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On the Road with George Melly

Page 3

by Digby Fairweather


  But another early guest was to be – guess who – George Melly! I was thrilled.

  By now I knew that George was bisexual. Beyond the confessions of Owning Up I had been lucky enough to become friends with the great Dixieland bandleader Alex Welsh, who always announced one of his favourite tunes as ‘“She’s Funny That Way”, a tune we dedicate to George Melly’. I was intrigued but wary; at that time I was both slim and sported more long blonde hair than Roger Daltrey. And Pete Thornett, a wonderful East End gentleman who played bass with Jazz Legend, was wickedly ecstatic. ‘You be careful, Dig,’ he warned. ‘He’ll be up your bum before you know it.’

  Young still, beautifully dressed and full of star presence, George arrived and in due course joined the band on-stage. In a passionate version of ‘Backwater Blues’ I took a long down-home trumpet solo, eyes closed, and towards the end heard a delighted bellow from the bass department: ‘Told you!’

  As I opened my eyes I found my hero close at my side; bedroom-eyes focused firmly in my direction. Unabashed, at half-time nonetheless, I lined up with a bevy of fellow fans to have my well-thumbed copy of Owning Up autographed by my hero. And in doing so used a term to George inherited from my library days to try to explain how the book had altered my way of seeing life.

  ‘It was bibliotherapeutic,’ I explained helpfully.

  ‘What?’ said George, mystified. Possibly he was already suffering from the deafness that would assail him in later years, but the word itself was no doubt enough to stop the conversation. So that was that.

  The next time I saw him around was in the early 1980s at New Merlin’s Cave, the legendary home for the mainstream fraternity which flourished every Sunday lunchtime in Clerkenwell. As well as the dirtiest lavatory facilities in London, the Cave had a crèche for children, and played host to the cream of London’s players in that style. Visit Merlin’s on Sunday and you could hear (regularly) John Chilton, Bruce Turner and Wally Fawkes, as well as such eminent sitters-in as Kathy Stobart, trumpeter Colin Smith, pianist Collin Bates, and American visitors such as Al Grey and Jonah Jones, who would come in search of a blow. And usually at side-stage, immaculately dressed in pinstripe suit and fedora hat, would be George Melly, digging the sounds and waiting to sing.

  Another Merlin’s fixture was Sally. She was beautiful; a generously proportioned, curvaceous dream of a woman with formidable breasts, which she joyfully shook in time to the music. She had been a long-time lover of a well-known jazz broadcaster and writer. But, at least once she strayed – with George.

  ‘I took her home,’ George told me later, ‘and when we got into the bedroom I noticed that all around she had pictures of herself. A narcissist you see. So I suggested that if I fucked her from behind she could look at the pictures while she was doing it. Which pleased her very much and after we’d come she said, “You’re the only man who’s ever realised that about me.” But unfortunately afterwards I needed to piss and Sally said, “It’s the door down the corridor on the left.” So I went down, still naked and half-erect, and opened the wrong door! And there was a full dinner party going on, which rather surprised them.’

  By the early 1970s George’s career with the Feetwarmers – now reduced to the quartet of John Chilton, Collin Bates, Steve Fagg and drummer Chuck Smith (known to the fraternity for the generous volume of his performance as ‘Hammer’ Smith) – was beginning to show signs of taking off in a big way. Having found themselves in the album charts (a near-impossible situation for a British jazz group at that time), John and George had agreed to management by the Ronnie Scott organisation, in the personage of ‘Chips’ Chipperfield, a well-known man-about-jazz whose collections would later form the founding collection of Britain’s National Jazz Archive. As a manager, however, Chips was inexperienced and had no idea how to deal with such a big-time situation in the making. A trip to the USA to explore tours for the group had produced muted responses from young rock-based producers at Warner Brothers.

