Joe Meek

"The Exceptional Joe Meek", "The Amazing World Of Joe Meek", "The Alchemist Of Pop", "Portrait Of A Genius": for once, the hyperbolic titles of the anthologies tell the truth. How can you blame them? Joe Meek has so many merits and firsts that an entire article could be written just listing them: the first independent producer, the first sound engineer to use the studio as an instrument, the first concept album, the first British single to crack the US Top 10, the best-selling instrumental of all time and, why not, also the first openly gay-themed song, not to mention the countless technical innovations he introduced or helped perfect (multitrack recording, overdubbing, close miking, plus the revolutionary use of echo and compression), right up to his pioneering electronic visions and rudimentary attempts at sampling.

And yet, if we had to single out one, his most significant contribution is conceptual in nature: he was the first musical genius who was utterly incapable of singing or playing an instrument, and illiterate in theory and notation to boot. His was, in every sense, a career built as a "technician", complete with all the typical steps (starting out recycling components, cutting his teeth in radio, working his way up as a studio assistant) and a hands-on, artisanal vocation rooted in his rural upbringing. The dogged comparison with Phil Spector makes little sense, given that his unmistakable touch stemmed not from overproduction, but rather from a deliberate poverty of means: natural reverbs, shoddy gear, hapless musicians and a perverse insistence on using his own flat as his preferred recording studio. Straddling the raw energy of the '50s and the visionary ambitions of the '60s, he gleefully mocked the former and blithely ignored the latter. In light of all this, would it really be so out of place to consider him a forerunner of punk and lo-fi?

Like all great eccentrics, he was a man of solemn refusals (like when he agreed to sign the Moontrekkers only on condition that they got rid of a certain Rod Stewart, or when he advised Brian Epstein not to waste his time on that band with no future), but in other respects a shrewd talent scout (Ritchie Blackmore, Jimmy Page, David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Steve Howe, Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey, Petula Clark all passed through his Factory) and certainly a coach with rather unorthodox methods (he once went as far as pointing a gun at Mitch Mitchell's head to get a more intense performance).

At the risk of lapsing into hackneyed romanticizing of doom, it's impossible to frame that unbridled imagination without referring to the wrecked personality that gave birth to it. His quirks were a reflection of his obsessions, and the equipment he used a way of keeping them in check. The "other worlds" his mind wandered to, from outer space to the afterlife, were more than just a fixation: the ghoulish effects with which he infested his recordings acted as a tender exorcism for those suffocating anxieties. Recording could, at any given moment, mean communicating with the dead, capturing the presences that hounded him, or keeping tabs on the figures he felt were perpetually watching him.

Art history is overflowing with chronic paranoiacs, but few can rival such an all-consuming affliction, and even fewer managed to channel it into a creative endeavor of such scope. Even his feverish desire to make every single song sound different, an undertaking to which he devoted so much technical ingenuity, cannot help but be viewed through a neurotic lens. Meek represented the quintessential outsider artist, unwilling to compromise out of naïveté rather than ideological antagonism, misunderstood and quite possibly incomprehensible. The final blow, no point beating around the bush, came from his tormented relationship with his own homosexuality, paid for dearly in an era when "acts against public decency" were still a criminal offence: so why not also remember him as rock's first queer victim?

Meek's untimely death is one of the greatest tragedies of the 1960s, and not only because of the horrific way it occurred. Never having been able to see him at work throughout that golden age, unthinkable without his Promethean insights, remains a regret as searing as few others. A second-rate crime reporter would build a long flashback starting right from that gruesome scene; we'll try to be a little less contrived and a little more discreet, keeping to the chronology as rigorously as possible.

Chapter 1: A Two-Penny Blues

You can tell a Joe Meek record a mile away

(Jello Biafra)

Our story begins in the countryside of Newent, Gloucestershire, where Robert George Meek was born on 5 April 1929 (the nickname Joe was a tribute to an uncle killed in the war). The family atmosphere is grim: his father is a war veteran left scarred by his combat experience, violent and emotionally cold, who will eventually die from a shell fragment lodged in his skull; his mother, who had wanted a girl, forces young Joe to dress as a girl to make up for her unfulfilled wish (a claim later firmly denied by relatives). Domestic strife soon pushes him toward isolation, turning him into an indoor kid from the tenderest age. He shows an early, precocious interest in technology, with a distinctly "rural" fascination for electrical components, which he handles as though they were materials from another civilization: the family yard is perpetually littered with appliances he takes apart and puts back together for fun. At five he's given a gramophone with which he experiments "like a little Edison"; at nine he becomes a radio ham.

Elusive yet piercing, like the presences that begin swirling through his head, Sound bewitches him: it becomes a playmate, a world he can shape to his own desires, but it also leads him to neglect school, which he leaves at fourteen to go work on the family farm. Two years later he becomes a sound technician for a local theatre company, and around the same time builds, piece by piece, the region's first television set, unusable only because the area isn't yet reached by a broadcast signal. During his national service in the air force he gets to indulge his passion by working as a radar technician, honing his technical knowledge while also fuelling his fixation on extraterrestrial life, which he tries to probe using the army's sophisticated equipment. Back in civilian clothes, he finds work in the repair department of the Midlands Electricity Board, using the company's equipment to carry on with his increasingly daring experiments. Recording becomes his chief interest, and the English countryside is a goldmine of stimuli for his imagination. He wakes up at ungodly hours to capture birdsong, then builds complex layers out of the various microphone takes: without realizing it, he has just invented multitrack recording, unheard of at the time even in the most advanced studios. This is also when his uncompromising entrepreneurial streak emerges: in 1954 he records his sister-in-law singing Doris Day's "Secret Love" and, thoroughly convinced of the quality of the result, tries to sell it on his own. Needless to say, he meets with no success whatsoever, but the episode is nonetheless hugely significant: as far as anyone knows, it's the first attempt at self-produced, independently sold music in the history of recorded sound.

