Backlisted - Scouse Mouse by George Melly

Episode Date: February 13, 2024

This episode was recorded in the great city of Liverpool and celebrates the life and work of a great Liverpudlian: George Melly, sometime writer, jazz and blues singer, artist, critic, lecturer and aficionado of surrealism. We are joined by two resident experts: the writer Jeff Young and the playwright and screenwriter, Lizzie Nunnery. The book under discussion is Melly’s Scouse Mouse, which is chronologically the first part of Melly’s memoirs. It was first published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1984 and was the third to be released despite covering the first fourteen years of Melly’s life, painting a vivid portrait of growing up in a middle-class Liverpool family, tinged with eccentricity and theatricality, and his painful experiences at boarding school. Subtitled ‘I Never Got Over It’, it was preceded by Rum, Bum & Concertina, an account of his time in the navy, published in 1977, and Owning It, which covers his years as an aspiring musician in the jazz world of the 1950s, first published in 1965. The final volume, Slowing Down was published in 2005, two years before Melly died.    Scouse Mouse was his Melly’s personal favourite of the four: ‘I don’t know why the events of over sixty years ago should be so much clearer than those of yesterday afternoon, but they are.’ He also adopted that ever-useful motto for the memoirist: ‘Life is lived forwards but understood backwards.’ How much this classic childhood memoir helps us understand the outrageous, complex and multi-faceted life of the grown-up George Melly is just one of the things the panel explore. They also revisit his brilliant book on the pop culture of the1960s, Revolt into Style, a book Andy first discussed back on episode 22 on Randall Jarrell’s The Animal Family. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is an advertisement from BetterHelp. Everyone knows therapy is great for solving problems. But turns out, therapy has some issues of its own. Finding the right therapist, fitting into their schedule, and, of course, the cost. BetterHelp can help solve these problems. It's online, convenient, built around your schedule, and surprisingly affordable, too. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more.

That's BetterHelp.com. exterior features compelling proportions and precise detailing built with integrity and purpose the interior boasts robust durable materials whether it's the all-terrain capability ample cargo capacity or innovative camera technology the defender 110 lets you go further and do more and with seating for up to seven everyone can enjoy the journey learn more at land rover.ca prime day is here with epic deals exclusively for Prime members. You'll feel like a winner. Behind door number three is amazing deals. Shop deals on electronics, home, and more this Prime Day. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books. Today you find us in a room inside a three-storey terraced Wardian house in Ivanhoe Road in the pleasant suburb of

Sefton Park in Liverpool. It's the early 1930s. We're watching a small boy, a plump toddler, sitting on a faded white rug playing with wooden building blocks. The floor is dark green cork. There are dark green blinds instead of curtains and a round child's table with four legs and two little cane bottom chairs. The bookshelf has a tattered set of Beatrix Potter and next to that there's a wind-up gramophone and a few old 78 records. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher on Bound, where people crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And today we are recording our first podcast, as you can't tell, in Liverpool.

And joining us are two residents of this fine city, each making their backlisted debuts. To my right, Geoff Young. Hello, Geoff. Hello there. And further to my right, Lizzie Nunry. Hello. Hi, thanks for coming. Geoff Young is the author of Ghost Town, a Liverpool shadow play, which was shortlisted for the Costa Prize and longlisted for the Portico, published by Little Toller. Rough Trade Books published his excellent pamphlet, Deliria, in 2023. He is an essayist, script writer for radio and stage, and used to write for TV.

He collaborates with musicians and artists on installations, sound art, spoken word, and performance projects in places such as a submarine dock, shipyard warehouse, derelict townhouse, cobbler's Shop. Whoa. Oh, yeah. And Boating Lakes. And he's a collagist and assemblage maker. Wild Twin, the sequel to Ghost Town, is out in 2024. Pop quiz, Jeff Young.

Okay. We are sitting in a building just by the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool. Do you have any idea what this building was used for before it was a podcast studio? I don't know. So you could just make something up now. Is this where the hotel used to be that's in Letter to Brezhnev? Oh, God. It's on the site, isn't it?

But I think it might be a newer building. I only watched that last week. Did you? It looks like it from outside. There's a scene in the morning in Brezhnev where Margie Clark's looking out of the window with the sailor that she slept with and they look out onto that green space.

Psychogeography happening in real time. Until quite recently, though, it was a Tesco. Less romantic. Yeah, yeah. Tesco geography, not psycho geography. For our younger listeners and viewers, of whom there are none, Letter to Brezhnev was a very good and popular film, one of the early films on Film 4, wasn't it, if I remember right?

Yeah, yeah. Well, you have passed with that flying... You can stay, Geoff, thank you. You passed that with flying colours. Lizzie Nunnery is a playwright, singer, songwriter and screenwriter from Liverpool. Her first play, Intemperance, a Liverpool Everyman production in 2007, was awarded five stars by The Guardian and shortlisted for the Mayor Whitworth Award. In 2006, her play Unprotected, performed at the Liverpool Everyman and the Traverse, Edinburgh, won the Amnesty International Award for Freedom of Expression, 2006.

More recently, Heavy Weather, staged at the Tonic Theatre, was nominated for Best Play for Young People at the Writers Guild Awards 2022, and her play with songs, Narvik... That's the one. Is this a backlisted first? What? Is this the first time we've ever had the author of a stage musical as our guest?

Absolutely. Oh my goodness. It was worth coming. Sorry, Lizzie probably doesn't realise that's a sincere excitement. That's not me being ironical. It's a big thing for us. Absolutely. That's a sincere excitement. That's not me being ironical. It's a big thing for us. Absolutely. That's wonderful.

