On the Road with George Melly Read online

  There had been other troubles with the Feetwarmers too. A cancelled Christmas bonus due to lack of funds after their last Christmas season at Ronnie Scott’s had provoked a bad row with one member. And one in particular had incurred George’s increasing wrath. ‘Him! I can’t stand him! One day he came to the breakfast table and said, “Can I join you?” And I SCREAMED at him [George, I was soon to find out, often talked in capital letters], “No! You can’t. You are annoying, stupid and tedious and I want nothing to do with you. Go and sit somewhere else.”’ Plainly the Feetwarmers had not always considered the social clause in their employment policies.

  Later we walked, in bright sunlight, from the house towards Shepherd’s Bush Green. George was sporting a bright-pink knitted shoulder bag. ‘I wear one too,’ I observed.

  ‘Not so poofy as mine,’ returned my companion.

  On the way we stopped at a service laundry run by a pretty Indonesian girl, and George emptied a large carrier bag of laundry on to her counter. ‘Yours, my dear!’ he said. ‘Oh look at that lovely Rastafarian art on the wall of the railway bridge. You didn’t notice that, did you? I thought not! Let’s go and look.’

  We stopped to admire the graffiti before making our way to a Shepherd’s Bush brasserie where my host received a big welcome from the owner. ‘We’ll drink gazpacho,’ George said. ‘You don’t know what that is, do you?’ I had to admit that I didn’t.

  ‘It’s cold soup,’ said George when it arrived, ‘delicious!’ And emptied the bowl by lifting it to his lips. ‘I’ve got a couple of broadcasts later on this afternoon,’ he continued, ‘then lecturing later at the Tate – Matisse and Picasso. It’s not until 11 p.m.; part of an all-nighter. It finishes at 7 a.m.’

  ‘That’s late,’ I said, ‘but you look fit and fine!’

  ‘In general, yes,’ said George, ‘but in a month or so I have to have that thing with the tube down my throat. Monday, 19 September. Yes, that’s it; an endoscopy. Something amiss in my stomach apparently but I’ve no idea what. About twenty years ago I had an expensive set of tests for stomach ulcers: blow down a tube – squeeze-blow and so on. But the first two times nothing worked and it was expensive. So I said, “I’m not here to be a bankrupt guinea pig.”’

  The talk turned to our first date at Harlech the following week, and I mentioned a couple of tunes and programme order. George readily agreed; apparently he was the most easy-going and co-operative of musical partners. ‘Now,’ he said with a wicked grin, ‘after this you can tell Jack we spent the WHOLE lunchtime working out a programme.’

  After a pause, he called the maître-d’hôtel to the table. ‘Does anyone smoke here?’ he asked.

  ‘No one on the staff, sir. I’m sorry.’

  ‘There’s a pretty blonde over there who’s smoking,’ I said. ‘See her – talking to her boyfriend?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ George strolled across and returned a minute or two later with his free cigarette.

  ‘Did she know you?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t think so,’ said George. ‘If she did, she didn’t let on. Well, now, you’re going to the station.’

  I wasn’t sure if this was an observation or a gentle command but together in the afternoon sun we walked back towards the tube. ‘Where’s Diana today?’ I asked.

  ‘In the country,’ said George. ‘We have a loose relationship. If she’s in the country I’m generally in town, and vice versa. Lovely little arse!’ he added unexpectedly.

  I looked over and a pretty young girl had passed us. It was obvious that the Dean of Decadence was far from his retirement date yet. We shook hands at the tube station and I watched my wonderful new friend make his stately way back towards home in the Shepherd’s Bush sunlight as I remembered how my musico-cultural love affair with him had begun all of 41 years before.

  CHAPTER TWO

  All Those Years Ago

  It was the rough-edged but enchantingly lyrical voice providing a seductive three-minute jazz interlude on ‘Saturday Club’, sometime in 1961, that had persuaded me that I’d discovered for myself a jazz singer who was special. The song was ‘Sweet Lorraine’ and the young singer was – of course – my musical partner-to-be, George Melly.

  At that point, of course, I had no idea of this and I didn’t know that much about George Melly either. He sang with a famous band led by trumpeter Mick Mulligan, and they toured Britain, made records, of course, and appeared on radio as well as television. We’d just acquired a television, after years of determined resistance by my father (who preferred his beloved gramophone and regularly growing collection of classical LPs), and one night I tuned in on a short show, in grainy black and white, featuring my newly discovered band and singer. An informal thing, in which the voice-over announcer talked about the ‘grainy trumpet of Mick Mulligan’ and George committed to television history his spectacular version of ‘Frankie and Johnny’, turning his back to the camera to simulate, with his own hands stroking his back, a couple in passionate embrace. It was a striking idea, which David Bowie would (consciously or not) also use years later (no doubt with George’s approval) for his ‘Heroes’ video.