Now determined to launch a career, he moves to London. He works first at the Stones record shop, then for Radio Luxembourg, and finally at Tvc, the television arm of the highly prestigious Independent Broadcasting Company. He does everything, a lot of it, and does it well, quickly establishing himself as one of the busiest and most sought-after engineers around. His overly exuberant personality doesn't sit well in an environment where technicians are expected simply to solve problems: many try to hold him back, but his talent and ambition win out. The first major commissions arrive: Alyn Ainsworth, Kenny Graham, Frank Holder, the Canadian baritone Edmund Hockridge, jazz's all-female pioneer Ivy Benson. Meek's approach to these sessions, where a real chance at a professional leap is at stake, is reckless to say the least: a chronic self-taught tinkerer who conceives of sound "as a painting to be painted", he rejects any standard procedure, operating solely by his own rules, and when he doesn't have one, he invents a new one on the spot, according to the needs of the moment. One of his obsessions makes its first appearance here: echo. To heighten it, he sets up a huge array of reflective surfaces in the studio, achieving an effect never heard before. Even on the recording side, Joe has theories entirely his own, from which he won't budge an inch: having the same song cut by several different artists to maximize its commercial potential is standard practice, but he refuses, staying true to his already crystal-clear mission of producing singles that are each, in their own right, unique pieces of work.

The definitive proving ground comes in 1956: Joe is working alongside Dennis Preston, the absolute pioneer of independent record production in Britain, first through Record Supervision Ltd. and later Lansdowne, with whom he's beginning a partnership that will unfortunately prove short-lived. The two are recording jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton's "Bad Penny Blues", and at the end of the session Lyttelton heads off on holiday. Not supervising a mix is more than normal at the time, still considered a purely technical step, but Lyttelton has badly misjudged who he's dealing with: left to his own devices, Joe turns down the trumpet and instead gives huge prominence to the drums, drenching them in reverb. What's more, he fiddles so much with the compressor knobs that he distorts the piano's low octave, turning it into the most prominent instrument in the mix. The result is the exact opposite of a conventional jazz recording, which tends to preserve the naturalness of the performance and foreground the solo parts, but above all it's a deeply iconoclastic gesture: at a time when sound engineers were still seen as white-coated androids carrying out instructions without batting an eyelid, the arrival of a figure who thinks of a song as "his" rather than "recorded by him" sets a startling and irreversible precedent.

Even on a purely sonic level, the break is profound: the deliberate choice to push peaks into saturation, shattering that limit once considered sacred and untouchable, is a wound from which the world of audio will never recover. The doors to modern rock (loud, excessive, cocky) are already thrown wide open, even if few notice it at the time. Many more notice that extremely odd single, which shoots straight into the Top 20: it's the first time a jazz track climbs so high on the British chart, and the credit lies precisely with that unusual, character-rich sound. Lyttleton, who had flown into a rage over the underhanded tampering, can console himself well enough. Among the many left dumbstruck by that glorious mess is a young Paul McCartney: that aggressive piano sound will become the inspiration for "Lady Madonna".

That same year Joe scores his first number one with Anne Shelton's version of "Lay Down Your Arms", for which he cooks up yet another of his sorcerer's tricks: to simulate the march of an army, he shakes stones in a box, then manipulates the sound to achieve the effect he has in mind. This art brut instinct will remain one of his trademarks and, no small thing, it introduces the concept of studio experimentation into pop music. From then on, it's a whirlwind of ideas that sweep away any principle considered sacrosanct: he moves microphones closer to instruments to increase the density of the recording (years later this will be called close miking), records the bass directly, bypassing the amplifier, and even dares to bring bizarre home-built devices into the studio. But it's above all one practice that leaves a mark on the imagination of so many colleagues: while it was common practice to record all musicians with a single microphone, positioning them at different distances to achieve a kind of pre-mix, Joe prefers to capture instruments separately and recombine them only later, with meticulous precision. Multitrack recording is already a reality, even if the rest of the world will take a while to accept it. Meanwhile, his colleagues' resentment grows by the day, and Joe's foul temper doesn't help matters, as he begins showing the very first signs of instability: the visionary decision to produce outside official channels will soon become a necessity rather than a choice.

Meanwhile, not content with staying behind the mixing desk, he decides to try his hand at songwriting too: in 1958, his "Put A Ring On My Finger" is turned into a hit by Les Paul and Mary Ford. Besides being tone-deaf as a post and having no idea how to play an instrument, Joe doesn't have the faintest musical ear: his highly peculiar method of composing therefore consists of making vocal demos in which he "yowls" over other records, then having the music transcribed by a trusted composer. Never had such an undertalented artist managed to reach such lofty heights.