Narvik won Best New Player in the UK Theatre Awards in 2017 and will be produced in Bode, Norway for European Capital of Culture 2024. Wow. Lizzie's short film Another World was produced by BBC in 2020 and her debut feature film With Love is in development with Blue Horizon Productions, supported by the BFI. She's currently developing an original TV drama series

with BBC Studios, a psychological drama set in... Liverpool. In Liverpool, yes, yes. About Catholicism and witchcraft. Yes. I'm in. She has also written extensively for BBC Radio with latest series Daphne,

A Fire in Malta broadcast in 2019. Now, I do just want to tell listeners, one of the reasons we were so thrilled that you were able to join us is you are a musician. And furthermore, you have written about local legend, the poet Adrian Henry. So we have one of the most qualified panels imaginable to talk about the Scouse Mouse himself, George Melly.

Well, because that's the book we're talking about, which is chronologically the first part of a quadrology of memoirs by George Melly, who as well as being a Liverpudlian, born and bred, was a celebrated jazz and blues singer, a critic, writer, lecturer, cartoonist, aficionado of surrealism. Scouse Mouse was first published by Weidenfeld in 1984 and was almost the last of the quadrilogy to be published, although it covers, in fact, his first 14 years growing up in a middle-class

Liverpool family tinged with eccentricity and theatricality and his experiences at school. Subtitled, I Never Got Over It, it was preceded by Rumbum and Constantina, an account of his time in the Navy, published in 1977, and Owning It, which covers his years as an aspiring magician in the jazz world of the 1950s, first published in 1965. He later named Scouse Mouse as his favourite of the four, adding, I don't know why the events of over 60 years ago should be so much clearer than those of yesterday afternoon, but they are. He also adopted that ever-useful motto for the memoirist, life is lived forwards but understood backwards. How much this classic childhood memoir helps us understand the complex life of the grown

up George Melly is one of the things we're here to discuss. When I say to you George Melly, one of the things I've discovered when we've been preparing this episode is I thought I knew who George Melly was, and maybe I did, but there are all these other George Mellys I wasn't really aware of. And the reasons I think we'll talk about later, it seems to me that his reputation, his posthumous reputation has probably suffered for that very reason. The reason he is not so well known is he wasn't one thing, or rather he was, and that thing was George Melly. So Jeff, if I say to you the name George Melly, what's the first thing you think of? I think of Liverpool. I think of the city.

The way I got interested in George Melly was through searching for writers that were writing about the city. And to me, he's one of the quintessential Liverpool characters, iconoclast. I feel quite a potent connection to him because at the end of the street I live in, there is a place called Priory Woods, and George was born in a house in the woods. The house is no longer there. He was born there, just around the corner. The way I walk to the shops every morning to buy the paper, I walk down a street called Melly Road, which is a street named after his family.

Several times a week I walk up Ivanhoe Road where he spends his childhood. I walk past 22 Ivanhoe, which he writes about in Scouse Mouse. And so I think I just always thought of him as someone that represents in some way the city plus the fact that my dad used to go and see him when my dad was young my dad was a jazzer he was into Humph you know Humphrey Littleton and uh and uh Chris Barber and that kind of thing and he used to tell tell us stories about going to see George So I feel it's like he's somewhere there. He's somewhere there in the atmosphere of the city for me.

Okay, so here's the thing. I didn't even know he was a Scouser before we started doing this. That's what I mean, but that's what I mean. I had no idea. Yeah, I mean, really, I suppose, why would you? I mean, he's always loved Liverpool. He's always been very loyal to it. He's always come back.

But his whole demeanour, you know, he's kind of upper middle class from a business and shipping background. They had maids, you know, they had staff. Even though they were kind of shabby genteel. But his whole delivery, his voice, you know, his vocal inflection, delivery, his voice, you know, his vocal inflection, you wouldn't find a trace of Liverpudlian in that. So it is kind of quite a discovery. Well, he's very much an example of the self-created individual, the self-created work of art, isn't he? I mean, that's, but being able to call on different things at any given time. Lizzie, same question to you.

George Melly, when I say George Melly to you, who do you think of? Jazz singer and kind of eccentric, radical spirit. I first came across him when I was working on a show. It was like a one-off at the Everyman that Geoff was part of called Radical City in 2011. And it was kind of a happening. We were trying to emulate the happenings of the 60s. Me and a really great playwright, Lindsay Rodden, curated it together. So we were researching all the radical figures of Liverpool's history as much as we could. And he obviously popped

up, you know, this man who was, you know know a musician and also a writer and also just a kind of a ball of energy yeah he pops up in everyone else's stories and he was really prominent as a friend of Adrian Henry as well who you know I'm fascinated by as a as a figure within popular culture and as a poet and a painter so So kind of represents an attitude to me, George Melly. And was he, now this again, this is, I can't, what a basic question. Was he a good musician? I think he was a good jazz singer. Yeah.

He really applied himself to the craft. Why? What's he got? And not just tone, but what's he got that makes it authentic? I think from a technical perspective, rhythm is everything with jazz singers. And he really does have that precise delivery and that ability to swing with his voice. But I think it's more than that. It's a little bit like how he writes about other people.

