Product Description

This single volume includes three famous memoirs - Scouse Mouse, Rum, Bum & Concertina and Owning Up, with a new introduction by the author. Scouse Mouse is a funny and frequently touching story of the author's 1930s childhood in a middle-class Liverpudlian household. Rum, Bum & Concertina, the naval equivalent of wine, women and song, describes Melly's National Service as one of the most unlikely naval ratings ever. He becomes an anarchist and connoisseur of Surrealist Art while self-educating himself on some of the wilder shores of love. Once demobbed, Melly comes to London to work in an art gallery, and in Owning Up he describes how he slipped into the world of the jazz revival, revelling in an endless round of pubs, clubs, seedy guest-houses and transport caffs while surrounded by a mad array of musicians, tarts, drunks and arch-eccentrics.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #111114 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 608 pages

About the Author
George Melly was born in 1927. He made his name in the jazz revival scene of the late 40s and 50s, singing with Mick Mulligan's band. In the 60s he became one of the UK's most ubiquitous critics, writers and TV personalities. He has published a great number of books, including four volumes of autobiography: Owning Up (1965), Rum, Bum and Concertina (1977), Scouse Mouse (1984) and Slowing Down (2005). Today he can be found singing with the trumpeter Digby Fairweather. In 2004 he was honoured with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the BBC's Jazz Awards.

Customer Reviews

Autobiography at its finest
Wit, raconteur, art connoisseur, surrealist, lascivious jazzman, sexual athlete and wearer of some of the most dangerous suits in Britain, Melly's autobiography is every bit as provocative and bizarre as the man himself.

Written in reverse order but rearranged into chronological order in this edition, it's best to tackle the volumes that way round.

Scouse Mouse covers George's upper-middle-class childhood in Liverpool between the wars. This is a fascinating account of his family, the arts scene in Liverpool, and of a city and lifestyle now almost completely vanished; there are plenty of laughs along the way too.

Rum, Bum and Concertina describes Melly's spell in the Royal Navy, his burgeoning sexuality, and his contact and involvement with the London art world, in particular the Surrealists. Probably the weakest of the three, but again a fascinating portrait of two very different aspects of his life.

Owning Up sees George falling victim to the dreaded curse of Jazz, describing in scabrous, lip-smacking and often highly self-deprecating detail his torrid days with Mick Mulligan's band. At the end of this book he decides to forsake the jazz life for writing and broadcasting...

...but of course an afterword describes his subsequent jazz career with John Chilton ;)

George is a national treasure; his books are warm, acerbic, waspish, astonishingly perceptive and almost infinitely readable. A real treat.

Immensely pleasurable social document
Why has nobody reviewed this? Is it because Melly is perceived as a frivolous figure? Or is it, more likely, the silly titles of the first two vols (actually the last two published)? Anyway, it is pure joy, and not in a frivolous, moon's-a-balloon sense but as fascinating social history (like James Kirkup's 4 volumes of memoirs, unhappily not yet gathered together). And you don't need to (a) like jazz (b) think George can sing!

Swinging and singing
Owning Up remains the true highpoint for me with its loving evocation of a world that was already vanishing when George wrote it back in the early 60's. To anyone who still thinks the 50's were stuffy and conformist in Britain, such as Daily Mail readers for example, this book will provide the necessary corrective. The only difference with that decade and the 60's was that suddenly everyone was aware of the hedonism going on underneath the surface. Even if you're not a jazz fan, the book will rivet you with its graphic descriptions of Melly and partner in crime Mick Mulligan cutting a swathe through late night drinking clubs, provincial dance halls in such glamorous locations as Grimsby and Boston, (Birmingham's reputation never recovered from the battering George gave it in this volume) and scrubbers - always scrubbers! Is there something in the female psyche that pre-programs them to offer themselves sexually to otherwise physically-unappetising musicians? Whatever, generations of spotty adolescents in rock bands who wish to discover if the best form of willy-warmer is a supermodel's mouth are eternally grateful! Rum, Bum and Concertina shocked me when I first read it back in the 70's but remains an intriguing picture of George - a round peg in a square hole if ever there was one - somehow finding time to fit in National Service in the navy whilst attending art galleries, anarchists meetings, and homosexual orgies. There's even a guest appearance by the great Louis Armstrong - the man who ignited George's mania for jazz in the first place. Buy it. When they made George they threw away the mould - and clean forgot how to sculpt another one.