Chapter 2: Echoes from a New World

At first I was going to record it with music that was completely out of this world, but realized that it would have very little entertainment value, so I kept the construction of the music down to earth

(Joe Meek on "I Hear A New World")

Increasingly tolerated less and less, and in need of an outlet, Joe realizes it's time to go it alone. First of all, he turns his little Notting Hill bedroom into a mini recording studio, where he invites musicians from time to time to record demos, later polished at night and in strict secrecy in Preston's control room: records show it's the first attempt at a home studio. Once he has satisfactory test pressings, he tries to place them with potential distributors with little sales success, until in 1960 Lance Fortune's "Be Mine" breaks through to number four on the chart. Excited by the unusual possibility of becoming a sort of door-to-door salesman of his own material, he contacts "Major" Wilfred Alonzo Banks of the SAGA Records holding company, whom he'd met while recording actor George Chakiris for him, and proposes becoming his partner. The "Major" isn't interested, but points him toward his colleague William Barrington-Coupe, with whom, in February 1960, he sets up Triumph Records: in all likelihood, the first-ever indie record label.

The policy behind it is, for England at the time, revolutionary: producing music explicitly aimed at teenagers, in a market still largely geared toward an adult audience. He does it in grand style: flooding magazines with ads and supplying record shops with stickers, photos and anything else that might create a buzz around an artist, giving a decisive boost to the rock music market and the spread of youth culture. Meanwhile, the experiments carry relentlessly on, relying more and more on machinery of his own design, whose inner workings he guards jealously. Sometimes, for instance, he chooses to replace the bass drum by asking the musicians to stomp their feet on the floor in unison, capturing the resulting sound to later modify and reuse it: sampling is effectively born. It's only the small-scale reach of his label that stops "Angela Jones", performed by popular TV singer Michael Cox, from becoming a hit. Meek realizes he needs to aim higher and, after a period of dodging the problem by "renting out" his music to other labels, decides to shut down Triumph after barely a year in business. More than enough time to write a fundamental page of British music history, and not before publishing one of the most important albums of all time.

We've already mentioned the extreme fascination that outer space and its possible extraterrestrial life forms exerted on Joe, whom, as a wounded outsider, saw them as friendly presences somehow capable of empathizing with his own alienation. He doesn't need convincing of their existence because he's certain he heard them during his years in uniform, behind the radar screens, and that's enough for him. The development of the space program and the sci-fi euphoria of those years affect him so deeply that they push him to have his say in the only language that suits him. Drawing inspiration from Gustav Holst's suite "The Planets", as early as 1959 he begins imagining an "outer space music fantasy" telling the saga of three oddball lunar peoples (Dribcots, Globbots and Sarooes), weaving the narrative of their exploits together with the sonic rendering of their universe. He thus designs a work divided into twelve chapters, each accompanied by a detailed explanatory note and conceived as an eccentric anthropological-musical porthole onto an unknown civilization. The blunt title says it all about how little skepticism he has about his charming little friends: "I Hear A New World". There's one precise word to describe this modus operandi: concept album. Despite the possible precedent set by Woody Guthrie's "Dust Bowl Ballads" (1940), by Woody Guthrie, it's now generally agreed that the honor belongs to Meek. Quietly, the LP era begins: a paradox, for the man who snubbed albums in favor of singles (his one point of contact with rival Phil Spector).

To give shape to his vision, the tone-deaf contactee needs shamans up to the task: he therefore recruits an obscure skiffle group, Rod Freeman and The Blue Men, feeding them his crackpot vocal demos. On the cover, however, it's his own name that will take pride of place: it's the first time an album is credited to the producer rather than the performer. The instrumentation deployed sidesteps the classic rock line-up entirely: steel guitar, prepared piano and, above all, the brand-new clavioline, a primitive ancestor of the synthesizer. But as always, it's Joe's tricks that steal the show, as he wrings absurd sounds out of the most unlikely sources: a radio caught in interference, a short-circuited electrical wire, a milk bottle struck with a teaspoon, a comb rubbed against an ashtray, bubbles blown through a straw, right down to the simple gurgle of running water. Not satisfied with that, he sets about warping that already crooked architecture in every possible way: speeding up the tapes to create a shrill cartoon-like effect (the little men's "voices") and pushing compression to the extreme to achieve a kind of constant clipping. The result is incredibly strange: out of tune, distorted, it sounds like the parody of a serious record, a child's scribble, a sparse hypnopompic vision. "This is a strange record, I meant it to be", he would later state, and it's hard to disagree. It's a "full" record that for some reason sounds "empty", the triumph of provincial amateurism over urban professionalism, a celebration of noise as an overflowing creative force: like it or not, lo-fi is born. And while mono is still the law of the land, Meek has other things on his mind: to amplify the sensation of floating in deep space, his work will need to explore the recesses of stereophony, in one of the very first attempts to "widen" the listener's sonic experience (confirming, in this too, his distance from Spectorian fundamentalism). Everything once forbidden becomes his new gospel, ignoring everyone and ignored by everyone.

