George Melly (1926–2007)

This hilarious memoir, by the flamboyant and free-spirited British jazz singer George Melly, is ostensibly about his time as a Royal Navy conscript at the end of World War II, but that’s not the half of it. Despite having been to a posh boarding school he was not considered officer material and spent his time in the Navy as an Ordinary Seaman on the Lower Deck. In fact, due to an administrative cock-up, he spent the first two years of his service onshore. This gave him plenty of time to hang out with the London surrealist group, become an habitué of Soho, make friends with the likes of Quentin Crisp and Lucian Freud, attend anarchist meetings, and take part in orgies in the houses of gay aristocrats. When young Melly finally set sail the war was safely over though he did eventually get into a spot of bother when a Warrant Officer discovered his collection of anarchist literature. Discovered is actually the wrong word as Melly, characteristically, had made no attempt to conceal the pamphlets.

Similarly, he made no attempt to conceal anything in his several volumes of memoirs. Melly was an unusually candid autobiographer with an admirable willingness to highlight aspects of his behaviour which other memoirists might prefer not to mention. I first read this as a teenager, shortly after it came out, and remember finding much of it deliciously naughty. Inevitably, it seems rather less so now, but remains as funny as it ever was. This time round I think I better appreciated just how well-written it is. Melly captures the period detail with some skill, and conveys an exhilarating sense of a young man discovering the possibilities of life, as well as casting an occasionally quizzical eye on the pretensions and self-deceptions of his former self.

This is a wonderfully entertaining book. ‘Good time George’, as he was known, was such an amiable writer; his truly unconventional and libertarian spirit shine from every page.… (more)

The sixties were still swinging when George Melly was writing this illuminating and incredibly enjoyable history of the British pop culture of the era. Born in 1926 and a trad jazzer at heart, Melly was not a prime mover of ‘60s pop culture, but he was a perceptive and broadly sympathetic observer.

The central thesis of the book is that each pop culture movement begins as authentic rebellion and is then gradually assimilated into show business and turned into harmless and profitable style commodity (the difference now being that contemporary pop culture starts and ends as mere style).

Melly focuses on music as the engine of pop culture (with the Beatles inevitably and rightly taking centre stage) but also includes chapters on visual art and fashion, television, radio, cinema, theatre and literature (the Liverpool poets figuring large here).

Remarkably for a contemporaneous account Melly got most of it right, so the book like much of the music it details, has stood the test of time. Revolt into Style, first published in 1970, was followed by numerous books on the same period, but it remains one of the few essential ones.

Unlike many at the time, who thought pop music was imposed on the ‘masses’ by cynical manipulators of public taste, Melly saw clearly that this was not the case. The manipulators and exploiters are only able to move in after the bandwagon has started to roll - every pop movement begins as a genuine grass roots response to a particular artist or band. He makes the extremely perceptive observation that pop is essentially a moment, a spontaneous eruption of energy which, unbounded by notions of past and future, exists in a perpetual present.

Melly understood that pop culture as it developed in the ‘60s was distinct from both traditional culture and older forms of popular culture, creating the possibility of a genuinely democratic culture which arose from society itself, rather than being imposed from above by an elite, and one which could collapse conventional notions of highbrow and lowbrow art.

To a large extent this is what has happened. Is Philip Glass a classical or popular composer? Was David Bowie a pop singer or a singer of art songs? The blessings may, of course, have turned out to be decidedly mixed. Is reality television a manifestation of democratic culture? There is certainly an undeniable sense in which large numbers of people want it.

In the final chapter of the book, written in January 1970, Melly praises pop for having made society less hidebound by convention, more spontaneous and emotionally open. He then, rather surprisingly, pronounces it dead and the book suddenly reveals itself as a requiem for a phenomenon that has served its purpose and exhausted its possibilities. This too, despite the punk rebellion of the mid seventies, has turned out to be largely correct. The notion that pop music could change anything other than your clothes or hairstyle effectively died with the ‘60s as pop became just another lucrative branch of the music business and success increasingly removed the bands from the audience that had originally produced them.

For those of us of a certain age and sensibility re-reading Revolt Into Style provides a powerful Proustian rush. Strange indeed to think that, once upon a time in the past, Tommy Steele was considered a rock ‘n’ roll rebel. The past, of course, being a foreign country.… (more)

When I was a teenager in the 1970s jazz singer George Melly was a frequent TV talking head and chat show guest. Although not a trad jazz fan, I was immensely drawn to this deliciously camp, larger than life, fruity voiced Liverpudlian, often dressed as though he was an associate of Al Capone, who could talk with erudite and provocative eloquence about music, surrealism, music hall comedy, politics and pretty much any other subject that was thrown at him.

George Melly wore many different hats both literally and metaphorically. He was a jazz singer, TV critic, film critic, book critic, Punch columnist, television and radio presenter and documentarist, film scriptwriter, art historian, lecturer and raconteur. In the 60s he wrote a pop music column for the Observer newspaper, the first of its kind, which led to his 1970 book Revolt Into Style, one of the first books about 60s pop music and still one of the best.

John Chilton wrote a song for Melly called Good Time George and this pretty much sums him up. He was a dedicated bon viveur: sex, drink and trad jazz could well have been his motto.