  Finally, in January 1974, George and John invaded Ronnie Scott’s to ask what – if anything – was going on. And there they were confronted by Jack Higgins. Jack had cut his teeth running small clubs in west London during the late 1940s and rapidly moved on to bigger things; first in the West End and later with the great Harold Davison agency. With Davison he had taken charge of the jazz side of activities, bringing to England top American jazz acts, including the Modern Jazz Quartet, Gerry Mulligan, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Count Basie, and pop groups, such as the Supremes. During these years he had learned to deal hard with every one of his clients. Since the mid-1960s he had concentrated on traditional jazz and swing, bringing in Americans, from Buck Clayton to an alcoholic Dickie Wells, and championing the causes of British artists, from Humphrey Lyttelton to Alex Welsh.

  In short, Jack was already the most highly regarded agent in Britain and George and John explained their quandary to him. ‘Come back tomorrow,’ said Higgins ‘at 10 a.m.’ Chips Chipperfield was corralled into a permanent position at the telephone calling venues up and down Britain – everything from pubs and clubs upwards – all of whom confirmed that, yes, they wanted George Melly and the Feetwarmers. At ten the next morning, Melly and Chilton arrived back in the office, and Higgins handed them a full datesheet for three months. From January 1974 the bill-topping act of George Melly and John Chilton’s Feetwarmers was on its way.

  And soon after Jack would join them, leaving the Scott offices to set up independent management and steer the fortunes of his new hit-making clients.

  For the next thirty years they remained at the top of the tree. There were tours of China and (earlier on) a triumphant trip to New York in 1978 to play at the famous jazz venue Michael’s Pub. It was here that George was famously attacked in The New York Post by a prominent American critic who condemned him as a ‘squat, leering figure of androgynous sexuality’ as well as a ‘stylistically frivolous performer of camp vaudeville’. This demoralising dismissal was swiftly countered in The New York Times by a second commentator, the near-legendary John S. Wilson, who praised his subject as ‘An Englishman who sings like Bessie Smith’ in a full half-page review which George later described as ‘the kind an artist might dream of in his bath but never receive’.

  Apart from two reviews in the British press by one critic notorious for both suspect guitar-playing and a declared championship of jazz’s ‘cutting edge’, George seldom received bad reviews or even poor public commentary from musical associates. One notable exception was a New York-based musician who made no secret of his hearty dislike for ‘Britain’s Bessie Smith’.

  ‘I know exactly why!’ George confided to me later with a wicked twinkle. ‘One night going home in the cab very drunk, I gave him a wank! And after the pleasure had subsided he apparently, and unaccountably for me, decided to resent the fact!’

  Amid such carousing days and nights, and for many years hence, George Melly and John Chilton’s Feetwarmers continued their triumphant progress. There were strings of albums, a rich round of British dates and, of course, radio and television.

  In his book Mellymobile, George, as charmingly as ever, described his year-long activities on the road in between retiring to Wales to fish in his beloved private stretch of the Usk. Theirs was a saga of success unequalled by any British jazz act in the post-rock years and would turn George into a multi-faceted cultural icon, society figure, respected art connoisseur, critic and bon vivant. As a lothario and champion of the free-love days of the sixties, so miserably turned away by Aids, George determinedly and actively railed against Dynasty soap operas and the post-Thatcher dumbing down of our society to politically correct posturing.

  Over the years I saw George occasionally but seldom to speak to. One night at the Pizza Express in Soho in 1979 he arrived at the club to listen to the Pizza Express All Stars with whom I played at the time, with a beautiful boy on each arm. I also watched him and his act regularly. A perfect presentation, decorated by the fiery trumpet of John Chilton and his neat
ly assembled rhythm sections. For George, John was the perfect bandleader. Methodical, to the point where a number was never repeated on a return visit to any venue, he was also an immaculately suited but discreet backdrop to his florid frontman, backing him with a huge selection of mutes (known irreverently to fellow trumpeter John Lawrence as the ‘Chilton Hundreds’), ever supporting, never competing. He was also, by report, a bandleader who set himself apart from his sidemen in traditional style. According to a gleeful George, pianist Stan Greig had retired from the band after three years complaining of the disciplinarian tendencies of ‘yon martinet’. John could exert a tight rein on his wayward frontman too, pointing out if a joke went on for too long or other aspects of the show veered off course.

