"Good Time" George Melly - RIP

LONDON: George Melly, a flamboyant, gravel-voiced jazz singer, critic and raconteur, died Thursday, his wife said. He was 80 years old.

Though suffering from lung cancer and dementia, Melly continued performing nearly until the end. He gave his last concert on June 10. He died at home in London, Diana Melly said.

Melly was noted for loud suits, louder ties and the image he cultivated of a hard-drinking throwback to the jazz age.

He joined the Royal Navy at the end of the Second World War because, as he quipped to the recruiting officer, the uniforms were 'so much nicer'. As he related in his autobiography, Rum, Bum and Concertina, he was crestfallen to discover that he would not be sent to a ship and was thus denied the "bell-bottom" uniform he desired.

Instead he received desk duty and wore the other Navy uniform, described as "the dreaded fore-and-aft". Later, however, he did see ship duty. He never saw active combat, but was almost court-martialled for distributing anarchist literature.

After his navy service in World War II, Melly relished the life of a peripatetic musician. "Hard drinking and squalid digs, but absolutely no regrets," he once recalled.

He gave up the musician's life in 1962 to concentrate on writing about surrealist art and working as a music and theater critic.

In 1974 he resumed his role as Good Time George and went back on the road with John Chilton's Feetwarmers.

Melly is survived by his wife, his son Tom, his daughter Pandora, his stepdaughter Candy and his four grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements were not immediately announced.