Books by George Melly

'The first serious attempt to analyse pop culture by someone who was part of it.' Julian Mitchell, GuardianThe 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.

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.