  But for now that was just about it. I sensed vaguely that Mulligan and Melly had a ‘reputation’; big enough for one LP – on which they were paired with the ‘Saints’ jazz band from Manchester – to be titled The Saints Meet the Sinners. Beyond that, though, there was nothing much to go on.

  That is (or was) until 1965 when – as a smiling young trainee librarian in Southend Central Library – I discovered George’s first autobiography Owning Up, and snatched it away from the ‘New titles’ section. Reading – or rather devouring – it in our nearby coffee bar, in fits of laughter, a whole new world opened up; a world of all-night jazz, wild drinking, damp digs and lumbering back a scrubber to the room, if you hadn’t already had a knee-tremble with her behind the club halfway through the job.

  Virtuously, George had shown the text of his proposed books to all the friends and partners whose eccentricities – and on-the-road excesses – might have given cause for offence, domestic problems or even a libel suit. All had agreed bar one: trombonist Frank Parr who, before his alliance with Mick Mulligan’s band, had shown huge promise as a potential member of Lancashire’s cricket team. Among much other intimate detail, Frank’s portrait included a detailed description of his regular inspection of his own armpits for spectacular body odour, self-described with pride as ‘going a bit’. But none of this bothered him at all. What did was George’s description of him as ‘wicket-keeper’. ‘Damn it,’ said Parr in a fury, ‘everyone knows the phrase is “kept wicket”.’ All else was well. And, as my good friend cornettist Alex Welsh laughingly pointed out in later years, it was only George’s own excesses that were the occasional victims of self-censorship.

  For a middle-class boy, raised in the sedate but hungover post-war years of victorious Britain – publicly entertained by the Billy Cotton Band Show, Dixon of Dock Green and the received-English of the BBC – this book was, to say the very least, an eye-opener. Vilified by the then poet laureate Philip Larkin (who, as a university librarian with a clutch of well-separated girlfriends, was in no real position to preach moral virtue), it achieved widespread notoriety and changed my life for at least a couple of decades. Admittedly the Beatles had, by then, cleared away all the stale air of Tin Pan Alley and the sixties were here. But Owning Up made it very plain that people had been swinging long before the sixties; as Bill Le Sage, the great British musician, told me in 1991, while I was trumpet tutor at Sir John Dankworth’s Wavendon summer school, ‘We taught the Rolling Stones all they knew.’ And that wasn’t just music! Growing up through the Southend music scene, trumpet with me at every available second, I decided – to the regular confusion of my steadier friends – that outrageousness was the way forward. Proper knee-trembles were out of the question. The Pill hadn’t arrived and I was far too shy to buy condoms, or ‘rubber johnnies’ as we called them then. But, by 1973 (in the appropriately anarchic atmo
sphere of Dave Claridge’s marvellous New Orleans Jazz Band), I certainly wasn’t above a good feel-up with a friendly local girl in the band car park and a nightly vocal rerendition of ‘Nuts’ in tribute to my hero.

  ‘Nuts’ was important. It was the naughty rewrite of the old jazz tune ‘Jada’, made famous by blues singer Roosevelt ‘The Honeydripper’ Sykes, that had brought George Melly directly back in the spotlight. And thanks to Owning Up, I knew a lot more about him. After the Beatles had created the twentieth century’s most dramatic redefinition of popular culture, he had more or less abandoned singing to become a TV critic and prolific journalist, often to be seen, read and heard. ‘Mr Melly, the man on the Telly’ indeed. A later book, Revolt into Style, proved that this remarkable man – unlike many of his more sullen jazz contemporaries – was, like myself, well open to the rock-revolution music that formed the yang to my own jazz yin. But it was in the pages of the Melody Maker – frequently at the championship of their marvellous critic Chris Welch – that George appeared most clearly to be refocusing attention on his singing, appearing, by the late 1960s, as a solo attraction with bands around London and perfectly fitting the times with his outrageousness. And, of course, his bisexuality. This was the era of David Bowie and the idea (as well as everything else, so it seemed) was definitely in.

