Gorgeous George

I stand at the back of a hall in UCD on a wet night in 1975. Dermot Morgan has just died on stage with a song about Pete’s Peanuts and oral sex and slunk off with his acoustic guitar. Uproar.

Then John Chilton’s Feetwarmers take the stage and swing into an instrumental. And then a strange fat man in a suit made apparently from an unusually garish deckchair, a red fedora hat and spats minces on doing the dance that earned him the sobriquet ‘Bunny Bum’ back in the ‘50s and sings the memorable words:
“They call me Good Time George I never say no to booze,
Lucky, lucky George, No woman will I ever refuse,
Hey woman better watch your man,
‘Cause my equipment’s on the AC/DC plan,
They call me Good Time George,
Looking for a good time NOW.”
He had come to the right place. The joint, as he so frequently observed on subsequent occasions “was jumpin’”. Many blues standards from Bessie Smith through Memphis Minnie via Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey followed. All were received with howls of appreciation from an audience that had obviously been liberally refreshing itself earlier.
Equally popular were the almost unbelievably filthy jokes and asides between numbers accompanied by the most lascivious and knowing leer in show business. Approximately half way through Rainey’s ‘Kitchen Man’– “When he eats my doughnuts he don’t leave nothing but the hole, And I sure can use his jelly roll.” – a very fat chum of the band’s staggered out from the wings and fell over into the crowd. George signalled and the music stopped. “Not pretty,” he said, “but not interesting either.”
At this, a man in the audience shouted something about George’s sexuality. George snorted, “That was a long time ago in the Royal Navy.” And then, looking right down to the end of the auditorium and catching my eye, “But if that young man at the back in the black beret would care to meet me after the show…”
So it was that some 45 minutes later after a rousing series of choruses of something called ‘The Lobster Song’ (“It’s about how a young lady gets a crustacean lodged in an inconvenient part of her anatomy”) I found myself being led by Billy Magra to a location backstage where George, after giving his tie to two punk girls, signed the copy of Nuts which I still play: “Magrittings to Tom Mathews and the new surrealist movement in Ireland.” For you see readers, in those days your old Uncle Tommy was a card-carrying member (in fact the only member) of that little group. I also received the first of what was to be a series of powerful bear hugs over the decades that followed, for although camp as a row of homosexuals, George was by now exclusively a ladies man.
Of some of our subsequent encounters I have already written in these pages and those of the old In Dublin magazine, for whom I interviewed George in the ‘80s. So let me fast forward to our last.
About three years back when he was a young shaver of 77, I was delighted to see that he was to sing at The National Concert Hall with The Digby Fairweather Half Dozen, an admirable ensemble but to George’s fans principally a backdrop. Arriving almost unbelievably drunk at seven that evening (the show was to start at eight) I stumbled through the gates to see a fat man in a purple suit and red fedora wandering around as if lost. Throwing my arms around him I approximated the words, “George you old wretch.” “Oh hello,” he said “ I can’t seem to find the artists’ entrance.” It took us about 15 minutes as he had an eyepatch and I was more or less blind.
Inside things were considerably staider than they had been in 1975, the crowd being for the most part affluent, middle-aged and relatively well-behaved. Not so, happily, the entertainment. Though compelled to sing from an armchair he gave of his best. The anecdotes continued to amuse being raunchier than Ronnie Scott’s. And when I spoke to him later, for alas the last time, he again signed (and even drew on) the albums I proffered, I was still so pissed that I remember at one point saying, “D’you know who I met earlier? George Melly!”
George was an athiest. He lived for the moment. He was the last of the music hall, a multi-talented writer and art critic. People loved him. I am sentimental enough to think he is in heaven. If he is, the joint is jumpin’.