In this compelling and moving account of the marvellous Melly's last five years, on- and off-stage, the eminent jazz trumpeter, Digby Fairweather, whose band has accompanied Melley during this period, captures the technicolour Melly as never before. He vividly recalls the many gigs, recording and drinking sessions, the performances up and down the country, the characters they have met and the unexpected and unscripted encounters...as well as their conversations and friendship.Anyone who has seen George Melly on stage will know how outrageous and captivating he can be - the rouguish twinkle in the eye always spelling mischief. But there is another side to him - his erudition, his fame as an expert on Surrealism, his passion for angling, his sexual appetite and more.Even in his last year, although very ill and growing ever more deaf, his sense of fun and his love of music has kept him singing to the end - the ultimate performer. In "George Melly: The Final Bows of a Legend", one of his closest associates offers a view of this jazz master as never seen before.

George Melly's three autobiographical memoirs - Scouse Mouse, Rum, Bum and Concertina and Owning Up in one volume for the first time. An account of the author's life from childhood in middle-class Liverpool in the thirties, through national service in the navy as an ordinary seaman to his emergence as a connoisseur of surrealist art and his career as a jazz singer.

In Why Don?t We Do It In The Road? the author looks back to the 1960s and the global phenomenon surrounding four young men from Liverpool . . .The names and the songs are well known, but the ?why?? is more difficult to assess - even with hindsight - against the glare of the music industry?s powerful myth-making apparatus. . .John Astley deploys his forensic skills as a sociologist todevelop an original take on the kaleidoscopic landscape that gave birth to The Beatles phenomenon . . .The reader is invited to take a peep back into the recent past - at the post-War years in England. . .the trembling class structure of an exhausted society. . .and the advent of global communicationsin the 1960s as the music industry and British culture is unmade and remade . . .Put another way, ?Why Don?t We DoIt In The Road?? is question that has gone answered for four decades - until now. John Astley is a writer and lecturer - and is a frequent contributor to journals, conferences, and radio talks. As a sociologist of culture, he is also the author of three volumes of collected essays: Liberation & Domestication, Culture & Creativity, and Professionalism & Practice. John Astley is currently working on Herbivores and Carnivores, a timely investigation into cultural values in contemporary society.

This book is about the tiny sounds of the world, and listening to them, the minute signals that are clues to who and where we are. A very small sound, given the context of its history, becomes hugely significant, and even an imagined sound in a picture becomes almost a voice. By speaking a name, we give a person back to the world, and a breath, a sigh, a laugh or a cry need no language. A phoneme is the start of all stories, and were we able to tune ourselves to the subtleties of the natural world, we might share the super-sensitivity of members of the bird and animal kingdom to sense the message in the apparent silence. Mind hears sound when it perceives an image; the book will appeal to sonic and radio practitioners, students of sound, those working in the visual arts, and creative writers.