Georgie Fame’s career has been an affair of ups and downs, from the huge and unexpected success of “Yeh Yeh”, which knocked the Beatles off the No 1 spot in January 1965, to the medical problems — a fall from a ladder in 2019, breaking his hip and severing tendons in his right hand, followed in 2025 by a diagnosis of hydrocephalus, impairing his mobility — that have restricted his musical activities in recent years. He’s 83 now, and there probably won’t be any more gigs or records, so it seems all the more worthwhile to investigate a new biography, Cool Cat Blues, written by his friend and fellow singer-keyboardist Ben Sidran. It’s a slender book, only 140-odd pages, but the story is well told, particularly that of his early childhood in the 1940s amid the mills and pits of Lancashire, and the warmth of a family in which music played a significant role. Then the Butlin’s and Larry Parnes years, during which Clive Powell became Georgie Fame and evolved from the pianist with Billy Fury and the Blue Flames to the singer and organist with his own Blue Flames, settling in London and taking up residence at the Flamingo Club, where the all-nighters with an audience of American servicemen and Caribbean immigrants provided the environment in which he could hone his distinctive musical character. During that period, 1964-67, I took every opportunity to see the Blue Flames whenever they visited my home town, which was often. I loved their blend of R&B and jazz, influenced by Ray Charles’s small bands, the vocalese of Eddie Jefferson and King Pleasure, and Mose Allison’s vocal delivery and wry wit. And I loved Fame’s choice of sidemen with jazz instincts — has any British jazz saxophonist produced a better ballad solo than the effort by baritonist Johnny Marshall on “Moody’s Mood for Love”, from their second album, Fame at Last? The book runs through the partnership with Alan Price, CBS’s attempts to turn him into a hipper Andy Williams, the surprisingly unsuccessful hook-up with Chris Blackwell and Island Records in the mid-’70s, his popularity in Sweden and his work with various big bands around the world, the creation of an Australian Blue Flames, the recordings produced by Sidran in New York for the Go Jazz label, Fame’s years as a star sideman with Van Morrison and Bill Wyman’s all-star… [TheTopNews] Read More.
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