Of the twelve compositions, all instrumental apart from the opening title track (later covered by Television Personalities and They Might Be Giants), what strikes most is not only the alienated/alienating sound but also the variety of moods and atmospheres: it ranges from the polka of "Orbit Around The Moon" to the Residents-like little march of "Entry Of The Globbots", from the music-hall numbers of "March Of The Dribcots" to the western wind of "Magnetic Field", from the Santo & Johnny-style Hawaiian languor of "The Bublight" to the astral minuet of "Disc Dance Of The Globbots", not forgetting noise-driven interludes ("Glob Waterfall"), while the robotic surf of "Dribcots Space Boat" anticipates the cybernetic cabaret of Bruce Haack and Silver Apples.

The most spatial moment, in any case, remains the two aching slow numbers dedicated to the Saroos, clearly his favorite tribe ("Love Dance Of The Saroos" and "Valley Of The Saroos"). Hurled beyond the stratosphere, the Blue Men's shaky jug sound turns into a freeze-dried mini-symphony, the dream of a cowboy launched into orbit without his knowledge. Powerfully cinematic, it's music so evocative it stages itself without needing any images. Space age pop is simultaneously codified and surpassed in a single stroke by this gust of feverish naivety, a perfect compendium of the era's most tender fantasies.

Joe Meek is the first cosmic courier: with him, experimental prehistory ends and the psychedelic era effectively begins, a good five years ahead of schedule. His New World is a pastel-colored Planet Gong explored by a mutinous Sun Ra Arkestra, with a sound that foreshadows a wonderfully ragged proto-indietronica. The rest of rock music will take at least a decade to get anywhere near half of these insights. The record also marks the first open display of the producer's "esoteric" eccentricity, as he becomes ever more absorbed, between séances and tarot readings, in his own deeply personal take on occultism. Sadly, his magnificent obsession will never see the light of day: in May 1960, only a four-track EP is released, limited to 99 copies, intended as a stereo test recording. The second part, though announced and even given a cover, will remain in a drawer. A disappointment that will push Meek to bury Triumph once and for all, while the band will soon return to the obscurity from which it had been plucked. A 1991 RPM reissue, "director's cut" style, complete with special content in which the man himself recounts the record's genesis, will finally do it justice: too late to make history, but still in time to rewrite it. In 1998, The Wire magazine will include "I Hear A New World" on its list "100 Records That Set The World On Fire (While No One Was Listening)": never was a caption more fitting.

Chapter 3: Johnny and the Ghost

If it sounds right, it is right

(Joe Meek)

Bruised but not beaten, Meek is determined to push forward with his uncompromising independence and regroups his forces for a more calculated assault. Returning to Canossa to see "Major" Banks, this time he manages to bring him on board directly as a partner and financier, securing his own back. Having picked up some second-hand BBC equipment, he rents a three-storey building at 304 Holloway Road, soundproofs it himself and launches his new record label: RGM (which of course stands for Robert George Meek, underlining his controlling nature). The building is owned by the leather goods shop downstairs, with whom he strikes up a complicated neighbourly relationship (whenever the music gets too loud, Mrs Violet Shenton bangs on the ceiling with a broom, and he retaliates by trying to annoy her even more, positioning speakers at the windows). It will become his workshop of wonders: every room is turned into a self-contained studio to exploit its own acoustic character, and all of them are connected through an intricate web of cables leading back to Meek's panopticon, letting him record each room on a separate channel and then mix the various takes together. His sound simply cannot be replicated elsewhere, if only because it's built on variables that verge on the unpredictable. To strengthen his arsenal, he forms an alliance with two standout talents who will prove essential: arranger Charles Blackwell and, above all, songwriter Geoff Goddard, with whom he also discovers a shared taste for the esoteric. This is the first fully realised experiment in musical self-sufficiency: recording studio and label become one and the same, under the control of a single person. The record industry does not look kindly on this arrogant do-it-yourself venture, and Joe will complain of constant attempts at interference and even sabotage: real or imagined, this marks the start of the descent into the paranoid whirlpool that will soon swallow him whole. For now, though, everything is going swimmingly, and the den becomes a crossroads for ambitious, often unruly young hopefuls, eager just to get a glimpse of that legendary enchanted castle: among them is a young David Bowie, still going by Jones at the time and relegated to the role of saxophonist in the Konrads. Over its seven years of activity, the studio would produce as many as 600 tracks by 100 different artists; of the 245 singles released, 45 would crack the Top 50.

The first is "Tribute To Buddy Holly" (1961), performed by Mike Berry: it's the first in a long line of singers of dubious talent, light years away from the manly energy of the rock'n'roll patriarchs but equally far from the swagger of the beat-group warriors, defenceless guinea pigs for our man's experiments. And not just sonic experiments: increasingly a factotum, he attends to every detail of his charges' promotional image, meticulously overseeing hairstyles and suitable outfits (on Berry and his backing band, the Western All-Stars, he imposes, for instance, a hilarious cowboy dress code). Though still a bit rough compared to the masterpieces to come, the track has everything going for it to break through, but it's banned by the BBC for being deemed "morbid". Certainly not reassuring is Meek's obsession with the Texan musician of the title, to whom he was bound by a long-standing, near-paranormal connection: a week before the "day the music died", Joe had in fact had a premonition of the tragedy in a dream, which convinced him he had a privileged mental link to his idol. He would come to regard him as a genuine spirit guide, "summoning" him in various séances and bloodying their bond with his own final, dramatic act.

