There are embarrassing moments, and then there are embarrassing moments. For instance, next time you're on a packed commuter train, try reading Owning Up, George Melly's Rabelaisian memoir of the booze- and sex-fuelled era of 1950s Britain and the trad boom. By the time you reach the bit quoting, in full, a missive from his landlord telling him to quit, a hernia from suppressed laughter is already on the cards; the letter merely administers the coup de grΓce.
Written tongue-in-cheek in a mixture of exasperation and affection, it catalogues the dissolute personal habits of Melly, his band-leader boss, Mick Mulligan, and various other jazz musicians, and the comings and goings of their girlfriends. (In Melly's case, there was the occasional boyfriend, too, although Mulligan simply felt that Melly's homosexuality was due to his not having had enough of what he called "the other" and set out to cure it by passing on a succession of girlfriends - this was, after all, the 1950s. At any rate, it worked.) It's a brilliantly funny, witty letter, embracing sex, the lavatory, the New Statesman, Freud, stealing money from the hall telephone box, graffiti and what his landlord calls the "last straw". This is the fact that he "will not tolerate this house becoming a common bagnio, a sponge house, a place of assignation, a pimp's brothel, or for Mick the Mulligan to bring his doxies here and perform his strange tribal rights with them in the early hours of the morning." Then comes the clincher. "And I strongly object that I have the next morning to straighten every picture in the house." Try reading that without flopping around like a fish just landed, while your bemused fellow passengers wonder if they should pull the emergency cord.
These days Melly leads a considerably more sedate life. He is, after all, 75 "and I look 80", he adds, with a wry laugh that seems compounded in equal parts of Havanas and alcohol. In those 75 years, he's been many things besides a landlord's nightmare, often simultaneously; jazz singer, art connoisseur, writer - several books of autobiography, film scripts, as well as filling the balloons for the Daily Mail's Flook cartoon strip and being film and television critic for the Observer - and lecturer on art and jazz.
The art bit was what first took him to London from Liverpool and a public school education. He landed a job at E.L.T. Mesens's newly opened London Gallery, a bastion of surrealism.
"I was a very inefficient, inky, untidy looking assistant at the London Gallery.
"But nobody was into surrealism then. I bought some pictures, I'm glad to say. Kept me afloat for the whole of my life." There is that throaty rumble of laughter again.
"I've a lot of pictures left," he goes on, "but not the great values that I bought for fourpence because everybody hated them, like Magritte and Max Ernst. I bought pictures for, oh, £100, £105, that sort of thing. I went to the Tate Modern recently, to the opening of the Surrealist Erotic exhibition - it's a wonderful exhibition - and there, sitting on the wall, is Magritte's Le Viole, which was mine for 20 years."
He was already a jazz fan at school, and in London his extrovert singing, modelled on Bessie Smith, got him noticed on the fringes of Revivalist Jazz, as the return to New Orleans style was called. Smith, whose record sales in the 1920s and 1930s saved Columbia from bankruptcy, was known as the Empress of the Blues; with her background in vaudeville, she didn't shy away from innuendo or the sexually explicit.
Nor did Melly, either as a performer or, later, when he was a columnist - as film critic for the Observer. He once described Percy, a British comedy about a man who had a penis transplant, as "a kind of 'Carry On Standing'". Reminded of it, he laughs and says: "People are so obsessed with penises. I mean, I'm all in favour of them, but they are rather too prominent, don't you think?" There's no clever answer to that.
But his writing and broadcasting did cause him to abandon jazz singing for years. So how did he get back to it and performing with trumpeter John Chilton's Feetwarmers?
"Quite simple, really. On a Sunday morning, when I was a columnist on the Observer, I had nothing to do, so I used to get on my moped - dashing, in those days, y'see - and I went down to a pub called New Merlin's Cave, which was on the Islington-King's Cross borders.
"And there were always these musicians; they liked to blow and there were jam sessions every Sunday - there was a girl there who was able to whisk her tits around in different directions; she was amazing. It was all very cheerful."
The band was a traditional one called the Wally Fawkes-John Chilton Feetwarmers - Fawkes, incidentally, is the cartoonist Trog of the Daily Mail's Flook, as well as a noted traditional jazz clarinettist. Melly started to sing with them, they were asked to play some provincial dates, and gradually he drifted back into singing.
The late Derek Taylor, PR for The Beatles, got them signed up with Warners. "We also thought we could go back to living like we were 20, so we were pissed every night and everything," he says. "And then suddenly a friend of mine persuaded me, at least, that 'you mustn't get so pissed, George, because people will stop getting amused by it in the end'.
"So I thought about it. John went tee-total. I didn't go so far as that" - you could almost feel a shudder run through him - "but I didn't think I had not to remember the end of the evening, which I used to do previously. And so we straightened up and flew right and now we're still doing it. We've been, oh, all over the place - America, Australia several times."
And his old boss, Mick Mulligan, he of the doxies and the cure for homosexuality? "He had a very bad ulcer, but it didn't kill him and he's better. He lives with his second wife - his first died - near Bognor Regis in Chichester." And, no, he doesn't play trumpet now. "But he and his wife put on the right clothes and go racing a lot."
George Melly and John Chilton's Feetwarmers open Laois Arts Festival on October 24th, at Montague Hotel, Emo, Portlaoise, Co Laois. Tickets £15. Tel: 0502 63355