Pop
In Melly mood
Duncan Fallowell
Judging by the smells and sights, everyone else at Ronnie Scott's must have been as bombed as I and my very good New York friend Miss Rita Rocks, a red-headed bundle of fun and pills, four and a half feet boosted to five by platform soles, one of which fell off with disastrous results while George was swinging in the middle of 'Shave 'Em Dry,' black buff slang for something sticky although I have forgotten exactly what. "I love it, I love it ! Do it again!" wailed Miss Rocks of the sugar candy smile, as an amber tear of Southern Comfort crept out between pursed scarlet lips, hurried down her chin, quivered for a moment, then dropped discreetly into the tropical urribra of her cleavage. "My dear, so vulgar, so divine. Princess Eugenie de Hohenzollern-Frankenburg used to get stoned on it in a lousy cellar off Bleeker Street. The /ate Princess. Who is this heavenly man? He reminds me of everyone I have ever adored, man, woman or child. There was a time in New Orleans, just before Professor Longhair developed his Snow White fetish and the roof started falling in . . . Where's that drink? What is he doing with those shoes? My God, it makes me feel young again! Not that I'm old but . . ."
All of this may seem somewhat-random but it 'isn't. I quote a little of Rita Rocks's patter because it dovetails precisely into the kind of mood that George Melly and the Fawkes-Chilton Feetwarmers were lathering up out front. Really Rita should have written this notice because the subject is right on her button but owing to some twist in internal pharmacology her syntax goes to pieces as soon as she is required on paper to put one word in front of another. So you will have to put up with me.
Trad jazz, particularly that 'fifties sandals-Sartre-sweaters-and-dandruff trip, is honestly not my cup of tea. It Wasn't, that is, until I had seen George Melly, in action, singing these horny Bessie Smith numbers and not changing the words, stomping and pirouetting in his Old Stoic blazer like some 'avuncular middle-'aged alcoholic junkie queen boxing impresarip, with an unflagging sardonic wit and a grin as lovable as a teddy bear's.
He has a firm flexible voice, too. It begins in a claret stupor somewhere in the Hollywood Bowl of his stomach, or perhaps just below it, moves higher to the lungs mingling with blue cheroot fumes, then shoots up into the head where I think it hits a few Elvis Presley fantasies as well as the free-wheeling imaginative intellect of this man of a hundred parts, none of them private, before finally on the rebound snapping, slurring, sliding, pouring out through his mouth, and anything left over comes down the nose. This accomplished, he moves to one side, sips from a wine glass, while the band blows and solos to intermittent applause, John Chilton trumo peting beneath the pavements of Basin Street, then George returns for another dirtier verse, singing round the corner of his face or tossing the mike from hand to hand. And between numbers there is the casual, wickedly funny chit-chat, so easy, so intimate, everyone caught up in a crazY good-time ball. Now that Melly's brief season at Ronnie Scott's is over, you can catch something of the spirit from a new, heart-warming LP called Nuts (Warner Brothers £2.29), recorded live by Melly at Scott's in June. You miss those stylish antics which turn the experience into spontaneous theatre but there is a lush colour photograph as compensation: cigar, gold signet ring' pinstripes like chalk marks on a blackboard, and a faint suggestion of rouge: You would also miss out on the deep blue: ' Crabs ' or Frankie and Johnnie' an hilarious song delivered with bavvdY panache, and the shoe routine. Over inY shoulder goes one boot, over my shoulder goes the other boot: you can picture the picture.
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