  In future years I would fully comprehend some of these problems. And also become very fond of John himself. He is one of jazz music’s most conscientious and gifted biographers, whose subjects included Sidney Bechet, Coleman Hawkins, Billie Holiday and Bob Crosby, as well as a definitive Who’s Who of British Jazz, and his contributions to jazz bibliography were regularly celebrated by high-profile awards. His Christmas cards and occasional notes addressed to me – constantly complimentary about my contributions to the foundation and development of the National Jazz Archive and related activities – revealed a man as kind and devoted to the cause of jazz itself as he could, by all accounts, be strict about what went on on his stand. His later and very welcome autobiography Hot Jazz Warm Feet was also (despite George Melly’s initial reservations) an honest, considered and fascinating account of a life devoted to the music, devoid of the self-preoccupation which remains an integral part of most autobiography.

  So it was unquestionably due very largely to John’s gifts as trumpeter, bandleader, everyday organiser and songwriter (he wrote George’s perennial signature song ‘Good Time George’) that the Feetwarmers presented a finely honed and, in its early days, wild show. An uproarious edition of ‘The Ovaltinies’ (retitled ‘The In-betweenies’ in view of the ensemble’s middle-aged status) could easily be capped on its craziest nights with the outrageous blues ‘Shave ’em Dry’.

  I got nipples on my titties

  that are bigger than my thumbs!

  There’s something in between my legs

  Would make a dead man come!

  Only in its much later days did the show begin to display signs of polish that threatened to change to veneer. Slowly, slowly, work began to diminish. And, at the last of their thirty years’ residency for the Christmas season at Ronnie Scott’s (on one night of which George appeared in full drag as his own grandmother), there was the dismal row over the expected Christmas bonus, as neither George nor John was able to subsidise their sidemen. Work for George Melly and the Feetwarmers, so it was rumoured, was beginning to ease off.

  Meantime, as the years rolled on, I had met all three of the principals in George’s career. John Chilton, who was bespectacled, always sharply suited, kind, and committed for a lifetime to the dual causes of trumpet and jazz documentation had been the organising director for George. A striking contrast to two wonderful reprobates: one who was his bandleading forerunner, Mick Mulligan; the other his star. And now, it seemed the new bandleader was to be me.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Road to Harlech

  By mid-August 2002, things were starting to move ahead and fast. The two bands with whom I was already working for Jack Higgins – the Great British Jazz Band and the Best of British Jazz, which just over a month previously had finished a recording session at Abbey Road – were, like George Melly and the Feetwarmers, showing signs of losing speed. Now, with a new musical partner whose music I admired, I felt that things were certainly not what they used to be. And our first gig was only ten days ahead.

  At 11.30 a.m. on 20 August the phone rang.

  ‘Is that Lord Fairweather of Southsea?’

  ‘Exactly so. How is your endo, now it’s been scoped?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I mean,’ I said hastily, ‘how was the endoscopy?’

  ‘Fine,’ said George blithely. ‘They have a little thing like the thing you throw a drowning sailor. They freeze it first and it tastes filthy but once it’s past the back of your throat – the cough point – you don’t feel a thing. They had a good look around but found nothing, apart from a tiny patch of inflammation and two bay leaves from a curry.’

  ‘Oh, that’s good,’ I said. ‘And how are you travelling to Harlech?’

  ‘I’m going over beforehand,’ said George. ‘And you?’

  ‘Playing the night before,’ I said, ‘so I’ll be driving over with Lisa, my partner, on the Sunday.’

  ‘Then let’s have a rehearsal – around 5 p.m. I shall see you there,’ said George with a wicked chuckle, ‘with your horn in your hand.’

  Later I called Jack Higgins. ‘Make it four, not five!’ he commanded. ‘And make sure George does enough. Sort out the lighting plan with the theatre. They’re quite liable to fuck it up, you know. That’s why I take my own manager and lighting person wherever I go.’

  Soon after, John Chilton rang. ‘I thought you might need help with a couple of keys,’ he said kindly. ‘And by the way don’t be afraid to shout at George. He’s very deaf.’