He kind of finds a way of cutting to the core of their charisma. And I think the world's full of good rhythmic jazz singers, but he just brought a style that was of a moment and completely his own as well. And on the records, the warmth and the energy and the affection that comes through his voice as well for the material, for the audience. I think that really sets him apart. Yeah, he was a wonderful performer. Right. The figure he reminds me of, John, is Barry Humphreys,

which is to say we remember them from being on TV, but they come from a cultural place. The hinterland that they come from is so famously, Robert Hughes said of Barry Humphreys, he was the only person in australia to understand dada and and and melia is a similar dadaist right as well so these people that we're perhaps habituated to i mean i just you know popping up on wogan to do 10 minutes and the number yeah you know but that was him too right that's all but john george

melly what does the name George Melly mean to you? I encountered George Melly weirdly through a book in a holiday cottage in New Zealand, which was where I was living. And, you know, there are those weird books that end up in, that you end up reading because there's nothing else there. And I picked up and read a book called Rumbum and Constantino. I thought it was one of the, I thought it was, it was the most unlikely funny.

I mean, just brilliant. You know, I sometimes think about influence in terms of being able to tell a story in what appears to be an effortless way. I mean, I devoured it and then lent it to friends and then I discovered much later on when I was back and in London, George Manley was not only still

alive he was performing I went to see him sing which is incredible and also the best of all was occasionally if you were in Jerry's or I very occasionally went into the colony room and he was telling a story that it's that voice he just had this incredible presence obviously you know the fedora the suits that but that, I think that ability, which is going back to what Lizzie was saying about the, why he was a good singer. Maybe he wasn't a great singer, but he was, my God, if you were there watching him with John Chilton, The Feet Woman, you didn't want to be anywhere else. It was just, it was, it was just great entertainment. He was also, I've, he's one of my kind of, the people I love who've got very low bottom thresholds,

which I suspect is actually kind of, as you say, maybe counting against him now because he did so many things. I will lob in my own connection to George Melly. As long-time listeners will know, my specialist subject is often the 1960s. And my knowledge of the 1960s would be much poorer without Melly's contribution, both in the moment, as the decade was happening, as a satirist and a cartoonist and a reviewer and a columnist,

but also, firstly, as the author of the script of the film Smashing Time. There's the soundtrack LP, everybody, which is perhaps not a great film, but a fascinating film in as much as it was written by Melly as a satire of swinging London while London was still swinging. So it's much sharper nastier and um and um more cynical than you might expect from something you know austin powers ish superficially okay um but also he's the author of a book that

i talked about on backlisted in our what have you been reading This Week slot eight years ago. On episode 22, which is about The Animal Family by Randall Jarrell, I talked about and read a little from Revolt Into Style, Melly's book that was his chronicle of what pop meant at the end of the 1960s as a result of the 60s. A still magnificent book, some of which I read again. I might read a little bit later on about pop, what he considered to be pop literature. He's all these things and all these other things we haven't talked about.

I have a quote before we go on to Scouse Mouse specifically. Near the end of his life he was asked would you say that your persona has overshadowed your talents i was going to save this to the end but actually it's just too good not to break it out now would you say your persona has overshadowed your talents well Well, he said, that's a sort of non-question to me. What talent? What persona? A lot of people don't know I write,

and a lot of people who read books don't know I sing. The maximum recognition I've ever received in public was after appearing on Room 101. It's a harmless programme, amusing even, but when I think of 30 years of singing and pounding the country and people come up to me and say, you were on Room 101, weren't you? People don't think you're real if you're not on television.

I go into a local pub and I know the guys there, they'll say, I haven't seen you on the box lately, very accusingly. I don't seen you on the box lately. Very accusingly. I don't care. I do what I do as well as I can. That's all. Yeah. Brilliant. Lovely.

Proper artists is what I'm saying. Yeah. I do what I do as well as I can is as good a definition of artistry as we could, as we could find. So Jeff, Scouse Mouse, is this your favourite of the volumes of memoir? It is.

I read Owning Up first. I read them, I think, in the sequence they came out. I read Owning Up and then I read Rumbum, Constantina. And then I came to this when it first came out. And I think it connects to me because I write a lot about childhood. And I just find that he immerses himself so warmly, tenderly, into his own childhood and through his childhood, through his, you know, it's quite a large family,

his parents, his brother and sister, his grandparents, the aunties and the uncles, and he creates this vast cast of characters. He says at one point of the term, they're like characters in a radio show, you know, and it's this, there are so many characters that you lose track. Yeah. And I actually really like that.

Sometimes I turn back a few pages and I think, oh God, who is this? And it kind of doesn't matter because he's so, he loves them, you know. And so I found that warmth and generosity and good humor. Even the people that he doesn't particularly like, he's really kind to, you know. So, yeah, childhood, I write about childhood a lot. I just wrote a book about it, you know. And, again, it's touchable.

I can, even though it's, you know, nearly 100 years ago, the houses are still there and the streets are still there, so I can walk through his story. And do you, Lizzie, do you feel Melly's powers of recall here are suspicious? I think he acknowledges that. He talks about his cousin's research that he's drawn on. And he mentions the fact that he's had to check things and look into things. It is very detailed.

It is incredible that anyone could remember every detail of the nursery that he read at the beginning. But in a way, I believe that. I believe those kind of caught fragments of childhood um there's there's a moment when he talks about the backyard in ivanhoe road and the washing flapping and this like slice of sky and you think it's beautiful it's so well well written isn't it and you think well that's a little piece of childhood that's caught but then yeah there's a lot that i think he's presenting as I remember that must be kind of gathered through time unless he has an incredible recall a bit of both is fine yeah

he says you know the thing about memory is that your memories he there's a bit where he is a lovely bit where he remembers being next to his mother in a car looking up at her and then she says only problem with that is my mother never drove. Yeah, yeah. It is a book about memory as much as... His fidelity to representing what he thinks he remembers would be my analysis of it. It is genuinely remarkable, I think.

