Overlooked in all the news I've read of his passing is the fact that he wrote
the script for
Rita's "Smashing Time"... Fortunately, I got to see this legend a few years ago
at Ronnie
Scott's nightclub in Soho...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3493375.stm

Obituary: George Melly

George Melly was loved for his talent and flamboyant lifestyle

With his flamboyant suits, oversize hats and Havana cigars, George Melly was a
good-time
Renaissance man who indulged, often over-indulged, his passions for jazz, film,
art,
fishing, writing, drink and sex.

He was born in Liverpool in 1926 and educated at the ultra-liberal Stowe public
school in
Buckinghamshire, where he pursued his interests with vigour and without
inhibition.

At school, he first became interested in art, particularly Surrealism.

He served as an able-seaman in the Royal Navy towards the end of World War II,
where he
got into trouble for distributing anarchist literature.

He moved to London in 1948 to work in an art gallery run by Belgian artist ELT
Mesens, a
leading light in the International Surrealist movement.

Melly became recognised as an authority on the subject and later wrote a book,
Paris and
the Surrealists.


Melly became a pop music critic for The Observer - and the BBC
According to his memoirs, it was at this time that he augmented the promiscuous
homosexuality of his schooldays, indulging in a series of menages a trois,
initially with
Mesens and his wife Sybil.

He had also developed a love of jazz, and started singing with Mick Mulligan's
band in
1949. His voice was described by John Mortimer as possessing "the raucous charm
of an
old negress".

A fan of Bessie Smith and Fats Waller, he was to become famous for his routine
of singing
jazz numbers from the 1920s, interspersed with ribald jokes and saucy asides.

'Too respectable'

The band's drink and sex-fuelled wild adventures were recalled in Melly's first
book,
Owning Up.

His first venture into journalism came in 1956, when he started writing the
captions for
the Flook newspaper strip cartoon, a job which continued for 15 years and
inspired two
books.

In 1965, he joined The Observer as pop music critic, and, over the next eight
years,
graduated to television and film.

But he returned to jazz singing because he thought the Observer work was making
him
too respectable. He joined John Chilton's Feetwarmers whose clarinettist, Wally
Fawkes,
had drawn the Trog cartoons.

With his loud hat and suits, modelled on the old gangster movies of the 1930s
and 40s, he
became a favourite on the Dixieland jazz circuit.

His love of fly-fishing, which began in childhood, never left him. In later
life, he sold
several important paintings to enable him to buy a mile of the River Usk in
Wales.

George Melly suffered from arthritis, psoriasis and a condition which precluded
his
drinking wine.

The latter did not hold him back, however, and his seemingly endless stream of
amusing
anecdotes made George Melly one of British showbusiness's most colourful and
sought-
after personalities.