  ‘I’ve heard about the “deafies”,’ I chuckled.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said John. ‘The best one I know was when we played Uxbridge with the Feetwarmers and a lady came up and said, “I was in Uxbridge for four years.” And George said, “Oh! My deepest sympathy!” The lady looked surprised and said, “No, I enjoyed it.” And George said, “No, no! I really can’t accept that! It must have been truly terrible.” And finally the lady looked at him and said, “What did you think I said?” And George said, “You did say Auschwitz, didn’t you?”’

  So with the Half-Dozen booked – Julian Marc Stringle (reeds), Chris Gower (trombone), Craig Milverton (piano), Dominic Ashworth (guitar), Len Skeat (bass) and Bobby Worth (drums) – we made the long drive to Harlech. This was the gig that had finished the Feetwarmers and I could see why. It was a long way! Through often-ravishing countryside, past Snowdonia and alongside slate mines via a mass of B roads, we arrived at last after hours on the road and pulled up in the car park of Byrdyr House Hotel in the High Street.

  There was George, sitting at an outside table, dressed in a multicoloured T-shirt, jogging bottoms and flip-flops peering earnestly at a copy of the Independent. As I approached he looked up with his usual greeting. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello, George,’ I said, ‘this is Lisa.’

  ‘What lovely eyes,’ said George, giving her an unmistakeable ooh-la-la!

  ‘I’ll be driving you to the theatre later, George,’ said Lisa. ‘But I’m really sorry. The car’s a bit of a tip.’

  ‘Never mind, dear,’ said George. ‘Just come to the bedroom – and lie down. Then we can drive to the rehearsal. I’m used to cars that look like a skip.’

  And so, after a short siesta, to the theatre we went, to run through our show. I had sketched chord sequences and routines for the show including a bluesy ‘Trouble in Mind’ featuring a towering guitar outing by Dominic Ashworth. But, keen though I was to share the stage with our star in the tiny theatre by the sea, I also wanted to make sure that my Half-Dozen were heard too, and suggested that we begin with three tunes before the arrival of the Man on stage.

  ‘Three tunes?’ said George with a teasing twinkle in his eye.

  ‘Three short ones,’ I said firmly. And from then on, the exchange – even when shortened to ‘just two’ became a nightly exchange between us.

  Our rehearsal was brief but efficient. ‘I’ve not been wasting time,’ said George, ‘in the meantime. In fact, I’ve written a book review on the way here. For the Observer I think. But I’m looking forward to the concert – and this whole new phase. The only worry is, if it lasts as long as the Feetwarmers, I’ll be 106!’

  Then it was back to the hotel to change, and when we arrived back in the downstairs bar there was our
newly contracted star in full scarlet and white striped suit with matching hat.

  ‘He looks like a tube of toothpaste!’ whispered our drummer Bobby Worth.

  Sipping a large Scotch and talking to the landlord, who was plainly enchanted to have such a famous guest behaving in such an approachable manner, George heard nothing. But then Lisa nudged me.

  ‘Don’t look now,’ she said, ‘but his flies are wide open!’

  ‘You tell him!’ I said. ‘It’s OK.’ But Lisa didn’t want to, so I returned to whisper in his ear. But our star had spotted the problem meantime and was making a small cabaret of putting it right.

  ‘There are three stages to old age,’ he announced to his gathering. ‘One is forgetting to do your flies up. Two is forgetting to undo them. And three is not giving a damn either way!’ The joke would stay in his act for months afterwards.

  The show that followed was a huge success, playing to a full house, and later we went to the local pub as our landlord had let us know – kindly if not that hospitably – that there would be no bar facilities at the hotel when we came back. This didn’t matter. The pub was called, perhaps with a touch of singularity, the Rumhole, and, like many before and after, had been kept open for George’s benefit. He received a hero’s welcome in which the band and I basked gloriously and where, to my surprise, the staff would accept Switch cards while I bought a large round. In due course things began to get a little vague and a short lecture by George on Louis Buñuel, the film-noir producer, became gradually more intriguing and bizarre.

 

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