Georgie Fame was born Clive Powell on June 26, 1943, at 1 Cotton Street in Leigh, Lancashire. He took piano lessons from the age of seven, left Leigh Central County Secondary School at fifteen for a short spell in a cotton mill, and spent his evenings playing piano with a local band called the Dominoes. A singing contest at a Butlins holiday camp in Pwllheli, North Wales, led to a job with the band of the early British rock and roll singer Rory Blackwell. At sixteen he moved to London, where Lionel Bart recommended him to the manager Larry Parnes, the man who had renamed Marty Wilde and Billy Fury. Parnes gave him the stage name too, over his objection.

For the next year or so he toured Britain as a pianist on bills with Wilde, Joe Brown, Dickie Pride, Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran, and in 1961 he joined the group backing Billy Fury, who were called the Blue Flames. Fury's management let the band go at the turn of 1961 to 1962, reportedly because it sounded too jazzy for a pop package, and the musicians kept the name. Fame, the group's pianist, became its frontman, and Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames went on to a three-year residency at the Flamingo Club in London's West End, where American servicemen from nearby bases lent him records and played him the new sounds from the United States. By his own account, records by Booker T. and the M.G.'s ("Green Onions" among them) and by Jimmy Smith, brought in by a serviceman, sent him out to buy a Hammond organ the following day. The band's repertoire mixed rhythm and blues, songs by Mose Allison and Willie Mabon, and Jamaican ska and bluebeat, the last brought in by the Jamaican-born trumpeter Eddie Thornton. The guitarist John McLaughlin was a member from June 1962 to April 1963, before he left for the Graham Bond Organisation.

The band's first album, Rhythm and Blues at the Flamingo, was recorded live at the club in September 1963, produced by Ian Samwell and engineered by Glyn Johns, and released by Columbia in early 1964. It did not chart, and neither did the first singles. The breakthrough came with Fame at Last (October 1964, No. 15 on the UK albums chart) and with "Yeh, Yeh," a Latin soul tune first recorded by Mongo Santamaría on Watermelon Man! (1963). Jon Hendricks wrote the lyrics, which Lambert, Hendricks & Bavan recorded live at Newport in 1963. Fame's version entered the UK singles chart in December 1964 and reached No. 1 in January 1965, ending the Beatles' five-week run at the top with "I Feel Fine"; it also reached No. 21 in the United States and No. 1 in Canada. Fame has said that the arrangement was written by the saxophonist Tubby Hayes. "Get Away," which he wrote himself, began as a jingle for a petrol company's advertising campaign; released June 17, 1966, it spent a week at No. 1 in July. "Sunny" (No. 13) and "Sitting in the Park" (No. 12) followed, along with the album Sweet Things (May 1966, No. 6), on which the drummer was Mitch Mitchell.

On October 1, 1966, Fame disbanded the Blue Flames, and within a week Mitchell had been chosen for the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Fame's next record was the one that made his jazz case: Sound Venture (Columbia, October 1966, No. 9 on the UK albums chart), made with a big band conducted and arranged by Harry South and produced by Denny Cordell and Tony Palmer. The band was a cross-section of the London jazz scene, with Tubby Hayes, Ronnie Scott, Tony Coe, Dick Morrissey, Ray Warleigh and others in the saxophone section, Kenny Wheeler and Jimmy Deuchar among the trumpets, Stan Tracey on keyboards, and Phil Seamen and Bill Eyden on drums. Five of its twelve tracks credit Hendricks as a lyricist, alongside tunes by Neal Hefti, Willie Nelson, King Curtis and James Brown, and Fame's own "I Am Missing You" and "Dawn Yawn." A joint tour with Count Basie followed, with Fame singing with the Count Basie Orchestra. The Two Faces of Fame (July 1967), which paired a live half with the Harry South band and a studio half, reached No. 22. His third UK No. 1, "The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde," was released at the end of 1967 and reached No. 7 in the United States.