Liz, you said something really interesting before we came on air about how he observes himself as a character while recording his perceptions. Can you give us an example of him doing that? I think it's there throughout, and it makes it a really fascinating book. I think that we're particularly used to modern memoirs having a narrative angle. And I think it's really interesting how he doesn't paint himself as kind of hero or victim, or he barely draws any lines of, my mother was this, so I became this, or this is why I'm a singer. He just kind of places himself in a moment and observes how he felt you know his kind of sensory experience um

and i think oddly that connects to all everything he writes later about pop music and about kind of releasing yourself from the weight of the past um but there's there's a great bit that's actually i think in look at those look at those posts I'm addicted to post-it notes. Yeah, right at the end of Scouse Mouse, when he's talking about having his holiday in Berkdale when he's been evacuated. And he just kind of ponders about why he did this thing. And I'm certain this is a real memory because he's as baffled by it as anyone else.

And he says, that evacuated holiday in Bechdale, I decided one afternoon to dress up in some of Maud's clothes, make my face up and walk with Andre, then eight into Southport. I've no idea why I wanted to do this. I've never been attracted to transvestism.

And with this solitary exception, have only worn drag at fancy dress parties when it was requested. And once as a joke, during the last evening of a season at Ronnie Scott's. This day however I went to pick up Andre and we set off down Waterloo Road me tottering along on Maud's court shoes Andre with strict instructions to remember to call me auntie. On the outskirts of Southport proper were two back-to-back public toilets sited on an island in the middle of the road. Holding Andre firmly by the hand, I entered and used the ladies.

We then walked on into Southport, where we had an ice in a fashionable cafe in Lord Street, and returned home. Like so many things you couldn't do now, you couldn't really do then either. Before we go on to talk about Scouse Mouse a bit more and about, Jeff, about Melly's prose and his descriptions of Liverpool, we have a clip here from, good Lord, 30 years ago. Those of a certain age will recognize this almost immediately a foggy night in old liverpool birthplace of a flamboyant entertainer who made his musical mark

on the city long before the beatles everised the Cavern Club. And tonight he's back in town for a nostalgic gig. As a young boy, his greatest thrill was a weekly visit to this theatre, the Liverpool Playhouse. And tonight he is the top of the bill. When I tell you that our man has been a sailor, a writer, a critic, an art expert and a jazz singer, you'll understand why nobody has ever called him predictable. Here I go. I must tell you that John Chilton and the others know there's an extra booking tonight, and I have come to Liverpool, as you might have suspected, to say tonight, George Melly, this is your life. Thank you very much.

I never thought it would happen because I didn't believe I knew enough respectable people, you see. Well, enough people know you, and there's a story as colourful as one of your suits to be told. Is there now? Yes. And we're heading to a studio near here to tell this, so it's time to let the good times roll and to thank your audience once again. Thank you. It's time to let the good times roll and to thank your audience once again.

Thank you. Geoff, could you, for listeners, could you describe what George is wearing on stage? I can, but with a slight caveat is that I'm colourblind. I'm so sorry. However. Guess, it's fine however I mean what it looks like

is it looks like fabric that's made out of seaside bunting and it does and children's ribbons you know

it's multi multicoloured and the tie looks like it's made from the same material but it's it's gone wrong in the wash so you know

anyone else who wore that would look like an absolute mess but george looks astonishing the one occasion when i met george melly he was wearing lilac apparently uh a lilac pinstripe uh good yeah Very good. You can find the whole of that episode of This Is Your Life on YouTube. If you are a fan of smashing time, go forward to 14 minutes in and Rita Tushingham appears as a guest. Geoff, the prose then, the prose. What I was astounded when I read this, again, on a very basic level,

I think one would be inclined to think of a book by George Melly, certainly at this point, as, you know, the lighthearted memoir of a celebrity. And indeed, the phrase celebrity memoir is so devalued now. I was astonished how well written this is. Astonished. And actually, it wasn't very widely reviewed. I had a look for reviews. There aren't many, because presumably people thought, George Melly, we don't review George Melly by the time this comes out. What are the trademarks of the prose in here? Yeah, I think it's that if he'd got it it wrong or if somebody else was writing these stories,

it would be just a kind of cavalcade of anecdotes that were skipped through. He doesn't do that. He does tell stories, but he also just takes time. He enters into it. He immerses himself into, you know, going back to that thing about the way he remembers or misremembers or invents the memories of the rooms, you know, but it's this kind of inner space. He takes you into these rooms and up those corridors and stairways and he's in no hurry to tell the next gag. There are gags. There is a lot of humour in it, but he's relaxing into it.

He's in no rush and neither should we be. Let's absorb the character and atmosphere of these places and these incredible people that we meet on the way. John, you had read Rumbob and Constantine. That was a fairly notorious book in its era, was it not? It was. How does Scouse Mouse compare to that? I think I'm with Geoff in, I love Rumbum and Constitina,

but it's a performance out to shock, out to kind of, you know, a peto le bourgeois. Whereas I think this is one of the most interesting books about early childhood that I've read. One is he does the, the structure is interesting. He does the flaneur thing. He's taking Carol Ann Duffy, who married to Adrian Henry, around showing her Liverpool and his old haunts. That's what starts him off in this sort of train of recollection. And he comes right back to her at the very end of the book and to point out all him off in this sort of train of recollection. And he comes right back to her at the very end of the book and to point out all the places and to sort of wrap up the

ends of what happened to this extraordinary cast of characters. I really like what Lizzie said. He doesn't, I mean, there's a funny bit, which I might read later about his mum's sexual analysis, but he doesn't do any kind of Freudian analysis he doesn't try and explain how did George Melly come out of all of this what he does is he gives you an almost it is almost unbelievable beyond Dickensian the kind of the the characters his mother that his quiet father and then all the uncles and all the and you say you get completely lost you're having to check back and he says things like i don't know very much about my mother's family and proceeds to tell you everything about all these incredible characters i'd just like to read a little bit the bit you were talking about about um the book starts with him flaneuring

alongside caroline duffy for personal reasons I found this an uncanny experience reading this. I was in Liverpool recently singing for two nights at Kirkland's. Where was Kirkland's? Kirkland's is on Harbour Street. It's now called Fly and the Loaf. It's a boozer. It used to be a bakery, and then it was Liverpool's kind of city centre's first proper wine bar.

