Jazz singer George Melly has died aged 80

As well as spending decades belting out standards with John Chilton's Feetwarmers, Melly was also a prolific writer, churning out four volumes of memoirs and books on surrealism and pop art. In between, he was a film and television critic, the writer of a long-running satirical cartoon strip, and a dedicated fly fisherman.

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The Liverpool born musician entertained audiences for 60 years and was known for his outrageous sartorial style

But it was his talent for outrage which attracted attention as much as anything else. As he once put it during his younger years: "All I thought about was drinking, fornicating, surrealism, decadence, excess and being outrageous."

Born in Liverpool, he was educated at Stowe where he first discovered his interest in jazz and modern art - and other boys. His homosexuality became a running theme in his memoirs, Rum, Bum and Concertina, which covered his time in the Royal Navy at the end of the Second World War. He narrowly escaped being court martialled for distributing anarchist literature.

Out of the Navy, he worked in a surrealist art gallery for a while before drifting into the world of jazz music just as the trad boom was taking off. He sang with Mick Mulligan's Magnolia Jazz Band until the early Sixties when he became a film critic for The Observer.

The Sixties was a prolific period. He wrote the script for the film Smashing Time, and with Trog - cartoonist Wally Fawkes - wrote the long-running Daily Mail cartoon strip, Flook.

Married by then to his second wife Diana - he had moved on to predominantly heterosexual relationships in his thirties, although fidelity was never his strong suit - he lived in

Gloucester Cresent, Camden. Jonathan Miller lived next door, Alan Bennett across the road. Visitors to the house included Allen Ginsberg, Ken Tynan and the Beatles.

In the early Seventies he returned to jazz with John Chilton's Feetwarmers, an alliance continued until 2003.

Modelling himself on the great blues singer Bessie Smith, Melly was never a technically proficient singer - but was always popular and entertaining. He said: "I don't pretend to be a great musician. I'm a jazz entertainer, not a jazz artist. I tell jokes between numbers. I put on a bit of a show. That said, I deliver the songs with what sincerity I can muster."

He had a daughter Pandora by his first marriage, and a son Tom by his second.