The years that followed were mostly pop and cabaret. Fame made the string-backed Georgie Does His Thing with Strings (1969) and had a UK Top 20 hit in 1971 with the singer and organist Alan Price, "Rosetta," which reached No. 11. He wrote advertising jingles, scored the films Entertaining Mr Sloane (1970) and The Alf Garnett Saga (1972), and played a pop singer in the 1968 comedy The Mini-Affair. In 1974 he re-formed the Blue Flames and began singing with European orchestras and big bands. He made In Hoagland 1981 with the singer Annie Ross for Bald Eagle, and from 1977 to 1988 he toured Australia each winter with a local band billed as the Aussie Blue Flames.

His jazz work came back into focus from 1989, when Van Morrison asked him to play Hammond organ on his records. Fame played on Morrison's albums through 1997, served as his musical director for a time, and shared the billing on How Long Has This Been Going On (Verve, December 1995), recorded on May 3, 1995 at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London without an audience. It is a session of jazz standards and vocalese, with arrangements by Pee Wee Ellis, Fame, Morrison and Leo Green, and Annie Ross as a guest. A year later came Tell Me Something: The Songs of Mose Allison (Verve, October 1996), made in a single day by Morrison, Fame, Mose Allison and the pianist Ben Sidran, with Guy Barker, Pee Wee Ellis and Leo Green on horns. Through the same decade he recorded for Sidran's Go Jazz label, beginning with Cool Cat Blues (1991) and continuing through the live Ronnie Scott's albums Name Droppin' (1997) and Walking Wounded (1998) to Poet in New York (2000), recorded with Bob Malach on tenor saxophone, David Hazeltine on piano, Peter Washington on bass and Louis Hayes on drums. The Académie du Jazz in France named it the best vocal jazz album of the year, and AllMusic's biography credits it with establishing him as a serious student of the vocalese tradition. Fame was also a member of Bill Wyman's Rhythm Kings, the blues and R&B band led by the former Rolling Stones bassist.

His later records are mostly on his own label. They include Georgie Fame & the Birthday Big Band (2004), Tone-Wheels 'A' Turnin' (2009) and Swan Songs (2015), the last two with the Last Blue Flames, and the studio album Lost in a Lover's Dream (2012, UK No. 28); Swan Songs reached No. 13 in the UK. His sons Tristan Powell (guitar) and James Powell (drums) have played in his groups. In 2018 Odin Records issued On a Misty Night, collecting vocals by Karin Krog and Fame on the music of Tadd Dameron, arranged by Per Husby and recorded in New York in November 1995 with the Per Husby Orchestra. As of November 2026 he is 83, and he has played a number of residencies at Ronnie Scott's.

Fame is a pop star with a real jazz apparatus behind the pop. Commercially he is remembered for three UK No. 1 singles between 1965 and 1968, and AllMusic's biography describes his records of the late 1960s and 1970s as leaning toward cabaret and middle-of-the-road pop. The jazz case rests on other evidence: the Hammond organ, which he took up in the early 1960s, after hearing records by Booker T. and Jimmy Smith, when very few British musicians played one; a book of songs taken from Mose Allison, whose "Parchman Farm" is on the Flamingo album and whom he has said he could hardly stop sounding like for several years in the 1960s; the vocalese of Jon Hendricks, Dave Lambert and Annie Ross, whose repertoire he has recorded and whom he credits with helping him understand jazz; and a run of big-band and quartet records from Sound Venture to Poet in New York that British and French jazz audiences took seriously. His phrasing sits close to Mose Allison's and to the jump-blues tradition of Louis Jordan, whom AllMusic names among his influences, alongside Booker T. & the M.G.'s. He was also one of the first white musicians influenced by Jamaican ska, which he heard in cafes in Ladbroke Grove and played at the Flamingo, and the Flamingo album includes Nat Adderley's "Work Song."