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| Jazzy George shows no sign of
slowing down |
George Melly is one of our more colourful cultural
pundits – and he is helping to keep the jazz and blues flag
flying, writes Graham Tayar
Slowing Down by George Melly
Viking, £17.99
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George Melly at Ray’s Jazz at Foyles reading from his
autobiography Slowing Down. Pictures by Paul Pace
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JAZZ is a minor but important (to many of us) art form, covering
approximately the 20th century and onwards, though its roots go
much further back into American history, black and white. And although
Britain is a marginal part of the jazz world, it has produced many
fine jazz musicians, particularly since World War II.
Among them, perhaps the most colourful, eccentric, polymathic, and
popular is blues-singer George Melly, still belting out the music
after more than 50 years in the business.
After public-school (Stowe, where it’s been claimed something
interesting happened with Peregrine Worsthorne), the Royal Navy,
which he describes in an earlier biography ‘Rum, Bum and Concertina’
(it was still his gay period), assistant in an art gallery specialising
in Surrealism – George once wrote surrealist poetry himself
– he went on the road for ten years with Mick Mulligan’s
band.
There was a long gap in the 1960s, when he became television and
film critic for The Observer. As Critic of the Year in 1970, strip-cartoon
wordster for Wally Fawkes’ Flook, arts commentator on TV, radio
and in his own seminal book, ‘Revolt into Style’ and most
of all as the witty frank chronicler of his many lives, George was
a major cultural pundit.
But at heart, he was still a performer. Singing – occasionally
– still in the style of Bessie Smith and visibly always delighted
by the applause that for 30 years and more has sustained the longest
stage come-back in show-business history. At the time, I thought
the Melly revival would last three or four years until he got bored
with it. I couldn’t have been more wrong. He’s continued
to live all his lives simultaneously.
Now at nearly 80, George is very deaf, suffering from “incipient
emphysema”, (he is still a smoker) and an occasional “unexpected
attack of violent diarrhoea”, often in such inappropriate places
as the Victoria and Albert Museum.
His active sex-life is over. “If we retain any sense, we will
avoid flirting, remembering that the very idea of randy old tortoises
is repulsive to anyone we might fancy, and besides I’m completely
impotent and, even if I weren’t, I am sexually indifferent
to those of my age group,” he writes.
George nevertheless copes quite well, with his anecdotal skills
unimpaired, and his reminiscences as sharp and funny as ever. And
he can and does continue to perform.
“In my late 70s, I am still able to play at senility, enjoying
supportive
friends, singing, albeit seated and wearing an eye patch, drinking
Irish whiskey, fly-fishing for trout, looking at works of art and
listening to Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues. I imagine this
last will be the last to go.”
And later he adds: “I’m not, they tell me with some surprise,
in bad nick.” All things considered, he is a survivor, though
the early chapters of this book, largely on his symptoms, doctors
and treatments, provide good reasons for entitling it ‘Slowing
Down’.
Then he moves on to his return to full-time singing, 30 years ago,
via Sunday lunch-times at the Clerkenwell pub ‘New Merlin’s
Cave’, where Duncan Hamilton and I had managed to persuade
the King’s Cross police station Chief Superintendent to legalise
(or at least allow) jazz-loving parents to bring their small children
with them for a civilised family drink.
But for George, with the John Chilton’s Feetwarmers, it provided
a jump-off point for an amazing and lasting breakthrough as he became
– and has remained – a national popular hero.
Part of his support has come from middle-aged and elderly jazz fans
who saw him recreating their own long-lost youth. But the genuinely
young, students and the like, also find George’s style, warmth,
and charisma irresistible. Among other virtues, he and his bands
have exposed jazz to those who otherwise would never have heard
of it, or listened to it.
Rock ’n Roll may rule – but he has helped keep the jazz
and blues flag flying.
In his account of the last three decades, George underlines the
parts played by others in his revival, trumpeter, band leader and
writer John Chilton, modern jazz stalwart Ronnie Scott, at whose
club, the Melly show has played over 30 Christmas seasons, promoter
and publicist Derek Taylor, the formidable agent Jack Higgins, they
are all precisely and wittily put into context as George digs up
his past.
It’s all good not-so-clean fun, stuffed with Melly stories
and asides – on Joan Bakewell, “Good Old Joan. You are
still this ageing impotent man’s crumpet,” on Liza Minnelli,
Judy Garland’s daughter, and a star guest at Scott’s,
“she batted her long eyelashes at me and said, Momma would
have loved your numbers.
“Could she have told me anything more calculated to please?”
They are all there, family and friends, scattered through these
pages, his mother Maud, my distant cousin, who tried to join the
RAF when well over eighty, his wife Diana, the wing commander who
has steered him and supported him over the years
A delicious and entrancing read, ending with his own parody of Betjeman,
‘Melly’s Churchyard.’ But why did he prematurely
consign poor Diana to this graveyard list? And Maggie Hambling,
whose line drawings enrich the text? A slight attack of Surrealism
perhaps? Never mind, it’s a smashing book.
• Graham Tayar is a former BBC producer and a jazz writer.
He also plays jazz piano and runs the Crouch End All Stars jazz
band. |
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