Okay. Originally an elegant 19th century bakery right now, wine bar. This is so great to have this level of literature. You do. I know. You were fact-checking this for George. I stayed, as I usually do, with the painter and poet Adrian Henry

and his companion, the poet Carol Ann Duffy. Before my second gig, Adrian having left to recite his poems somewhere in Cumbria, I invited Carol Ann to dine with me in a bistro in Lark Lane in the suburb of Sefton Park. And as it was a fine evening in late March, I suggested we took a short bus ride to the gates of Prince's Park and walk from there.

Carol Anne didn't know this part of Liverpool very well, but I did. It was where I lived until I left to work in London in the late 40s. We caught the bus opposite the Rialto, a Moorish cinema built during the 20s and now a furniture store. Yeah, it's no longer there. It got burned down in the Toxteth riots. And moved smoothly up Prince's... It's like having sidebars.

It's so good. And moved smoothly up Prince's Boulevard. There is a statue of a Victorian statesman at each end of the tree-lined yellow gravel walk running up its centre there. Not anymore, though, is it? Well, one of them certainly got... One of them was pulled down in the Toxteth riots.

There you go. Sorry, I'm quickly... We could have a reel at a side. One of them was pulled down because they mistakenly thought it was a slave trader when it wasn't. Yeah, the one at the Prince's Park end. And my maternal grandmother always advised her friends to wait for a 33 tram.

It took, in her view, a prettier way than either the one or the 45, which ran to the Dingle through slums and dilapidated shops close to the river. It may be that that led the Guardian in one of the few reviews to write no one i can think of incidentally has written better about trams prince's park an alternative childhood walk to the far larger almost adjacent sefton park is long and narrow surrounded by the backs of big houses and mansion blocks and enclosing a chain of artificial lakes duck strewn and the colour of brown Windsor soup, fenced in by croquet hoop-like railings. At the entrance to the lakes is a small gravestone

commemorating Judy, the children's friend, a donkey which died at an advanced age in 1924. John, I can see the grave of Judy the donkey from my office window. I couldn't, and it's hidden away, it's under a tree. So to pick the book up and see George

when was this written? This must be 40 plus years ago. Walking through 84. It's 40 years ago. So it's 40 years ago. Yeah. Walking through, walking through, 84. 84. Walking through.

It was 40 years ago. So it's 40 years ago, writing about 60 years earlier. And the only trace of the statues have gone. The trams don't run. The furniture store got burnt down in the riots. But the grave of Judy the donkey is still there for those who know where to look. There's so much that's still there, though, as well. And I think what you've just described, those locations across the decades,

do create this feeling of the uncanny when you're so familiar with these places. He's describing Sefton Park all in the past tense, but almost everything he's describing is still there if you go there right now. And I don't know, I this there's a feeling of validation almost that you experience all these places as beautiful and magical or significant anyway even if they're mundane and then to have them there in this in this really fine prose kind of elevates

them but it reminds me of your both your work and your work jeff that idea of like Ghost Town is a book that perambulates Liverpool in the present and the past simultaneously. And you've written about Adrian Henry at some length and you were talking there about the happenings that were such a big part of the British cultural scene, not just the Liverpool scene, but the British cultural scene in terms of forging links with the States, with beat writers in America and what have you. And Lizzie, I wonder if you could talk a bit more to that idea, the idea of Melly as somebody who represents those different Liverpools simultaneously. Yeah, he kind of bridges the decades, doesn't he? And then bridges all these different cultural movements. And I think the really incredible thing when you're reading his various books is that he manages to have this kind of openness throughout all that. You know,

he could easily have been a traditional jazz guy who was just disgusted by pop. And that was the end of his cultural experience and contribution. He could easily have seen pop art or, you know, the literature of Adrian Henry and the Liverpool poets as kind of crass. But I think that's kind of what I find most impressive about him as a figure when you start to look closely, is that what he saw was this great cultural democracy and democratisation that was happening and saw that as liberating. I'd love to have kind of been able to listen in on his conversations with Adrian Henry because I feel like that's where they collided.

Reading this book also you get, I mean it sounds a bit overblown, but the idea of where modern sensibility comes from. He's Victorian Edwardian, his childhood, really. He said once that his interest in surrealism came from seeing a lot of First World War veterans sitting in this lounge, surrounded by kind of potted plants and they all had missing limbs. And it was just the juxtaposition of the veterans potted plants and they all had missing limbs. And it was just the juxtaposition of the veterans with the kind of loose 19 sort of 20s.

You feel in the book, what's clever, it could have just been one anecdote after another. I think he's doing something more clever in the way he selects and puts the various memories. Although he never says this, you think, yeah, I can sort of see why you became so interested in modern art, apart from the desire to shock and to perform, which is clearly there all the way through.

We're going to play a quick game now, which I'm calling One Degree of Separation. I'm going to give each of you the name of an artist or a celebrity, and you have to get to George Melly in one move. Okay? Okay. So should we go, let's start with Jeff, and I will not accept any answer that contains the word Beatles.

