Scouse Mouse

by George Melly

Scouse Mouse is a funny, moving, and extraordinarily precise memoir, filled with outlandish characters and beautifully evoked memories.

Genres: Memoir

208 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1984

About the author

Alan George Heywood Melly was an English jazz and blues singer, critic, writer, and lecturer. From 1965 to 1973 he was a film and television critic for The Observer; he also lectured on art history, with an emphasis on surrealism.

Reviews

[Nigeyb · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wonder how many people now remember George Melly? He seemed ubiquitous when I was a kid and young adult as a larger-than-life mix of Jazzer, writer, and TV critic.

I've heard good things about his three memoirs (collected as Owning Up: The Trilogy) and published between 1965 and 1984. When he wrote them he worked backwards, so Scouse Mouse or I Never Got Over It: An Autobiography was the last to be written yet covers the earliest period in his life.

George Melly grew up in Liverpool as a part of privileged family. Scouse Mouse or I Never Got Over It: An Autobiography is filled with his descriptions of his somewhat eccentric relatives so we get a seemingly endless cast of cousins, uncles, aunts, great uncles, great aunts, grandparents etc who are a very eclectic mix of Jewish and English heritage. Elsewhere this is a love letter to pre-WW2 Liverpool. It's wonderfully evocative but slightly outstayed its welcome as far as I was concerned.

I am really lookng forward to the next two books which cover his stint in the Royal Navy and various encounters during the 1940s, and then on to his burgeoning fame in the Jazz clubs of Soho and provincial dance halls of 1950s Britain.

There's an episode of the Backlisted Podcast devoted to this book which came out in February 2024 which is well worth a listen.

3/5

[Ben Baker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant writing about his family which is chronologically first but the last to be written and its those later years that really offer the scope to take it all in. Wonderful to revisit.

[Ian Mond]

This boisterous autobiography covers Melly’s childhood. If, like me, you have never heard of Melly, this book won’t help much because there are only brief glimpses of Melly the adult. Not that it matters. Melly’s childhood is utterly charming, filled with eccentric parents, cousins, aunties and grandparents, an eclectic mix of Anglo and Jewish (controversially for the time, Melly’s mother was Jewish, his father from solid English stock). We’re given a vivid portrait of pre-WW2 Liverpool as Melly takes us down the streets he inhabited, the cinemas he attended, the halls where he saw his mother perform with her actorly friends, the family homes, both small and lavish and his school run by a ridiculous, pantomime villain of a Principal. And through it all, the antecedents to Melly’s broad-ranging career (jazz singer, screenwriter, critic) are present. It’s also a surprisingly frank book, especially around what went on “behind the bleachers” amongst the boys at school. Time permitting, I’ll get around to Rum, Bum and Concertina (covering his war years) and Owning Up (covering his career during the jazz boom). But I’d also be keen to read Melly’s criticism (if I can get hold of it).

[Tim Julian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first came across George Melly as a teenager via a second-hand copy of Revolt Into Style, one of the first books of serious pop music criticism. A few years later I saw him perform with John Chilton's Feetwarmers and thoroughly enjoyed the show, despite having at the time almost no knowledge of trad, or indeed any, jazz.
This was the third and final volume of his memoirs to be published, though chronologically the first, narrating as it does Melly's childhood and the varied array of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins that passed through his infant years. Melly has astonishing powers of recall and a gift for the amusing anecdote that makes the whole thing a delight, and though he was born in 1926, a year after my parents, there's a lot that brought back memories of my own childhood forty or so years later.