The chance for redemption would be handed to him on a silver platter by Goddard, who one morning that same year woke up feeling inspired and recorded a promising melody onto the portable tape recorder he kept on his nightstand. When Meek hears it, he's smitten, has it hastily arranged by Blackwell, and hands it over to singer/actor John Leyton, an old acquaintance of his, backed by the Outlaws. The recording, which would once and for all establish the "Meek method", takes place in a chaotic atmosphere: Leyton records his vocal together with the rhythm section in a room connected to the control booth by a screen, while soprano Lissa Gray provides the backing vocals from the bathroom; the violins are set up on the stairs, the horns directly on the floor below. The whole thing, as always, is heavily reworked in post-production by Meek, who speeds up the track's tempo and runs it through a ghostly spring reverb. Out of this whole display of forces comes "Johnny Remember Me", which turns the chaos of that session into a strength: driven by a galloping country-style drumbeat, it's a sonic agglomeration as bizarre as it is tightly packed, over which the titular Johnny, played by Leyton, and his dead beloved, voiced by Gray "from beyond the grave", duet as if in a trance. It's a textbook example of the death ditty, the pop equivalent of the popular murder ballad: mini photo-romance stories set to music, perfectly suited to the melo-gothic taste of the era (the most famous case being the American girl group the Shangri-Las, whose early singles describe extremely detailed tragedies of every kind), but also to Joe's well-known love of the macabre, long accustomed to gloomy nighttime strolls through cemeteries (whether to gather spooky sounds, or to communicate with the departed).

For once, fortune favours our hero: Leyton is about to debut on the popular TV show "Harpers West One", and when his manager Robert Stigwood (who would go on to become famous as the eminence grise behind the Bee Gees of "Saturday Night Fever") asks Meek for a song for the show, he's handed the freshly polished gem. Thanks to Stigwood's good offices, the track gets heavy rotation and quickly shoots to number one on the charts, despite yet another ban from the BBC: Buddy Holly, after all, had predicted as much during their last telepathic chat. The show of strength can be considered decisively won: a single produced in-house by a fledgling label has commercially crushed all the competition from the big established labels. Meek becomes a star, and will have the foresight to use his newfound bargaining power for yet another stroke of genius.

Chapter 4: A Tornado Called Telstar

“Telstar” is such a marvellous tune, full of life

(Margaret Thatcher)

Any regular visitor to Meek's Factory wouldn't have had much trouble noticing an unusual gathering of pretty, well-groomed young men, details to which the host often paid more attention than to their actual musical talent: after all, this is the man who slammed the door in the Beatles' faces, mocking his friend Brian Epstein's nonexistent commercial instincts, only to devote much of his career to spineless nobodies who, without his talent, would have gone nowhere. Meek's sexual orientation, truth be told, was no secret to anyone: although strictly closeted, in keeping with the repressive climate of the era, everything about him brimmed with camp, from his flamboyant manner to the gaudy flourishes he loved to sprinkle over his productions, right down to the protégés he stubbornly insisted on betting everything on.

One day, Heinz Burt shows up at his house-studio: a bassist of German descent who had played in the '50s with the small-time outfit the Falcons and was now working in a grocery shop. A mediocre musician, but radiant with Teutonic good looks. Joe falls head over heels for him, seeing in him the blond angel of his simmering fantasies, and immediately decides to turn him into his star: taking inspiration from John Wyndham's beloved sci-fi novel "The Midwich Cuckoos", he has his hair bleached to give him an unusual look (today we'd call it punk) and tries to get him hired by the Outlaws, who however turn him down. No matter: he'll just build a whole new band around him instead. He recruits Alan Caddy and George Bellamy (father of Matt) on guitars, Roger LaVern on organ and Clem Cattini on drums, renames them the Tornados and hands them over as backing band to rising star Billy Fury, all while starting to plot their own proper launch. Their first single, "Love And Fury", does reasonably well and strengthens the group's chemistry, warming up the engines just enough. Meek is electric, all he needs is a spark to light the fuse, and History is about to grant his wish, quite by chance.

On 10 July of that year, the American Telegraph & Telephone Company launches the Telstar 1 satellite into orbit. Before the astonished eyes of thousands of viewers, the miracle happens: after an endless, heavily disrupted connection, images from the other side of the Atlantic appear for the first time on British families' TV sets. It's the dawn of telecommunications: for the first time, the world is connected in real time, and all of it can be comfortably enjoyed from home. Given his already-mentioned passion for space, Joe is affected to the nth degree by the historic event, so much so that he can't sleep at night. And it's during one of those restless nights that a tentacular melody worms its way into his head, the kind that grabs hold of you and won't let go: he rushes to capture it on one of his shrill vocal demos (the wildly drunken fragment, one of the most searing declarations of artistic freedom ever documented, can be heard on the cult compilation "Songs In The Key Of Z", devoted to outsider music), and the next day hands it over to his loyal assistant Dave Adams, who transcribes it.

