Free Slowing Down by George Melly Page A

several things wrong with me; in fact, I was perhaps at my lowest ebb healthwise and had been hospitalized for a chest infection. In falling to the ground, at least twice I had cut my face on sharp corners and on getting up and looking in my shaving mirror, discovered that I had a mask of blood. I stopped bleeding eventually and I cleaned up, but was it possible these knocks and cuts were responsible for the revolt of first one and then the other retina?
    Diana keeps her own perfect eyes on me and ensures that I take my pills. Like my hero Luis Buñuel, I have learnt the importance of establishing a strict routine and of not feeling guilty about sleeping, if possible and especially when at Ronnie Scott’s, at least twelve hours a day. The medical specialists probe, prod, X-ray and scan me an enormous amount. I walk with great care, especially in stepping over curbs, and if there are no banisters I seek a helping arm. Still, all in all, I think I’m in quite good nick.

7. ‘George Melly – God Help Us!’
    The world’s jazz-crazy, Lord, and so am I –
    Old jazz vaudeville song
    It was in the sixties, after I’d officially retired from the jazz world, that Wally ‘Trog’ Fawkes, for whose famous strip cartoon Flook I had been contributing the words for almost fifteen years in the Daily Mail , let drop that every Sunday morning in a big shabby pub near King’s Cross, the mysteriously named Merlin’s New Cave, a band made up in the main of retired jazz musicians gathered for a blow.
    So, the following week, my TV column safely ‘put to bed’ in the Observer , I cruised down the hill from Camden Town on my moped to suss it out.
    They blew in a large room off the bar. You could drink there, but there was no alcohol actually on sale, and this meant you could bring your children with you to tumble about, and the family atmosphere was very sympathetic. The musicwas not ‘trad’ but a less rigid form of jazz which, with the recent triumph of rock ’n’ roll, I hadn’t heard for almost a decade, a music fulfilling the great Jelly Roll Morton’s definition many years before, ‘hot, sweet, plenty rhythm’.
    The house band, as it were, were called The Chilton– Fawkes Feetwarmers. (The Feetwarmers was the name of a band from the past led by Sidney Bechet, a favourite ofboth the leaders.) Wally played mostly clarinet. Indeed, Bechet had once declared him the best on that instrument not only in Europe, but in the world, and had asked Wally to join him. Wally, however, weighed things up. He was beginning to establish himself as a cartoonist; he had great talent there and opportunities too. A life on the road with the notoriously moody Bechet, and the conceivably transient popularity of jazz itself, were both factors; he returned to Fleet Street, but has continued to play when and where he chooses to this day.
    There was Bruce Turner, a fine saxophonist and famous eccentric, who was still a professional; a non-drinker or smoker, but with a passion for chocolates and cream cakes, a gentle man but a convinced Stalinist, a public-school boy (Dulwich) and yet devoid of snobbery, totally committed to the pursuit of young women or ‘mice’, the jazz term for them at that time. ‘Must have that mouse, Dad!’ was one of his many catch-phrases.
    He had created a limited yet unique language of his own. When pleased, ‘This is the life I tell ’e’; when miserable, ‘Wish I was dead, Dad.’ While his use of the word ‘Dad’ was universally applied to men and women, children and dogs, he himself realized this could present difficulties: ‘Went to see my father last week, Dad,’ he told Wally. ‘Didn’t know what to call him.’
    This performance, while seductive, seemed a little contrived to me, and his extremely fluent playing, as an American muso didn’t hesitate to point out, was at times prone to imitation of American masters, often several within the same chorus. ‘What’s Bruce Turner sound like?’ asked his