Owning-up

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.

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.