George Melly

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.

The Trilogy

Owning Up

Edward Frank Willis James

My Early Years

Swans Reflecting Elephants

The Pop Arts

Revolt Into Style

'The first serious attempt to analyse pop culture by someone who was part of it.' Julian Mitchell, Guardian The redoubtable George Melly (1926-2007): flamboyant jazz singer, sexually ambiguous raconteur, prodigiously gifted critic. In the early sixties, at the birth of what we now recognise as the pop revolution, Melly began work as a broadsheet journalist, commenting upon this new cultural phenomenon. Revolt into Style (1970) is his first-hand account of those turbulent and exciting years when all things creative - whether music, fashion, film, art or literature - were changed utterly. Central to the book are The Beatles - the epitome of the swinging sixties - who charted the decade's changes and about whose significance the Liverpudlian Melly had a special feel and insight. Alongside the Fab Four is a large cast of movers and shakers, of wannabes and taste-makers, all dissected by Melly's surgical mind.

Revolt into Style

The Uneducated Children in Our Large Towns. A Speech, Etc. (Appendix.).

George Melly was an unignorable figure in the more louche cultural circles in London between the 1950s and 90s. He first came to notice as a Jazz singer, notable for risque songs performed with verve rather than with great technical ability. This is a supplementary volume of autobiography which treats in more detail Melly's long-lasting attraction to Surrealism, and his friendship with the character who headed up the English Surrealist group: E.L.T. Mesens (their adventures form the core of this book - adventures which ELT was keen should not get back to Sybil, his wife).

A Intimate Memoir of E.L.T. Mesens and of English Surrealism: Augmented Edition

Don't Tell Sybil

George Melly

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