Okay? What is the connection? How can you get from George Melly to George Harrison? Yeah, okay. George and the band were driving home from a gig in the north and they stopped off for some reason, which I'm not quite sure.

They stopped off at George and Patty's mansion. In Henley. In Henley. In Henley. And they hung around with George for a while. And then they got on their way to the Reading Festival. And when they got to the Reading Festival and they were setting up for their slot, for their gig, their roadie turned around and their roadie was George Harrison. Wow. That's not the answer I have on the card, but that's a good answer.

Can I give you another link? Yeah, go on. Oh, great. This is from a piece from the Liverpool Echo. George Melly loved the Beatles, he told me so, in a suit as loud as one of their Sgt Pepper outfits. I drank with the colourful singer before he went on stage. Dear boy, he said, they are Liverpool, you think of them and the city comes up in your mind.

How right he was. On the day I met him, he had in his inside pocket a white envelope. Do you know, old chap, he said. After two large gins and tonic, I went from a boy to an old chap. What do you think is in here? I told him I wasn't psychic. He laughed and said, it's a cheque from George Harrison to go towards the renovation of the Palm House.

The beautiful Sefton Park Palm House was in an ugly way and a campaign was mounted to restore it to its former glory. As a journalist, I asked Mr. Melly how much it was for and he put his finger to his lips and said, never shall be told. George Harrison, he pointed out, didn't want publicity. Oh, wow. Isn't that great?

I feel I have to say I got married in the palm house. Oh! And that could never have been possible without the two Georges. Wow, that's so nice. All right. Well, Lizzie, I turn to you then with, you're probably not even old enough to know who this is, but we'll give it a go.

Get from Tony Hancock to George Melly in one move. It is George's sister. She was an actress and she was on Tony Hancock's Half Hour. Andre Melly, that is quite correct. Passed with flying colours. Brilliant. Did you know that? I didn't know that, no.

Where did she play in Hancock's Half Hour? She's sort of the straight person in the original line-up of Hancock's Half Hour. So she's not Kenneth Williams, Sid James or Bill. She's there to kind of give Tony the flat lines. We should give credit to Maud, the Melly mother, because she was, he's very funny in the book, isn't he? He always says she's obviously fruity and theatrical, but then he's also saying, well, she was quite timid and not assertive. It doesn't sound like she seems to know everybody.

All right. So, so Mitch, here's the third one. Get from, and you have two choices. If you do both, then that's, that's, that's a feather in your cap. get from George Melly in one move to either Jean Rees or Bruce Chatwin or both? Okay. I can get to Bruce Chatwin. George Melly and Diana Melly had a house in Wales. He's very fond of Wales. One of the other things about George Melly, which I didn't know but now do know,

is he was a really, really keen fly fisherman all the way through his life. He was. He sold a Magritte to fund his buying a stretch of the river. For those who are going to go on and read, you learn about landing his first trout, which is one of the good scenes in the book. But that was the house where Bruce Chatwin wrote On the Black Hill. That is correct. I don't know. You're going to have to fill in the Reese, Andy.

Jean Reese became very famous and successful in the late 1960s. And she considered it in true Reesean fashion to be one of the worst things that ever happened to her. Because not only had it come too late, she was constantly being asked to do things she didn't really want to do. Write more books, make appearances, be this character, Jean Reese. And she was nearing the end of her life, and she very much enjoyed a drink to help her achieve those things. to help her achieve those things.

And she was quite poorly. And so George and Diana Melly invited Jean Rees to live with them in the 1970s. And she moved into their house. And six months later, she moved out again. Because it was a disaster. Do you think they'd read the early Jean Rees novel? I think they just thought she was, again, they loved... Andy, were she still alive? And I know you love Jean Rees, like no one else.

Would you invite her to come and share a flat with you? I would take her out every day, Johnny, and we would go and visit the grave of Judy the donkey. We would go to the Palm House, we would take a little drink there. No, I wouldn't. Of course I wouldn't. But I think one of the things about Melly, it seems to a little drink there. No, I wouldn't. Of course I wouldn't. But I think one of the things about Melly, it seems to me, and throw this out, they loved artists.

They had a stormy relationship with one another, George and Diana. Open relationship. We know, open relationship. But they loved artists, outsiders. And one of the things people say about Melly, in the obituaries of Melly, they say how open-hearted he was. I was talking to somebody just yesterday whose agent, a comedian whose agent, had known George Melly when he was a young man. when he was a young man, and George had not had an inappropriate relationship with him,

but he had tutored him, in the agent's words, in how to be gay, in an era where it was not so easy to be gay, because George saw it as almost pastoral care. You know? Yeah. Yeah. He reminds me in that regard actually of uh of simon napier bell the the kind of the you know music manager managed the man who took wham to china and

managed the yardbirds but simon once threatened to sue the daily mail for suggesting that he wasn't gay but he has come to that weird i think think George Melly was a bit like this. You know, he said, I think if I was living my life over now, if I was born now, I wouldn't be gay. Because it's just so dull. Everybody's put into these little pigeonholes. And I think there's that sense always,

you know, the fact that George was clearly bisexual and had relationships with both men and women. He didn't like to be pigeonholed. He didn't like to be put into a box. He's actually like to be pigeonholed. He didn't like to be put into a box. He's actually like Reese. Who are you? I am whatever I say I am. And you base that on my choices. Wherever you're going, you better believe American Express will be right there with you. Heading for adventure? We'll help you breeze through security. Meeting friends a world away? You can use your travel

credit. Squeezing every drop out of the last day? How about a 4 p.m. late checkout? Just need a nice place to settle in? Enjoy your room upgrade. Wherever you go, we'll go together. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamx. Benefits vary by card. Terms apply. Jeff, I'd love you to read a little bit from Scouse Mouse in a minute, but there's a wonderful interview you put me on to with Melly on Daytime ITV. I remember this was on Daytime ITV. He wasn't proud, was he?

