George Melly (1926-2007)
 
I have a hard time picturing the Dangerous Minds reader who wouldn’t fall in love with the rakish, bisexual jazz singer and surrealist George Melly, a bon vivant who spent his life playfully defying authority, rationality and good taste. The Telegraph’s obituary included this telling incident from Melly’s career as an ordinary seaman in the Royal Navy:

... in 1947 he was dropped from a Royal Naval Command Variety Performance after Warrant Officer Perkins discovered a pile of anarchist leaflets in his locker. Since the number he had been intending to perform before the King was his own highly suggestive rendition of Frankie and Johnnie (a song that became a standard in his repertoire) it was probably as well.

 

The Stranglers c. 1977
 
When London’s Hayward Gallery held the exhibition Dada and Surrealism Reviewed in 1978, the show was the ostensible subject of BBC2’s George Melly in “The Journey” or The Memoirs of a Self-Confessed Surrealist. Demonstrating that surrealism was not an “artistic movement,” in Melly’s phrase, but a wish to transform everyday life, the TV documentary follows Melly as he walks from his North London digs to the Hayward, reminiscing about his Dadaist and surrealist comrades along the way. He shaves, eats breakfast, enters phone boxes (to dial numbers at random and declaim surrealist verse), pisses in a urinal, and bumps into the Stranglers, who happen just to be hanging around, as if it were their full-time job to stand on the street, hating the Queen. Recognizing kindred spirits, Melly salutes the band: “Long live the Stranglers!”
 

George Melly (and is that harmonica player Lew Lewis?) on the back of the Stranglers’ “Walk on By” single
 
The five musicians hit it off so well that the Stranglers invited Melly to record a song with them. It’s fun to imagine the louche session that produced “Old Codger,” a blues number about the joys of pederasty which the Stranglers released on the B-side of their Doorsified “Walk on By.” From the irritating, unreliable, and official Stranglers biography No Mercy:

‘Old Codger’ was sung by Liverpudlian jazz maestro and hep-cat, writer and broadcaster George Melly, who had recently featured the Stranglers prominently in a BBC2 documentary on the impact of surrealism on contemporary art. Suitably flattered that their activities had been endorsed by the cognoscenti (his 1972 book Revolt Into Style: the Pop Arts in Britain was one of the most influential of its day), the band asked Melly down for a spot of brandy-drinking and crooning, and he obliged with a great vocal for the ‘Old Codger’ track.

And Hugh Cornwell’s autobiography includes this scene:

Alan Yentob is making a BBC2 documentary about Dada, and George Melly asks for us to be in the programme. We appear as the inheritors of Dada, and I write a song for George to sing with us, called ‘Old Codger’ about an ageing man with an obsession with a choirboy. I show the lyrics to George and he says, ‘Very nice.’

You really do want to watch the whole program, but the Stranglers appear at the 17-minute mark.
 

 
And here’s Melly singing “Old Codger” with the Stranglers: