Salty Dog
Empty Bed Blues
George reminisces about his schooldays
Take Me For A Buggy Ride!
If You’se A Viper
Send Me To The ‘lectric Chair
George recalls a favourite landlord, Bill
Meadmore
Down In The Dumps
Young Woman’s Blues
George remembers the day he joined Mick Mulligan
I Need A Little Sugar In My Bowl
Sweet Lorraine
George remembers turning professional with
the Feetwarmers
Lulu’s Back In Town!
Cemetery Blues
My Very Good Friend The Milkman
Brother’s Blues And Requiem
George Melly with Digby Fairweather’s Half
Dozen
rec. Merfangle Studios, Waltham Cross, March
and June 2007
This is George Melly’s last
go-round, recorded on his specific instructions
("I definitely want to make one last
record") when he knew he was dying. It
captures the man Digby Fairweather calls the
Dean of Decadence in sometimes tired voice
– understandably so – but also demonstrating
the verve and joie de vivre that were so much
a part of his huge presence. Interspersed
between tracks are passages read from his
autobiographical writings, read by himself.
They lend a brief but lucid narrative thread
and oddly put me in mind of Louis Armstrong’s
Musical Autobiography LPs in which
he read Leonard Feather’s texts between musical
tracks.
He revisits old friends and
family here. Bessie Smith is here of course,
and other Classic Blues, but Harlem narcotics
(If you’se a viper) and Fats Waller
also rightly feature. Sweet Lorraine
is sung by Julian Marc Stringle because Melly
was unable to manage it – the only such occasion
on an album in which the singer, enfeebled
and suffering from the onset of dementia,
nevertheless shows all his accustomed familiarity
with his material.
Salty Dog is enlivened
by a reference to his wife Diana’s "best
seller" – much of it was about him –
and duly re-energized, shorn of its "God
made a woman/Made her mighty funny" lines.
It’s peppered with such Melly-isms and sounds
very likeable. Fairweather takes a fine solo
on the classic Empty Bed Blues sliding
lazily over bar lines with the rapier stealth
of a Buck Clayton. Melly incidentally was
probably the only singer of his type not to
replace personal pronouns in these songs;
if Bessie sang "he" then so did
Melly. Stringle’s alto is also vaunting here
– what a splendidly eclectic and rhythmically
tumultuous player he is. If Melly sounds a
touch tired in the stop choruses of Take
Me For A Buggy Ride! and especially in
Send Me To The ‘lectric Chair then
we can only wonder at the toll taken on him
and the effort made by him – to do it at all
was remarkable enough.
Stringle’s agile playing
is a feature of If You’se A Viper and
I assume that it’s Fairweather doing some
mugging in the intro. Throughout the disc
the front line of Fairweather, Stringle and
trombonist Chris Gower – first class solo
on Down In The Dumps – play the good
arrangements with individuality of tone and
cohesive intelligence in their support of
Melly. So too the rhythm section though they
have less chance to shine. And the envoi,
when it comes, brings with it Melly’s wolfish
amusement at any kind of solemnity in Brother’s
Blues And Requiem – with a ghostly fade-in
of the first side ever recorded under his
own name back in 1951, a lusty, unvarnished
Rock Island Line.
In our end is our beginning.
Melly ends entirely on his own terms returning
to the songs he loved the longest and the
best. Let’s hope that wherever he is, like
Bessie’s young woman, he ain’t done runnin’
around.
Jonathan Woolf
In our end is our beginning. Melly ends entirely
on his own terms returning to the songs he
loved the longest and the best ... see Full
Review
CD Reviews
LAKE LACD 250 [56:02]