If people asked him, he would do stuff. But imagine, you put farmhouse kitcheners being on, and then you put this, this comes on. Why the arts, George? Why do you think they're important? Well, I don't think all art's important at all. I never think that sort of art, which is almost an extension of what colour you choose for your curtains or your walls, are important.

I don't think of art as purely sensory pleasure in arrangements of colour and shapes. I think art's important in that it suggests, as it were, an alternative reality. It suggests what's inside us instead of what's imposed on us from outside. Any picture which for me is worthwhile is in a way an exteriorization of what's inside the person and a form of statement which is in itself revolutionary because it opposes the hum, drum and the dull. My English teacher at school used to say art is a way of rearranging the pattern so that it makes sense to you. Would you agree with that? No, I think your art teacher at school was talking nonsense. I don't rule out the fact there are good painters and bad painters, but in a way I'd sooner have a bad painter who had something interesting

to say about him or herself and the world about him or herself than a good painter who was purely interested in what your art teacher suggested, arranging shapes, patterns and colours. Yeah, I think that really connects with Adrian Henry and his spirit as a painter. Well, his attitude of kind of quantity over quality, just always making things, whether it's a poem or a happening or a picture.

What he says there is so beautiful and it's almost like you could use that as, you know, that could be on a poster. You know, it's almost like a manifesto statement and it's kind of everything that's gone wrong with cultural education you know he he whenever that was decades ago that should be on the school in our art schools you know on the walls in art schools we need to open up to possibility he says on numerous occasions in i think in a few of the books, when he's talking about a particular character, he says,

she was original. Yeah. And it's embodied, isn't it? It's not kind of, like you say, it's not a manifesto. He's not laying out his philosophy in this book. He's sort of showing you this is what i've got this this was my childhood this is where this is where i came from yeah and this is this is still what informs my imagination yeah could you read us something from the book because i feel we want to

hear some more from the from the book okay i thought i'd read this which is kind of we've talked about this kind of memory and misremembering and what is the reality of memory. And he says this specifically to do with childhood. You come to as a child as if from a major operation. Oh, yeah. Pink blurs loom up, solidify interfaces, become recognizable, Oh, yeah. whose significance is lost. A few film clips of random lengths shown in no particular order. Nor is it possible to distinguish in retrospect between what you can really remember and what you were told later. And anyway, many early memories are false. I am sitting beside my

mother in an open car. She's driving along a seaside promenade festooned with fairy lights at night. Everything is in shades of milky blue, the sea, the pier, the boarding houses. I am very happy. I smile up at my glamorous mother. The only flaw is that my mother never drove a car. A maid, a friend of my nanny's, is hanging up sheets in a small garden on the side of a house opposite ours in Ivanhoe Road. A blue sky full of little clouds, blossom on a stunted soot black tree, the sheets very white, the arms of the maid red from the soots, the whole composition cramped and angular without depth. Why this image chosen from so many which have been forgotten? Why a white horse galloping across a green hillside in North Wales, lit by brilliant sunshine under a dark sky? Early memory has no discrimination. When everything is equal,

without associations, without any meaning beyond itself, there is no measure available, no scale. My mother drives her car. The maid hangs up the washing. Wooden pegs bought from gypsies who came to the door. The white horse gallops under the dark sky. That's so good. If you didn't know it was by George Melly, you wouldn't know it was by George Melly.

You'd be right up there. Virginia Woolf, one of the great modern modernist writers i think that's astonishing passage i've got a similar passage here about number 90 chatham street um chatties chatties which is the house in which his grandparents and various family members lived just inside the front door crammed into quite a small vestibule, was a huge glass case of stuffed animals largely engaged in carnage. This is the thing you were talking about, about that. It's ridiculously specific, but so good. A fox looked up from dismembering a rabbit. A stoat was in the act of pouncing on a field mouse, a squirrel, frozen in terror, recoiled at the

descent of a swooping hawk suspended from a wire. There was also a large cupboard carved with melly crests and containing several boxed grey toppers, and facing it a substantial table flanked by two of those uncomfortable little high-backed armorial chairs, and on it a silver tray for visiting cards. All the corridors at Chatty were painted a deep, shiny orange-brown. I mean, it's so... The sensitivity to object, colour, mood. There's also one, forgive me, there's a wonderful thing about the library at Chatty.

Do you remember this? Yeah. Just, again, imagine the recall here or the reconstruction of it he talks about the library he talks about the objects and toys that were in the library and the books he says the books were rather dull on the whole improving and pious works in very small print but there was some splendidly engraved hand-colored volumes of fierce beasts and one fascinating book full of sadistic tales about naughty children getting their comeuppance, which even I was able to read, as it deployed no word of more than three letters, a restraint which must have meant considerable circumlocution. Why did you get the cat and put the cat in a bag and put the bag in the sea?

For fun. It is not fun for you and no fun at all for the cat. Needless to say, this homily had no effect on Ned, but he was eventually bitten on the leg by a mad dog and lay in terrible agony the jeering of the creatures he had tormented ringing in his ears. Do you say it is for fun now? Asks a fly he had partially dismembered. Or to revert to the monosyllabic style of the original,

did get the fly and did get the leg off the fly. I mean, what it's like, Lizzie, it strikes me, what it's like is somebody itemising a room in their imagination. And we know that he may have had some kind of OCD, either diagnosed or not. But he writes with an almost obsessive attention to detail because he can't move on from what he's describing until he's got it exactly right.

