Melly

From the Oxford National Dictionary of Biography entry on George Melly (1926-2007) -

In 1974 Melly resigned from The Observer and joined Chiltern's band full time, adopting his trademark razor-sharp 1930s suits and outrageous fedoras. It was a pop cultural silhouette, ironic and self-referential. Nor did age abate his sense of anarchy. He fell out with Roland Penrose, surrealist and founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, when Penrose invited the duke of Edinburgh to open a Picasso exhibition. He subsequently turned down a CBE: 'I didn't see the point of accepting an honour from a Hanoverian sovereign of a former empire' (The Guardian, 18 Feb 2004).

Melly had published his first volume of memoirs, Owning Up, in 1965. A rumbustious, picaresque account of his town and provincial jazz tours, the book was both filthy and hilarious. It was followed by a prequel in the shape of Rum, Bum and Concertina (1977), which dealt with his disreputable naval service and offered such memorable scenes as Melly, the put-upon rating, being defended below decks by a tough seaman: '"Anyone who says a word against f-- Picasso", he murmured gently, "gets f-- done over"' (Owning Up, 320). A third volume, Scouse Mouse (1984), retold his Liverpudlian upbringing and underlined, in a wonderfully unsentimental yet nostalgic manner, how far he had travelled. In all three books he was at pains to strike a deliberately outrageous tone, one that enhanced rather than concealed his essentially humane and affectionate personality.

Melly also wrote a witty account, with Barry Fantoni, of his milieu in The Media Mob (1980). His sensitive biography of the outsider artist Scottie Wilson, It's All Writ Out for You, appeared in 1986 - a theme pursued in Tribe of One: Great Naive and Primitive Painters of the British Isles, with Michael Wood, in 1991. He edited Edward James's Swans Reflecting Elephants: My Early Years (1982), an evocation of the great surrealist patron; and in 1997 published Don't Tell Sybil: an Intimate Memoir of ELT Mesens. Hooked! (2000) was enlivened with a passage about m-- over a trout. 'I put that bit in early because not many people are interested in reviewing a fishing book unless something startles them' (Scotland on Sunday, 1 July 2001).

Editorial amendment in the Picasso anecdote, of course, so that this blog doesn't get sin-binned