The Trilogy

Owning Up

Reissued with a gorgeous new cover to accompany the paperback of his latest book, <I>Slowing Down </I>

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.

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

George Melly is 79 nudging 80. You'll probably think, 'That's not old these days'. And it's true, George is still swinging and singing, fly-fishing, flirting, and for now just playing at senility. But it's not as if he were the Queen Mother. He walks very slowly nowadays. He's losing control over his bladder, and his bowels. He no longer, being quite deaf, enjoys noisy parties. He's been seriously ill once, and not quite well often. And he's constantly being probed and tinkered with at St Mary's Hospital: like an old car in and out of the garage. Sex has walked out on him, but Irish Whiskey, in only slightly diminished quantities, remains a good friend. This remarkably cheerful book is his diary of it all. An extraordinary, darkly funny, frank, and larger-than-life account about how feels to be growing old and irresistibly Slowing Down.

George Melly

Books by George Melly

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