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GEORGE MELLY ; Flamboyant 'Oscar Wilde of English jazz', incisive critic and memoirist of disarming candour

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From: The Independent - London
Date: 20070706
Author:Philip Hoare

The worst thing you might say about George Melly is that he was respectable. He was a man who had invented himself out of a provincial middle-class upbringing to become a Surrealist flaneur, an incisive critic, and a vivacious entertainer in outrageous suits, "the Oscar Wilde of English jazz", as his friend the artist and writer Philip Core dubbed him. Yet his essential honesty - his passions and his vices - militated against any sense of artificiality, and combined with his intellect and generosity to install him as a minor British institution all of his own.

He was born Alan George Heywood ...

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