  And then, thanks to the Beatles’ publicist, Derek Taylor, plus Welch and burgeoning publicity during the rock years, George had had his hit album Nuts. It was produced in 1972 by his great friend Taylor and you couldn’t miss it on the shelves. With a slot-in portrait of the man framed within its front cover and captioned ‘Wouldn’t this photograph make a good enlargement’ the album was no nostalgic retro, but an unashamed product of its time, complete with tributes from six contemporaries, including Max Jones, Michael Kustow and Mick Mulligan. Mick’s encomium reassured us that the tales of Owning Up had been truer than true. ‘You could never find a better mate than George, be it man, woman or bulldog,’ Mick wrote (later on I would get to the bottom of this bizarre triumvirate). ‘During some dozen years of weekly forays into the jungles of the scrubber belt, our George entertained, amused and generally knocked out not only the audiences but also ourselves as well. One of the Great Architect’s better efforts!’

  But my favourite tribute came from Annie Ross. Annie – my vocalese heroine – whose voice had led the great group Lambert Hendricks and Ross; who had sung with Lionel Hampton, Clifford Brown and Dizzy Gillespie; who was an icon of the modern jazz movement. And whose final top note in ‘Down for the Count’ in the Sing a Song of Basie album had kept me awake for three whole nights one school weekend when I was fourteen. Wow! If she liked George then he simply had to be the greatest thing. Annie’s tribute was a poem which cleverly summarised almost all of George’s obsessions – from hats to blues – and included the humorous and affectionate lines:

  He loves to eat

  And he digs Magritte

  . . . George Melly I love you!’

  The Nuts album was George’s recorded gateway to a new career as jazz singer with John Chilton’s Feetwarmers and the progress of a jazz singer into the charts dominated, or indeed ruled, by rock music was a source of fascination to me. However, still I was enthralled by Owning Up and those raver’s years on the road with Mick Mulligan.

  But it was in the later 1960s that I first saw George sing: at a concert at Camden’s Roundhouse in the good company of Alex Welsh’s great band and French tenorist Guy Lafitte, accompanied by Keith Ingham’s Trio. Unaccountably, one corner of the stage was occupied by a swarthy bearded tramp peacefully dozing through the proceedings. Far from fazed, my hero greeted the insurgent with a friendly wave, jovial greeting and clap on the shoulder for good measure as he passed him to sing. There’s a man, I thought, who likes life and people and takes everything in good spirit.

  Years later I would get to know not only George but Mick Mulligan too. Sometimes on my visits to the south coast with Val Wiseman’s Lady Sings the Blues show, he would turn up with an aristocratic south coast trumpet triumvirate completed by Kenny Baker and Nat Gonella, and lent his experienced ear to what was happening on the stage. With jutting eyebrows (somewhat ressembling devil’s horns), firmly placed handsome features, piercing blue eyes, public-school delivery and a charm that made his every statement sound like a declaration of affection, outrageous or not, it was easy to see why his singer of fourteen years, George Melly, loved him for life. And so I was delighted when, in 1984, as a contributor to the definitive and prestigious Grove’s Dictionary of Jazz, I was asked to write an entry on Mick Mulligan. I rang his number.

  ‘Mick Mulligan here.’

  ‘Mr Mulligan,’ I said, ‘I’ve been asked to include you in Grove’s Dictionary. And I’d very much like to know whether you mind – and, if not, if I might ask a few questions?’

  ‘Go ahead, cock.’ To Mick most people, apart from lady friends, were ‘cock’.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m afraid one of the things I need is your date of birth.’

  ‘Twenty-fourth of January, 1928,’ said my interviewee. ‘So that day I’ll have a drink with you.’

  ‘Certainly,’ I said, ‘and, by the way, that’s my girlfriend’s birthday too.’

  ‘Good,’ returned Mr Mulligan. ‘So I’ll have a drink with you – and a fuck with her!’

  During the interview that followed I asked Mick when he had formed the Magnolia Jazz Band. ‘1948,’ was the reply. ‘So when did you take up the trumpet?’ ‘1948.’ Remarkable!

  As the years went by I found out a lot more about Mick. Devastatingly charming, very well spoken (a BBC dramatisation of the Mulligan years once miscast him as a cockney) and incapable of offence even at his most outrageous; he had lived, for a time in the fifties, during his bandleading days, in Lisle Street, Soho – a haven for prostitutes. One hot day Mick had been sitting on the steps outside his house chatting to the girls.

