Life and times of a Scouse Mouse

If you only do one thing this week - make it this

Feb 16, 2024

Despite my notepad busting with scribbles from all the exhibition private views I’ve been to recently, this edition of Stored Honey is urging you to do just one thing.

This is not, I promise, entirely because it is half term here in Liverpool and I’ve reached Friday without managing to make good my promise to take the kids swimming. It is mainly because I enjoyed the thing I am about to recommend to you so much that it is worthy of its own dedicated Stored Honey.

No matter who I have interviewed in the past, I have managed to compose a calm, professional demeanour. Peter Blake, Kim Cattrall, Paul McCartney - I have successfully maintained the illusion that we are all just professionals doing our jobs. No selfies, no autographs, no imprinting my palm in wax straight after a handshake.

However… it is a very good job that I had no clue one of my all-time favourite podcasts Backlisted was recording here in my very own city or I would have hung around outside the recording studio they rented near the Adelphi and hope guest star Lizzie Nunnery recognised me from an interview I did with her in 2011 (unlikely as it was over the phone) and invited me in to listen.

Many of the very best books I have read over the past few years have either been recommended on Backlisted (“giving new life to old books”) or published by its sponsor, the publisher Unbound (“where people crowdfund the books they really want to read” run by Backlisted co-presenter John Mitchinson). I could write a whole newsletter on how inspired I am by the way Unbound’s business model uses digital innovations to subvert publishing industry norms while drawing on an 18th century subscription strategy. But I will spare you that and get straight to the episode recorded in Liverpool.

Episode 205 discusses artist, jazz and blues singer, writer and critic George Melly’s childhood memoir Scouse Mouse, subtitled “I never got over it”. First published in 1984, it covers the first 14 years of his life, growing up at 22 Ivanhoe Road near Sefton Park in a middle-class family, and later at boarding school.

I haven’t yet read Scouse Mouse, although it has now jumped to the top of my list (sorry War and Peace), but I have read - and loved - Ghost Town by Jeff Young, Backlisted’s second guest on this episode. Jeff has a way of talking, and writing, about Liverpool that so describes the way I think about the city as I move through it that it was as if he had pulled my thoughts from my mind and found an eloquent way of describing something that I have always struggled to express. The best way I can put it is layers of time all going on about their business simultaneously - all the stories I have read and retold about Liverpool’s past playing out around me as I walk through the modern city. In the area where I live, this feeling is even more intense as I have ended up where three (more?) generations of my Dad’s family grew up. I find myself taking my children to a kids birthday party in the church hall where my Dad went to Sunday school, where my Grandma acted in the Follies and my Uncle played in a now famous band.

In Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay, Jeff invites you to experience his childhood in a fragmented collection of memories, interspersed with moments from the city’s history. It is impossible to describe without making it paler - you’ll just have to read it for yourself.

Add to that Lizzie Nunnery, playwright and musician, whose every contribution to the Scouse Mouse discussion contains an insight, and it’s pretty much a perfect podcast episode.

Listen by clicking on the player at the top of this newsletter, or search for it on your favourite podcast player. Information about the episode is available here, and if you’re interested in discovering more about George Melly’s Liverpool roots, there are details of his homes on the Liverpool Footprint blog.

Thank you for reading this week’s Stored Honey. Assuming that you haven’t fallen down a rabbit hole of Backlisted episodes (yes there really have been 205 so far), I’ll see you here next week when I’ll be sharing more on those exhibitions I was getting excited about at the start of this newsletter. In the meantime, you can get in touch on X/Twitter, in the comments or by dropping me a line at tostoredhoney@gmail.com.