve Voce. But he was not above recognising the opposition when it was on form. Faced with a uniquely beautiful sunset in the Scottish Highlands, he had the Mick Mulligan band coach pull to the side of the road and organised the musicians in a round of applause for God.

His brilliance for melodrama was exemplified by his regular performance of "Frankie and Johnny" where, in a remarkable display, back to the audience and hands along his spine, he created an incredible tableau of a couple making love. The lyric involved Johnny doing Frankie wrong. Intoned by George, it became "I think he was contemplating doing you a serious injury." The number stayed in the Melly repertoire for more than 40 years and was only finally abandoned when George became too portly and prone to damage to throw himself violently to the floor as he had done each night at the climax of the number.

It was George Melly as much as D.H. Lawrence and Lady Chatterley's Lover who forced the acceptance of free thinking about sex in Britain. The Rolling Stones and other rock groups appeared on the scene with intent to shock in the 1960s, but George had covered the same ground 20 years earlier. He and his satyr-like bandleader Mulligan were replete with the conquests of the many groupies who had placed themselves before them.

George Melly needed an audience. He didn't care whether he sang or spoke, or simply stood before a crowd, as long as there was one there and it was devoting all its attention to him. The audience was his great addiction, as was apparent in his final months when he went on inexorably and beyond sense with his public appearances, ignoring a sequence of illnesses that would have pole-axed anyone less driven.

Interesting? Click here to explore further