George Melly, the jazz singer, author and personality passed away on July 5th 2007, at the age of 80. He had been ill for some time, but was still performing up to June 10th, at the 100 club in London. To Stranglers fans, he is probably best known for providing the vocals to "Old Codger", one of the B-Sides to the 1978 single "Walk on By". With his association to the band, Jet has kindly provided the following obituary.

With the sad news this week of the death of legendary singer/lecturer/critic and writer George Melly, it is appropriate to mark the occasion with a few words about this unique British character on these pages.

George Melly and The Stranglers had a sort of mutual appreciation thing between them. He called himself ‘Good Time George’, but even that was a bit of an understatement. His colourful career was marked by many of the excesses you would expect from such a legend. His many exploits have been well documented elsewhere and his own accounts of his life are no less frank, so I won’t dwell on that here.

George has been on my personal horizon since a very early age. As a teenager, who had just discovered music, I used to see George when he appeared at the Walthamstow Assembly Hall (north east London). George at that time must have been right at the start of his long and successful career.

I vividly recall that there was a certain incongruity between his very poshly spoken upper class English accent - probably more extreme then, than in later life - and his style of singing with a very pronounced American vocal delivery. Few if any, could have suspected the young upstart would go on to carve a unique place in British culture. I certainly didn’t. If nothing else, this fact alone probably marked George out as a character I would never forget, a lesson there for everyone.

George continued to punctuate my own life, as I attended his gigs from time to time. He was always lively and entertaining, until one day early in the band’s career, we received a message that George Melly was about to make a TV documentary in the BBC ARENA series about Dada and the Surrealist movement. He wanted to include The Stranglers, who he said were “the inheritors of Dada”. Flattered we indeed were.

I guess you all know that the programme was duly completed and shown. We in turn felt moved to reciprocate with an offer to record George on a specially written piece, ‘Old Codger’, the other side of the ‘Walk on By’ release. I know that George had to spend the rest of his life autographing copies at his shows which gave him great personal satisfaction.

That George was an acknowledged authority on the aforementioned art movements is well known, but he also lived a bit of a Dada existence. He told me once how - due to his love of fishing - he had bought a stretch of a river in Wales - the Usk - and that the piece he purchased, when he visited it, was never there!

Good Time George was immense fun. The ‘Old Codger’ recording session - in the same studio where Rattus & Heroes were recorded - was a riot of booze - mostly brandy - and hilarity. He needed no coaching for the tongue-in-cheek song, he fell into it with great relish and it was more or less a one take affair.

George never forgot The Stranglers, he continued to make reference to the band in later works and I guess he genuinely saw parallels between Dada and ourselves. Perhaps that parallel might be called barmy!

George will be sadly missed by all of us and he can never be replaced. The very art and culture of Britain is at a loss because of it.