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Many of Melly’s lifelong musical and humorous stage routines took shape during his years with Mulligan’s band, from the exaggerated movements he adopted to illustrate the words to such Bessie Smith numbers as Take Me for a Buggy Ride (the first tune Melly recorded) to his elaborate recreation of a New Orleans funeral, or his Frankie and Johnny setpiece, which in his early years involved falling enthusiastically from the stage at the moment Johnny is shot. (“Was that you falling down?” the trumpeter Eddie Calvert once asked him in the wings after a particularly spectacular stage “death”. When Melly told him that indeed it was, Calvert eyed him suspiciously. “You’ll get cancer,” he said dismissively.)

The band itself went through several incarnations, before ending up as a seven-piece Dixieland ensemble, broadly specialising in a loose-knit Chicago style of jazz, rather than the more earthy New Orleans style espoused by such revivalists as Chris Barber and Ken Colyer. The group recorded for Tempo, Saga, Decca, Parlophone and Pye, and Melly also recorded a few pieces under his own name or with Alex Welsh’s band for a similar variety of labels. He and Mulligan also provided the musical illustrations for a highly eccentric recorded history of jazz presented by the optician-turned-historian Rex Harris, about which Melly later preferred to remain tight-lipped, saying only that it proved he had not been born with a vocation to sing about breaking rocks in a chain gang.

His finest recording of the period was a powerfully felt version of Michigan Water Blues, from 1957, although the overall atmosphere of his work with Mulligan is best captured on Mama Don’t Allow It, from April 1959.

Most of the group’s frequent changes in personnel are charted in affectionate detail in Owning Up, which was prompted by a feature he wrote on the jazz life for Queen magazine in 1963. As well as many well-known figures in the musical world, such as the pianist Johnny Parker, the drummer Pete Appleby and the agent-turned-author Jim Godbolt, Melly’s pen-portraits include such fellow side-men as the clarinettist Ian Christie (who went on to write for the Daily Express and other papers), the trombonist Frank Parr (a former county cricketer who subsequently managed the Acker Bilk organisation) and the tuba-player Owen Maddock (who went on to design F1 racing engines).

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

The central portrait in Owning Up – other than that of Melly himself – is that of the trumpeter Mick Mulligan. He and Melly become extremely close friends and they remained so long after the band broke up in 1963, and Mulligan continued for a time to be Melly’s manager. During their professional years together Mulligan detested rehearsal and seldom added to his repertoire. Despite Melly’s description of the band’s “increasingly dull noise”, his fondness for Mulligan’s anarchic sense of humour and his ebullient personality kept Melly in the band.

However, from the mid1950s, Melly began to be increasingly financially and professionally independent from his life as a musician. In 1956 he was invited by the Daily Mail to replace Humphrey Lyttelton as the author of the balloons in Wally Fawkes’s Flook cartoon strip, and henceforth, as he travelled the country with Mulligan, he carried a portable typewriter to tap out the adventures of Rufus, Scoop and the strip’s furry hero. The constant observation of life in Britain’s dance halls and musicians’ digs kept the strip sharp and topical, just as, in the 1960s, it reflected Melly’s later occupation as a film and TV critic.

He eventually handed the balloon-filling on to Barry Norman in 1970, but that same year an anthology of his work on the strip appeared from Sidgwick & Jackson as A Flook’s Eye-View of the Sixties. A retrospective exhibition of Flook’s first 30 years was held in 1979 at the Centre for Cartoon History at the University of Kent.

Melly also began to broadcast in the 1950s, and by 1963 had become a regular presenter of Jazz Club on BBC radio. He was also well known by this time as a festival and concert compere, and as an occasional TV presenter.

He married his first wife, Victoria, in 1955, but they soon separated and were divorced in 1962 after Melly met his second wife, Diana, shortly before the Mulligan band dissolved. He married Diana in 1963. He retired from full-time music at that point, fully intending only to sing on a semi-professional or part-time basis, if at all, for the rest of his life.

In addition to Flook, he and Fawkes were producing regular cartoons for the Spectator, and in 1964 Melly became – rather surprisingly to those who knew him – the pop music critic for The Observer.

An initial distaste for the music of the Beatles was soon replaced by curiosity, as Melly realised that he was witnessing the social, musical and sexual revolution of the swinging Sixties at first hand, and having the opportunity to write about it on a weekly basis. These columns eventually led to Revolt into Style (1970), one of the first and still one of the best-written in-depth studies of the British pop arts.

By the time the book appeared Melly had become the paper’s TV critic. This was a largely sedentary life, which nevertheless allowed him to decamp for long periods to a cottage near Brecon where he watched television and wrote much of the book, and also energetically applied himself to trout-fishing, which had always been a hobby, even during his days as a travelling singer.