He quickly summons the Tornados, whom he instructs to play a jaunty accompaniment. As soon as Goddard arrives at the studio, he puts a clavioline in his hands and asks him to rework that dazzling melody on it, and to double it with his voice on the final verse. He adds the finishing touch with a couple of his own tricks: to simulate the sound of a rocket, he first blows right up against the microphone, running it through a delay effect, then plays a toilet flush in reverse. As the B-side, he throws together "Jungle Fever" on the spot, a Bo Diddley knockoff just to fill out the 45, and on 17 August 1962 he launches his own satellite into orbit: if AT&T's marvel had built a telematic bridge between the Old World and the New, the notes of "Telstar" fly even higher, reaching number one in both the UK and the US. It had never happened before: impregnable America is finally breached, marking the start of the British Invasion. It would go on to sell over five million copies, making it the best-selling single of the year and the best-selling instrumental track of all time. The credit goes to a sound that captures the innocent, optimistic spirit of the era better than any sociology textbook, and which still today evokes a knee-weakening sense of nostalgia: "Telstar" is the Space Age. The audience is won over at once by that irresistible theme and by those genuinely interplanetary atmospheres, no words needed: experimental pop has become a reality.

Meek is awarded the prestigious Ivor Novello Award for his production work, while the press tries to stir up buzz by inventing a nonexistent rivalry between the Tornados and the Shadows: it's the first band feud, a tactic British tabloids would remain fiercely attached to. To ride the wave of success, a few months later a sung version is fed to the market, performed by Kenny Hollywood, retitled for the occasion "Magic Star" and again produced by Meek. Over the years, virtually everyone would cover that breezy little tune: in Italy, the best-known version remains the one by Piero Umiliani, credited to Ingegner Giovanni e Famiglia (?). And yes, it would go on to be a huge favourite of Mrs Thatcher's, too.

Alas, the Tornados would meet a fate not too different from that of the satellite that inspired them, lost in space just a month after launch. While 1963 yields two more hits of the calibre of "Globetrotter" and "Robot" (accompanied by a delightful scopitone film, the ancestors of music videos played on dedicated jukeboxes), the five of them find themselves unable to capitalise on their success because of a punishing contract that keeps them tied to the UK to back Billy Fury live, their main employer. Meanwhile, an obscure French composer named Jean Ledrut accuses Meek of having plagiarised the theme from the soundtrack of the film "Austerlitz", which he had composed. A tangled legal battle ensues to sort out credit and liability, and pending the verdict the song's juicy royalties are frozen. Neither the band nor their deus ex machina, potential millionaires both, will see a single penny of it. Meanwhile, the arrival of Merseybeat spells the decline of instrumental groups: the magic moment has passed, and the Tornados fall apart. They were one of the unluckiest bands of all time. Once again, Meek is defeated by Chance. For his already fragile state of mind, the blow is devastating.

With the Tornados out of the picture, the hapless producer turns his attention to the solo career of his protégé, whom he simply renames Heinz. The pretty-boy German, however, has to contend with a rather serious little problem: he has an embarrassing voice (a constant headache in Meek's productions: many agree that, had he simply hired less dreadful singers, he could have doubled his own success). The ever-serene boss doesn't lose heart: he sends him off for singing lessons, and in the meantime has a more capable stand-in secretly sing on the first single, "Dreams Come True" (1963), which nonetheless fails to chart. Meek refuses to give up: he arranges a support tour with Gene Vincent, but an unexpectedly cheeky crowd responds by throwing beans at him, a jab at his surname sharing its name with the famous tinned-legume brand. Things go better the following year with "Just Like Eddie", a light-hearted tribute to the legend of Eddie Cochran featuring a very young Ritchie Blackmore on lead guitar. His career starts to take off, but times have changed: the arrival of the Beatles has turned the music business on its head, and Heinz comes across as a belated '50s-style teen idol. An entire album dedicated to Cochran ("A Tribute To Eddy") and a musical film in which the unlikely blond fashions himself as a new Elvis ("Live It Up") do little to help.

Joe, meanwhile, is starting to lose his bearings, as shown by the wild spending he lavishes on promoting his beloved protégé and the questionable handling of the resulting royalties.

Chapter 5: Do You Come Here Often?

“Do you come here often?”

“Only when the pirate ships go off air”

“Me too”

“Well, I see pyjama styled shirts are in, then”

“Well, pyjamas are OUT, as far as I’m concerned anyway”

“Who cares?”

“Well, I know of a few people who do”

“Yes, you would”

“WOW! These two, coming now. What do you think?”

“Mmmmmm. Mine’s all right, but I don’t like the look of yours”

“Well, I must be off”

“Yes, you’re not looking so good”

“Cheerio. I’ll see you down the Dilly”

“Not if I see you first, you won’t”

(“Do You Come Here Often?”, 1966)

Despite the gathering storm clouds, Joe Meek across the crucial years '63/'64 is still a determined and remarkably prolific artist, unleashing as many as 75 singles onto the market: among other things, he produces Tom Jones's very first demos and, above all, works with the hilarious Screaming Lord Sutch, a heavily masked missing link between Screaming Jay Hawkins and Alice Cooper with his pre-Cramps horror rock'n'roll. Meek dreams up deranged promotional videos for weird classics like "Jack The Ripper" and "Dracula's Daughter", in which he gets to indulge fully in his repertoire of occult, morbid imagery. "Have I The Right" by the Honeycombs, showcasing pioneering female drummer Honey Lantree, a rare compromise with the emerging beat sound (which he regarded as little more than a passing fad), is the biggest hit of the period and one of his greatest technical achievements, but it also marks the break with the invaluable Goddard. The problem is that by then record production had become synonymous with two words that had reset the scoreboard: Phil Spector. Joe tries in his own way to break into the girl group phenomenon, forging little songs like Glenda Collins's "I Lost My Heart In The Fairground" which, however likeable, are small potatoes compared to the mighty layer cakes of the Hollywood wizard, towards whom Meek begins to nurture a paranoid resentment not unlike the one that will later afflict Brian Wilson. Spector, for his part, admires Meek, and between the two there's a surreal phone call that has gone down in history: our man receives a congratulatory call from the American producer, only to respond by accusing him of stealing his ideas, then slamming the phone down with such fury that he breaks the receiver.

