He’s dead, but he hasn’t gone. Now a new exhibition will celebrate the rumbustious Liverpudlian George Melly, who will always be with us. David Charters reports

TOWARDS the close of his days, the brown-eyed man started growing a Biblical beard, so that he would look more like Christ returning to the Father.

It was a strange and bold image, which rose in passion and smiles from brain cells still capable of acrobatic twists and leaps, as his body slowly sank.

Even then, knowing for sure that he was going, his bravery, that unsquashable humour, the vivid desire to entertain and the startling imagination, rubbed together well, and those who loved him still felt that the world was a brighter place, when he released a low, rumbling chuckle.

Anyway, George Melly considered dementia a suitable disease for a surrealist, though it was harder to mock the cancer, which had become its cruel ally.

And he died on July 5, 2007, leaving a cavernous hole in the lives of family, friends and admirers. But “Good Time” George or “Gorgeous” George – writer, wearer of hats, raconteur, jazz singer, boozer, gossip, promoter of surrealistic art, outrager, smoker and crusher of privet-hedge morality – kept some tricks to pluck from the pockets of another candy-striped jacket.

And he appears – larger than life, of course, and as porky and ebullient as ever – in the dreams of his old chum Maggi Hambling, the grand artist, with whom he drank large measures of Irish whiskey and exchanged stories of elastic ribaldry in Soho drinking establishments, such as the Colony, haunt of artists, poets and pickled Bohemians.

The portraits that Maggi painted of George, whom she had known since the early 1980s, are to be exhibited, many for the first time, next month at the Walker art gallery in his native Liverpool.

Appropriately, the show is being called George Always, suggesting that he is a ghost with the biggest girth to be found in what spiritualists call “the other side”, an indestructible presence – then, now and tomorrow.

“If someone who is very close to me dies, I feel inhabited by the person,” Maggi says. “George certainly appears in my dreams. I had one only the other night about him. A lot of these paintings, you know, begin from these dreams that I have about him. He is very jolly in the dreams, always laughing and very happy and plump again.”

Where is George?

“Well, in one of the paintings, George’s Surrealist Lecture, I had this dream that he was in the gardens of a stately home somewhere,” she says. “Everybody in the art world was there. Suddenly, everybody began to run in a certain direction because George was about to give his lecture and there he was. Actually, in the dream, he was in a wheelchair, but I removed the wheelchair and had him standing up.”