  ‘Oh, love!’ said one. ‘It’s so hot. And you know what that does to men. I must have been up and down those stairs fourteen times already.’

  ‘Oh, darling,’ said Mick Mulligan, ‘your poor feet!’

  Mick adored women – and they fell for him too – but he could be impatient with inappropriate company. After one exhausting session with George and his band at 100 Oxford Street, he found himself surrounded by female admirers and one chosen friend who persistently interrupted his conversation. Mick finally turned to her in exasperation.

  ‘Darling,’ he said disparagingly. ‘Just shut up, will you. Or the fuck’s off!’

  Mick could handle himself well too as George knew from his efficient dispatch of a teddy boy one evening from the well-remembered Cooks Ferry Inn – a legendary home of British Dixieland jazz in the 1950s. On another occasion he had watched a female friend in the crowds being over-familiarly tackled by a bystander; so he walked over and told him in no uncertain terms to leave her alone. Mick returned to his friend looking satisfied.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘Now that must be worth a handful of tit, mustn’t it?’

  Mick had given up bandleading in the early 1960s and retired to run an off licence. And of course after ten more years George had returned to the road with John Chilton’s Feetwarmers to a second starry career. Much later, during the 1990s, by which time they had completed over twenty of their thirty years on the road, I had been corralled from an eighteen-month sojourn on Jazz FM into the service of the BBC. Initially as a substitute for my close friend and champion the late Peter Clayton, known to most as ‘the voice of jazz’ in Britain, I spent a less-than-secure five years on a variety of shows including the World Service’s Jazz for the Asking, Jazz Parade and later Jazz Notes. These last two were half-hour shows – first five a week, later four – that were notable for their transmission in or after the midnight hour when all but the most devoted jazz fans or lonely women were dozing off in their thousands.

  One welcome interviewee was George and I’d decided that it would be a good idea to reunite my guest
with his old bandleader. So, under the bemused gaze of my producer Terry Carter, I dialled Mick on a BBC line-out while George sat opposite me in the studio.

  ‘Hello, Mick,’ I said brightly. ‘George is here and waiting. And I thought it might be fun if I introduced him and then said, “Mick Mulligan, welcome back to the airwaves. And I’ve got a young singer here who’s looking for a job and wondered if he might have a word with you.” There was a compliant grunt from the other end of the phone and Terry Carter rolled the tapes.

  ‘Good evening,’ I said, ‘welcome to tonight’s Jazz Notes. Tonight our guests are legendary trumpeter Mick Mulligan and a newcomer to the scene – a singer who’s looking for work. Mick, would you mind having a word?’

  ‘Hello, you old cunt!’ responded the obliging Mick. ‘How’s things?’

  Bells rang, lights flashed and the rage infusing my prurient producer’s face indicated that we had a problem. Luckily we weren’t live and therefore in need of the seven-second delay mechanism universally known to live radio broadcasters as the ‘fuck-button’.

  ‘Mr Mulligan,’ said Carter, scarlet-faced, ‘we’ll have no more of that kind of language on my show. If you please!’

  But it was very difficult to stem Mick’s regular return to basic Anglo-Saxon and, rather than ‘de-um’ him later (‘de-umming’ is the editing process of eliminating unfortunate false starts and stops after an interview is recorded), we couldn’t even de-eff Mick and – to my great regret – the whole idea and interview were scrapped.

  But this was in the 1990s. Meanwhile, back in the early 1970s, I was still a full-time librarian with trumpet attached and just starting to make my way up the jazz ladder into professional company. Among a slew of other ambitions I knew that somehow I had to meet George Melly, the liberator of my introverted post-pubescent years.

  The chance came in about 1973 when I’d joined a professional-level traditional band, Jazz Legend, co-led by Hugh Rainey (a former star with Bob Wallis’s hit-making Storyville Jazzmen) and soprano saxophonist Eggy Ley, a well-known and gifted British player, who’d made a big name for himself in Europe during Britain’s trad-boom years. Every so often we played at a club in Romford called the Reservation and Eggy, who had friends all over the British jazz scene, sometimes invited guests to star with our band. An early one was a well-known British guitarist, Diz Disley, who played wonderfully (later he partnered Stephane Grappelli in Britain and beyond playing Django Reinhardt style and achieving widespread success on radio, TV and records). Diz scatted along happily with his own solos as he played: da-da-da-de-deedle-dum-da-da. Then as a string broke: da-da-de-deedle-fuck it!-da-da-deedle!