All this, however, turns out to be little more than a footnote compared to the collapse about to unfold. In 1963 Joe is caught by a plainclothes officer in a public toilet: charged with cottaging, he gets a night in a cell and a fine. The story makes the front pages, proof of just how brightly the star of "Telstar Man" still shines in the British firmament, and it exposes him to a string of wretched blackmail attempts. His colleagues are baffled, not so much by the open secret being dragged into the spotlight as by the sheer absurdity of the circumstances: why would a man forever surrounded by all the young men he could ever want resort to such risky behaviour? Success and life in London have done nothing to smooth over the troubled imprinting of this true rock'n'roll Pasolini, a repressed and frustrated country boy whose greatest fear is that the unseemly scandal might reach his mother. For poor Joe, it is, quite literally, the beginning of the end.

And yet, his mid-1960s are still brimming with the urge to throw himself into things and engage with the present: the abrasive freakbeat experiments of "Singing The Blues" by Jason Eddie and The Centremen (the band of Billy Fury's brother) and "Crawdaddy Simone" by the Syndicats (featuring a baby-faced Roger Glover and Steve Howe), the enchanting doo-wop of "Please Stay" by the Crying Shames (originally written by Bacharach for the Drifters and regarded by Meek as his own production peak), even an unexpected protest song like Collins's anti-nuclear "It's Hard To Believe It". Things could have gone even better, if only someone had managed to get the usual Heinz out of his head, who, with his version of "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright", still manages to kick off the fashion for Dylan covers. Either way, the relationship between the two is now at breaking point: unwilling to indulge his mentor's sexual appetites and irritated by the meagre earnings, the arrogant young man soon abandons the Holloway Road temple, not before sadistically introducing his new girlfriend to a stunned Meek and, much to our misfortune, leaving behind in the house-studio a firearm we'll be forced to discuss shortly.

Increasingly desperate, Joe pulls off a move that may not rewrite the history of music, but which will prove nothing short of explosive on a sociological level. Partly to relive past glories, partly to get back at the bastard who broke his heart, in 1966 he puts together a bogus lineup of the Tornados with new musicians, an outfit that lasts just long enough for a single 45 palmed off on none other than Columbia. "Is That a Ship I Hear?", brimming with nautical sound effects designed to entice the then-influential pirate stations, is the last of his visionary pastiches, but what really grabs attention is a seemingly far more innocuous track titled "Do You Come Here Often?". For two and a half minutes it's nothing more than a background cocktail-lounge instrumental, but right at that point a fake field recording creeps in and something extraordinary happens: two gay men start chatting in a saucy, flirtatious way in what sounds like the toilets of a club. Not everyone picks up on it, but for receptive ears the track is anything but coy in offering a lively glimpse of London life: it's Meek's official coming out, a brave attempt to exorcise the unpleasant episode of three years earlier and, above all, the first gay-themed song ever released by a major label, who knows how consciously or how consensually. In 2006 it will appear, alongside other similarly disguised jabs, in the anthology compiled by Jon Savage "Queer Noises 1961-1978: From The Closet To The Charts", crowning Meek as one of the great trailblazers of queer culture in rock music. Listened to again today, that subversive gesture, so elegant and so well disguised, remains startlingly clever. Not bad, as swan songs go.

Epilogue: two gunshots in London

Joe Meek, record producer, ‘The Telstar Man’, pioneer of recording sound technology, lived, worked and died here

(Commemorative plaque at 304 Holloway Road)

As rock is gripped by a fibrillation that seems to be sweeping everything away, and society as a whole is rocked by irreversible change, Joe Meek's grip on reality — despite his fundamental contribution to that very upheaval — grows shakier by the day. His paranoia has long since spiralled out of control. Everyone is spying on him: the police, hoping to catch him red-handed again; the Kray Twins, looking to blackmail him; the major labels, out to finish him off commercially; Phil Spector, scheming to steal the secrets of his trade. Precautions must be taken: he fits locks to the control room, papers the rooms with microphones, orders his assistant "Pink Patrick" (real name: Robbie Duke) to let no one into the studio without his permission, and combs the whole flat for hidden bugs. If the living can't be trusted, the dead remain good company: his visits to cemeteries become a daily appointment, always with his inseparable tape recorder in tow (one of those grim field recordings, in which he talks to a cat he believes to be the reincarnation of a dead person, is in the public domain). When he isn't wandering among the gravestones, he finds comfort in the usual séances, in the books of Aleister Crowley, and in a voracious consumption of barbiturates and amphetamines, which further destabilise his already volatile moods. His delusions edge into a hallucinatory sense of superhuman power: he becomes convinced he can use his equipment to control the thoughts of his supposed enemies, and that he can monitor the studio remotely thanks to unspecified paranormal powers. The posthumous diagnosis will speak of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, for whatever that's worth to us now.