Much drawn to surrealism and anarchism as a teenager (he even kept his collection of anarchist literature in his locker when he was doing his National Service in the Royal Navy, the discovery of which lead to an attempted court martial), he held solidly progressive views (pro CND, anti apartheid, pro gay rights - he was bisexual), but never became a bore about it and was also pleasantly politically incorrect (the old unreconstructed anarchist states of PC in Slowing Down ‘even when I agree with its aim I still resent its obligatory surveillance’). He was a lifelong atheist and humanist (this book includes a withering, but perfectly well reasoned, attack on Mother Teresa, whom Melly describes as ‘a serious backer into the limelight’).

When Melly wrote Slowing Down, his final book, he was in his late 70s and not exactly in the best of health. Much of the book is a chronicle of his deafness, diminishing eyesight, emphysema, mobility issues and loss of memory. His ailments are described with his characteristic candour (he even tells us about the nappies he wears due to his unpredictable bouts of diarrhoea). This might all sound a bit grim but he writes completely without self pity and with his usual wry humour.

His body might have been abandoning him, he died only a couple of years after this book was published, but he was still fully capable of behaving disgracefully. He relates a wonderful story about being apprehended by a young policeman while relieving himself against a public building after being caught short following a visit to a restaurant (‘well, sir, this time we’ll overlook it, but next time try not to choose the wall of a police station’). He remained a committed drinker and smoker to the end. He also continued to sing, albeit seated and wearing an eyepatch, which gave him a suitably piratical appearance.

Slowing Down includes a lengthy section about his return to jazz in the early 70s with John Chilton’s Feetwarmers which provides many hilarious tales of drunken and licentious behaviour - their debut album Nuts was recorded live at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club, but the performance was so inebriated they had to re-record it in the studio, and then dub on the rapturous applause they had genuinely received. There are also warm recollections of old friends such as Ronnie Scott himself. The book is illustrated by Maggi Hambling.

George Melly was incapable of writing a dull book and Slowing Down is a funny, sometimes moving and always entertaining read, but new readers should start with his autobiographical masterpiece, the brilliant Owning Up trilogy, published in one volume by Penguin.… (more)

ELT Mesens is not exactly a household name and, before reading this book, the almost nothing I knew about him came from two other Melly memoirs - Rum, Bum and Concertina and Owning Up. In those Mesens played a supporting role but here he gets star billing. Well almost, as this is the story of a friendship, with Melly himself looming large in the narrative.

ELT Mesens was a Belgian surrealist poet, collagist, art dealer, friend of Magritte, gambler and dedicated drinker. He first came to London in 1936 and helped to organise the now legendary International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries. He was the leader of the surrealist movement in England and the director of the London Gallery in the late 1940s and early 50s where Melly was his devoted but somewhat erratic assistant. His increasingly irascible and unpredictable alcohol fuelled behaviour eventually alienated pretty much everyone he knew, except Melly, who stayed loyal despite no shortage of provocation. Mesens died in 1971 aged 67.

Surrealism was a surprisingly hierarchical and authoritarian movement. Andre Breton, the leader of surrealism, ex-communicated alleged heretics with the zeal of a medieval Pope, and Mesens exerted similar authority, though inevitably on a smaller scale, in London. Melly makes the interesting point that surrealism was not an artistic movement but a commitment to a way of life.

Melly once sang a song called Good Time George and he certainly lived up to the title. He clearly lived the life of Riley. Sex (of all known varieties) copious quantities of booze and trad jazz (still considered quite racy in England when Melly discovered it in the early 1940s). And that’s not to mention the endless parties with his extensive collection of famous friends.

Young Melly was not short of confidence. Barely out of his teens he became part of the surrealist group in London by pretty much inviting himself along to one of their Soho dinners. Swanning around London in a sailor suit (well, he was doing his National Service in the Navy) the old Stoic (in the sense that he went to Stowe School only, in every other respect he was conscientiously hedonistic) moved with ease among the surrealist bigwigs. A few years later he breezed up to the stage at a jazz concert and asked if he could sing a number with the band and, in no time at all, he was the singer with the Mick Mulligan Magnolia Jazz Band and becoming quite famous. Melly cheerfully acknowledges that his success owed more to his extravagant personality than his abilities as a vocalist. Sheer cheek might sum it up.

Melly enjoyed a ménage a trois with Mesens and his wife Sybil and, when this ended, Melly and Mesens had an affair with each other. ‘Don’t tell Sybil’ became a catchphrase for Edouard as he implored George not to pass on the details of their latest drinking or gambling exploits (not that the ever loyal Melly needed much persuading).

The great virtue of Mellys’ memoirs is their complete lack of virtue in the traditional moralistic sense. He is astonishingly and hilariously candid. He simply wouldn’t have understood that dreadful, and dreadfully ubiquitous, contemporary phrase “too much information”. For George Melly there was obviously no such thing as too much information - particularly when it came to the most embarrassingly intimate details of his life.

If you haven’t read Melly before, I would recommend starting with the brilliant Owning Up trilogy, published in one volume by Penguin, but this book casts light on a fascinating part of his life only briefly touched on in his other books and is full of outrageously funny stories and his usual anarchic good humour. His sheer ebullience and wonderfully wayward spirit shine from every page.

By the way, Mesens collages can be found online and are well worth a look.… (more)