Yeah, I think you're right. And I think there is something about childhood memory that it's like if it was a film, the focus is so close. Yeah. Everything is at eye level or towering above you and I think he really captures that and also a kind of fetishisation of objects that happens when you're a child

you know there's kind of little pots that were on the shelf in my childhood home and I can still see the pattern I think he gets that across really vividly and it reminds me a lot of your book Jeff of Ghost Town those moments that way of accessing childhood through the specifics. But you're right, I think Melly has something else, which is a sort of compulsive need to document. the obsessive spirit in my remembering so minutely the contents and decoration of an unremarkable terrace

some 50 years ago. And then he says this, which I think is kind of the key to the whole thing. Well, I have always tended to understand people initially through the objects they accumulate and the manner in which they display or conceal them. Oh, that's so good. That's a great one.

I love his mum describing him towards the end as an affected bit of goods. He's a show-off. You know, we're going to have to wind up in a minute, which is such a shame. Johnny? I'm afraid now it's time for us to bring this gig to a close. A huge thank you to Geoff and Lizzie

for bringing George Melly back to such vivid life and to Nicky and Jacob for making our individual improvisations come together as jazz. If you want show notes with clips, links and suggestions for further reading for this show and the 204 that we've already recorded, please visit our website at backlisted.fm. And if you want to buy the books discussed on this or any of our other shows, visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose Backlisted as your bookshop. And we're still keen to hear from you on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Blue Sky, Royal Mail, postcards. Yes. Or just think of us occasionally.

Yes. If you want to hear Backlisted early and ad free, you can subscribe to our Patreon, www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Your subscription brings other benefits if you subscribe at the lock listener level. For a monthly fee that's probably a better investment than buying a bale of Tom Melly's wholesale wool, you'll get not one, but two extra exclusive podcasts every month. Features the three of us, talking and recommending the books, films, and music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight. For those of you who enjoyed our what have you been reading slot, that's where you'll now find it. It's an hour of tunes, musings and superior book chat. Plus, lot listeners get their names read out accompanied by lashings of praise and gratitude

like this. Leslie Wood, thank you. Christian Powers, thank you. Terence Stevik, thank you. Richard Brouillette, thank you. Emma Grove, thank you very much. Alexis Thompson, thank you. Stephen Van Emel, thank you. Corin McChesney, thank you so much. Now, before we go, we're actually going to go out with a tune from George, but

before we do that, this has gone quickly, hasn't it, Lizzie? It has. It's rushed by us. How on earth do we think we could that, this has gone quickly, hasn't it, Lizzie? It has. It's rushed by us. How on earth do we think we could even do this in an hour? But is there anything else you would like to add or say about George Melly while the camera is rolling? I found this little quote in Revolved Into Style that kind of lit me up because I thought,

oh, I think this might be the key to Melly or to something about him anyway. He's talking about popular culture and pop culture. And he says that pop culture made us, and then this is the quote, we re-examined our aesthetic premises and owned up to the areas around us, which we affected to despise, but in fact rejoiced in. you think oh gosh that's it isn't it he was owning up to all his kind of cultural impulses and he's holding up the LPE

smashing time that's exactly what that is absolutely I could not agree more so pleased we got that in thank you Geoff there's nothing left briefly his father's last words to him Geoff, there's nothing left, is there? Briefly, briefly. His father's last words to him.

Oh, yeah. His last words to me were, always do what you want to do. I never did. Yeah. Brilliant. That's like the starting pistol, isn't it? Yeah. And that's what he did.

Yeah. You know. And he kept going. Yeah. And kept going. And kept going. And kept going. Well, this has been such a joy. We're so enjoying having this conversation.

We're going to keep going. And if you want to hear us talk about George Melly's review of A Spaniard in the Works by John Lennon, and you want to hear some of the other things we had stacked up that we didn't have time to talk about during the last hour well you can come over because next week on our patreon there will be an extra half an hour all about george melly the people he knew um the times he lived through there's just so much to say um We're awarding ourselves a special extra episode. And next week, that will be available on our Patreon, John, which you can find at...

www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. So hopefully see you next week over there. In the meantime, we're going to leave you with George himself, very early records of George's. George, who is no longer with us but of course he still is with us because he's singing to us from the cemetery this from 1950s

next to the donkey Judy the donkey 1956 here is some hot jazz by George Melly Cemetery Blues and I urge you to look up online the sleeve of the EP from which this comes which is called George Melly, Cemetery Blues. And I urge you to look up online the sleeve of the EP from which this comes, which is called George Melly Sings Doom.

I'm not going to tell you what's on it, but while you listen to this piece of music, go and find the EP George Melly Sings Doom. And this from that EP is Cemetery Blues. Thank you, John Mitchinson. Thank you, Lizzie. Thank you Lizzie. Thank you Geoff. Bye everyone. We'll see you next time. See you next time everybody. Bye.

Once I knew a gal named Cemetery Lot Down in Tennessee She had got a pair of mean old graveyard eyes Full of misery And both by night and day You could hear us sing the blues away I'm going down to the cemetery

Cause the world is all wrong I'm going down to the cemetery, cause the world is all wrong To join with all them spooks and hear them sing my sorrow song Got a date to meet a ghost by the name of Jones I've got a date to meet a ghost by the name of Jones Well, it makes me happy to hear him rattle his bones He ain't no fine dresser, he don't wear nothing but a sack sack I said he ain't no shop dresser he don't wear nothing but a sack but every time he kisses me them funny feelings scramble up my back. If you're looking for a man

You always know just where to find Said if you're looking for a man You always know just where to find. Said if you're looking for a man, you always know just where to find.