To make matters worse, as if that weren't enough, yet another grim episode intervenes. In January 1967, shortly after the release of what would remain his last single (the flawless "Gonna Be A First Time" by the Riot Squad), England is shaken by the Bernard Oliver case, also known as "the suitcase murder": the body of a young gay man is found dismembered inside two suitcases. Hysteria spreads, and the police — who had circulated a macabre photo of the decapitated head to help identify the victim — begin combing London's gay hangouts for information. Meek knew Oliver personally (according to some sources, he may even have been a studio employee for a while, though the matter has never been clarified), and he sinks into terror at the thought of being counted among the suspects. The case, for the record, remains unsolved to this day.

On top of everything, Meek's troubles are far from purely psychological: buried under debts he cannot pay, he is stripped bare by Her Majesty's tax collectors, who seize all his assets. He had turned down his last great opportunity just a few months earlier: invited by Brian Epstein, in June '66 he watched Bob Dylan's concert at the Royal Albert Hall from the Beatles' own box, turning down Sir John Lockwood's offer to become an in-house producer for EMI. He barricades himself in his now-empty house, where, between hallucinations, he takes up painting, venturing out only rarely and always behind a pair of large sunglasses, so as not to be recognised. By now it's only a matter of days.

On 3 February 1967, his landlady Violet Shenton comes to collect the rent. She finds Meek in a confused state, wired on amphetamines. After accusing her of spying on him, he points his shotgun at her and kills her, then turns the weapon on his own extraordinary head. It is the anniversary of Buddy Holly's death, the one date Joe never had to mark on a calendar. That very same day, the Beatles finish recording "A Day In The Life".

Three months later, the judge settles the "Telstar" dispute in Meek's favour, ruling that he could not have seen "Austerlitz", since it was only released in Britain in 1965. On 21 July, the British Parliament passes the Sexual Offences Act 1967, decriminalising homosexuality in England once and for all. Sometimes fate really is cruelly ironic. By a bitter coincidence, those same months also claim two more victims of the homophobic persecution that had already destroyed Alan Turing: Brian Epstein and Joe Orton.

Heinz would be drawn into the investigation as the owner of the shotgun: although his innocence was quickly established, his career never recovered. He would scrape by as the survivor (including with the Tornados, who reunited in 1975 to record a new version of "Telstar") before succumbing to a stroke on 7 April 2000.

Joe Meek left behind a chaotic archive of unreleased recordings, discovered by Cliff Cooper, bassist of the Millionaires and founder of the celebrated Orange amplifier company. Dubbed the "Tea Chest Tapes", after the tea-chest in which their owner used to store them, the roughly 4,000 hours (!) of music include recordings featuring David Bowie, Jimmy Page, Ritchie Blackmore, Mitch Mitchell and many others. Auctioned off in 2008 for £200,000, they remain unreleased to this day.

The first attempt to shed light on the enigma of both the artist and the man is John Repsch's book "The Legendary Joe Meek", published in 1989, from which the BBC would draw the documentary "The Strange Story Of Joe Meek" two years later. In 2008 came the biopic "Telstar: The Joe Meek Story", directed by playwright Nick Moran and based on his own stage play, with Con O'Neill as Meek and Kevin Spacey as "Major" Wilfred Alonzo Banks. Despite its careful period reconstruction and convincing performances, the film raises more than a few doubts for its excessive dramatisation of Meek's mental illness, as well as for some questionable suggestions about his private life (for instance, it is taken for granted that Joe and Heinz were lovers, despite the absence of any evidence for a relationship almost universally denied). A new documentary titled "A Life In The Death Of Joe Meek", directed by Howard S. Berger and Susan Stahman, is still in production.

Clearer still are the "technical" tributes he has collected over the years. In 1993, inventor and sound engineer Ted Fletcher dedicated an entire line of audio equipment to him. In 2009, the Joe Meek Award for Innovation in Production was established, won that year by Brian Eno. In 2014, he took first place in the New Musical Express's ranking of the greatest producers of all time, beating out — at least posthumously — his old nemesis Phil Spector (on that note, fans of suspicious coincidences will note that Lana Clarkson also died on 3 February...).

Among the many musical tributes he has received, one worth mentioning is the Matmos track "Solo Buttons for Joe Meek", included on their 2006 album "The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast". His memory is kept alive by the ever-diligent Joe Meek Society, which periodically publishes its own newsletter. Today, at 304 Holloway Road, a half-hidden commemorative plaque reminds passers-by of the man who lived, worked and died there.

The epitome of the independent producer, Joe Meek was the national hero of pre-Beatles Britain, thoroughly British in his eccentricity. Too idiosyncratic to live comfortably with his own genius, he imagined worlds that would duly come to pass, worlds whose splendour he never got to enjoy, forced instead to settle for a dark satellite inhabited by his own ghosts. If his personal story remains one of the most heartbreaking, his artistic legacy will forever preserve the glory that an absurd fate chose to deny him until the very end.

This article is dedicated to Honey Lantree of the Honeycombs, among the very first female drummers in rock history, who passed away on 23 December 2018.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google