George Melly; Independent obit (Great)
Hyfler/Rosner
Flamboyant 'Oscar Wilde of English jazz', incisive critic
and memoirist of disarming candour
The Independent
06 July 2007
Philip Hoare
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.
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.
--
Please visit www.aodeadpool.com!
marilyn...@aol.com
Hyfler/Rosner
> mistress had threatened to cut her head off, she
> retaliated by Tippexing out her lunch appointment in his
> diary.
Who can explain?
danny burstein
>Who can explain?
"Tipp-Ex" is the German equivalent of "Wite-out" or "Liquid Paper".
ah...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipp-Ex
--
_____________________________________________________
Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key
dan...@panix.com
[to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]
Brad Ferguson
<dan...@panix.com> wrote:
> In <VpWdnc0DJvoMGhLb...@rcn.net> "Hyfler/Rosner"
> <rel...@rcn.com> writes:
>
> >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.
>
> >Who can explain?
>
> "Tipp-Ex" is the German equivalent of "Wite-out" or "Liquid Paper".
(Insert joke here about how it was invented by Johann Pachelbel's
mother.)
Brian Watson
"Brad Ferguson" <thir...@frXOXed.net> wrote in message
news:070720070916470077%thir...@frXOXed.net...
Pachelbell's canon.
--
Brian
"Fight like the Devil, die like a gentleman."
Hyfler/Rosner
--
\>>
>> (Insert joke here about how it was invented by Johann
>> Pachelbel's
>> mother.)
> I heard the story was included in that great body of work
> that is Pachelbell's canon.
Love you guys. Ask for an explanation and you get a
dissertation and a laugh.
Brian Watson
"Hyfler/Rosner" <rel...@rcn.com> wrote in message
news:oOCdnasAepdSAxLb...@rcn.net...
...and a corpse.
He was a BIG fella - get it wrong and we could witness the second Great Fire
Of London.