It was a time when your surname really had to be something like Eager, Wilde or Fury. That's the way impresario Larry Parnes saw the world of show business and stardom in 1960s London and so it was that Clive Powell suddenly became Georgie Fame. After a period with Billy Fury, Fame went out on his own, taking with him not only Fury's band, but also the name - The Blue Flames. Together they were to become one of the biggest groups of the 1960s.
Based in the Flamingo Club in Soho, Fame was at the very heart of the London scene. His music, an enlightened and farsighted blend of blues, jazz and rhythm and blues, made the Flamingo the focal point for black American servicemen who recognised an authenticity in Fame's swinging sounds which were heavily influenced by Mose Allison and Booker T. These flush and fuelled servicemen, determined to dance the night away to the cool sounds of home, were immediately drawn to The Blue Flames. They found they had much in common with this young and very hip piano player. American music and the simple pleasures of dancing were two things Powell, aka Fame, from Leigh in Lancashire knew all about.
"My father played the accordion in a danceband - drums with all the skulls on it, a piano player with a big old microphone and then there was my Dad on accordion and my Auntie Bessie who sang. They had social evenings in the Sunday School and that's where I learnt to dance the foxtrot, the valeta and the polyglide. And so from the age of five I was singing the songs while my aunties were teaching me to dance! Nobody played jazz really, but what I got from those dancing days was a tempo and sense of swing.
"I think what really got me on the jazz side of things was Willis Conover on The Voice of America on AFN, the American Forces Network. I used to tune into the jazz hour and I heard Duke Ellington. And even though you don't understand the musicality of it at that age, or the notes, you can feel it. Quite apart from the excitement of tuning into the short wave radio to some distant place which is on this planet but could be another planet."
Fame would claim to be a jazzer only in spirit and does not purport to be technically expert in jazz terms, although his track record and his quite spectacular jazz vocalising might suggest otherwise. Certainly he is a musician who over the years has turned his hand to many styles, from Caribbean to outright pop, and his hits have included Yeh Yeh, Sunny, Sit- ting in the Park, Get Away and The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde.
There's no denying that there has been more than one flirtation with commercial pop, but at the very heart of much of what Fame does is a jazz sensibility which leans very heavily towards the blues.
"All that came from a 78 record called Bad Penny Blues by Humphrey Lyttleton. On that record Johnny Parker, the piano player, played a boogie woogie and I was already playing boogie woogie at that time. When I was about 10 years old, my sister had a boyfriend, his name was John Berry, and they'd be snogging on the sofa in the front room where the piano was. Everybody had a piano in the front room then instead of a telly.
"Anyway, to keep me quiet he taught me to play boogie woogie. As for singing, there's a photograph of me somewhere winning a talent contest at a holiday camp just outside Morcambe where we would go on a family holiday. I sang You can roll a silver dollar down upon the ground and I played rick-racks, the bones. I won six shillings and I was meant to be in bed."
This capacity to entertain when he really should have been in bed was to prove vital when he moved to London in 1959. Over the next decade Georgie Fame was to provide the musical backdrop to what became known as The Swinging Sixties and The Flamingo Club was where much of that swinging actually happened. Fame happily recalls regulars such as The Beatles, Christine Keeler, Muhammad Ali, virtually every visiting American musician and most importantly the GIs, who not only appreciated Fame's music, but consistently introduced him to more.
"It was a black American club and it could have been anywhere in America - but it was in Soho. It was really a jazz club and we were playing opposite a lot of great British jazz musicians like Ronnie Scott and Tubby Hayes and Ronnie Ross. But they were like second string to us because we were playing the dance stuff and that's what the cats wanted.
"The GIs would just want to dance and so we were the hot band. They'd come in from these bases all over England and they'd park the car in Soho, open up the trunk and it would be full of Wild Turkey bourbon, thousands of cigarettes and there would be loads of records. And during the break they used to play these records by people like Richard Holmes and Gene Ammons on this little dansette turntable in this rat infested band room by the side of the stage.
"Guys would come in and say to me `Man you sound like Mose Allison!' and I'd say that I'd never heard of Mose Allison and they'd give me an album like Back Country Suite. That was happening daily! One night a GI walked in with two records and he said `check this out!' and it was Booker T's Green Onions and Jimmy Smith's Midnight Special album. I went out and bought the Hammond immediately."
According to myth, Georgie Fame owned the first Hammond organ in London. Fame however, attributes this distinction to Graham Bond, one of the many musicians on the scene who were about to enjoy varying degrees of stardom and success. It was from a small group of performers around the Soho scene that many of the so-called supergroups were later to emerge in the years of the British Blues Boom.
In those early Flamingo days, however, the potential had not yet been realised and many of those who would later turn to rock were still playing jazz.
"The Johnny Birch Quartet for instance, which played opposite us for a year every Friday night, was Johnny Birch on piano, Ginger Baker on drums, Jack Bruce on bass and Dick HeckstallSmith on tenor. They were a jazz quartet before they ever joined Alexis Korner and became Blues Incorporated and moved into that commercial market. Next thing you know it's Cream! Alexis Korner was very significant in a marketing sense in that he selected a lot of these guys and they went for the commercial card.
"This is how you got people like John McLaughlin, who was in my band, jumping in with Graham Bond. Graham was actually a saxophone player who got into the Hammond because he realised the potential of the Hammond in commercial terms - as well as musical terms. Alexis would come down the Flamingo at three in the morning and we'd be playing until six and he'd be digging the scene, checking out the cats and that's how he put a band together.
"Actually it was Ronan O'Reilly who really did it. He was really responsible for Alexis getting all that together, as well as the great Radio Caroline. But we didn't know about any of that then. This was all something that was about to happen and we were only interested in this music and the lifestyle which went with it."
Many of Fame's contemporaries are now either well established in the grandiose world of rock or are contentedly playing jazz on a smaller and more manageable stage. These days, he is still touring constantly and has for some years also been a valuable driving presence in Van Morrison's band.
The musicians and singers he has worked with - people like Annie Ross, Mose Allison and Jon Hendricks - provide some indication of the standards he has managed to maintain for almost 40 years. These people are Fame's real heroes and are at the very core of his own style and approach.
"I try to make my voice sound like an instrument, which it is. I try to make it sound like Johnny Griffin playing saxophone, or Chet Baker playing trumpet or Groove Holmes playing a Hammond Organ. There was about five years in the 1960s when I couldn't sound like anybody other than Mose Allison. Everything sounded like Mose. But it takes a lifetime to develop your own particular sound and style, and my style is a mixture of all sorts of people.
"A lot of it was because I had to work with a lot of girl singers. They were never singing in my key and so I just started to do it in whatever key they wanted and that just opened up my range. Jon Hendricks is the godfather of all that. He extended the range of the voice. We don't care about what key you're singing in any more because, if it's physically possible to do it, then you do it.
"Listen to Ritchie Buckley. He's got four octaves on a tenor saxophone but Adolph Sax, who built it, says there's only two and half. I try to sound like a horn. It's a tenor saxophone. People have preconceived ideas about what you can do musically or physically, but I gave that up 20 years ago."
The reference books rightly describe Georgie Fame as the smooth, swinging, jazzy, bluesy Hammond Organ player who was on television every Saturday night in the 1970s. Perhaps the longer view will see him further recorded as a uniquely brilliant jazz vocalist and an entertainer of the old school who is only now approaching the peak of his powers.
John Kelly is a writer and broadcaster.