joe
meek
This piece originally featured in Mojo magazine in a truncated 8,000 word edit. this is the full near-12,000 word original piece. This is such a great, dark and funny yarn of wayward genius and eccentricity that even a bad writer (say...no, I'll leave it) couldn't spoil it. It was a labour of love of mine that I'd bugged people about for years. Richard Benson when editor of The Face, had originally asked me to put it together. By the time I'd tracked down all the relevant decaying old lunatics, he'd left and the new lot chickened out of publishing it. Shame on them. It eventually appeared in Mojo due to the personal enthusiasm of Andrew male there. Since this piece was written, the great Geoff Goddard, Meek's crazy collaborator and author of the unimpeachable 'Johnny Remember Me' , who I spoke to for this article, has died. In so much as you can do it in such a context, this piece is for him and all the other unsung 'cats' who, in cheap suits and HP'ed up to the eyeballs in order to pay for their cheap instruments, helped Joe steer pop into crankier waters.
At the end of the
article is an imaginary tape which, if compiled, might assist in a better
understanding of the magic of Meek.
|
The stories, near unbelievable, are strange but true. In a flat on the Holloway Road, four people bang their feet on the stairs, stomping their way to a sixties pop-defining number one. The microphones that record the din are attached to the banisters with bicycle clips. There are singers in the toilet and string sections in the kitchen. In the bedroom, his feet lost in a carpet of reel to reel tape and tangled wires held together with chewing gum, a thick-set man in a suit sets the controls for the heart of British popular music. These stories would be fantastic enough without rumours of black magic, gangland threats and a pill-popping climax of paranoia, rapidly declining fortunes and murder. The Joe Meek story is a B movie script without a home. From his home, a dank flat with famously rickety stairs above a leather goods shop at 304 Holloway Road, London, Joe Meek created some of the strangest and most wonderful sonic experiments ever to attempt to gatecrash the hit parade. Known to the crazed few as the British Phil Spector, Meek a misguided auteur who single-handedly invented the idea of independence in pop by selling his finished products to the major labels, is seldom credited as the creator of some of the best known sixties records ever. Ken Pitt, who later managed David Bowie for a time, knew Joe well via artists he managed who recorded for him. “Everything he did in that tiny little studio was an act of faith in something”, he says. “ Music was his entire life”. “He found it impossible to think or talk about anything else”, says songwriter and musical spar back then, Geoff Goddard. The singers may have evaded you, but there are few unable to recall the hysterical strains of ‘Johnny Remember Me’, the hard-faced punch of ‘Just Like Eddie’, or the infernal racket that is ‘Have I The Right’- where those bicycle clips came in handy on the stairs. The breathless rush that is ‘Telstar’- the best selling instrumental of all time- can’t even be spoiled by the sad fact that it is Margaret Thatcher’s favourite record. Between 1956 and 1967, when his creative whirlwind came to a murderous end, Meek released over 300 records. Most of them were written, recorded, topped and tailed in his flat. Those releases are just the tip of an iceberg, with that toll amounting to perhaps less than a quarter of the songs he recorded before, on February 3 1967, he took his golden boy Heinz’s shotgun and summoned his long suffering landlady upstairs, blasting her to death. Mrs Violet Shenton lived downstairs and was wont to take her broom to the ceiling above, unable to sleep as Joe dropped coins in buckets and rattled lavatory chains inside biscuit tins in his restless sonic search for original sounds that would shake the hit parade to its foundations. “This is a private house, this ain’t Las Vegas”, she would shout. Joe would curse her endlessly, adding her to his paranoid list of the ‘rotten pigs’ who he felt were out to drag him down. Just like the record companies he claimed had bugged his flat and the producers he said were using insiders to steal his precious ideas- his secret sounds. As Mrs Shenton lay dying, Joe pointed the gun at himself and called it a day. Bang. His assistant who laboured tirelessly under the moniker Patrick Pink in the hope that Joe would one day record a number one for him too, found them both dead. This is the tragi-comic story of a visionary genius, dubbed, ‘The Ed Wood of lo-fi’, by writer Irwin Chusid, whose crazy life would warrant a book alone, without the added weight of his pioneering and now hip and highly regarded approach to record production. An idiot savant of sound? Hear the insane B-sides, the impossible to find freakbeat gems and a uniquely individual approach that gave us the peerless suite of low-tech sci-fi mania that is ‘I Hear A New World’, and you will readily agree. So far out it wasn’t released on its completion in May 1960, an amazing 40 years ago, Joe described it as ‘An outer space stereo music fantasy’. With it’s fizzling shorted wire sounds, endlessly echoed primitive keyboards, miked up milk bottles banged with spoons and sleeve notes that detailed a heartfelt belief in little green men on the moon, the world’s first concept album only recently made it to the surface- long after Joe Meek had died- the mocking laughter of the ‘rotten pigs’ and unbelievers still ringing in his ears. In his day, Joe was tolerated for an undeniable teen-pop talent and the hits he churned out. But his bridge-burning self-belief was abrasive. There are tales aplenty of tape machines aimed at errant musicians, a temper which was never far from ignition, and delicious stories like the one of him sending a young Rod Stewart (who he judged useless) packing from an audition at his studio with a ripely executed raspberry. He would let anyone that cared to listen know that, ‘those bloody Beatles’ were nothing more than ‘matchbox music’ that wouldn’t last. It’s easy to laugh at Joe Meek. Many of us, while simultaneously enjoying his music, do. But, as pop music heads for the second half of its own century, his audacious genius, combined with a life that begs to be filmed, make him impossible to ignore. “He felt that the sound was as important as the song”, says Geoff Goddard. “And I think he was one of the very first people in pop music to think that way. Today people take the creative input of the record producer for granted. Joe Meek did so much to pave the way for that”. Robert George Meek was born four days too late, on April, 5 1929 in the Gloucestershire market town of Newent, a location that gave him a cider-curdling West Country accent preserved on sixties radio interviews where he talks of, ‘delayin’ the echo’. Joe’s mum had wanted a girl and he was overshadowed by his tree-climbing country-tough brothers. His quieter ways were compounded when his mother began to dress him as a girl. Before his teens he was staging magic shows for other children and dressing up for his own elaborate theatre productions. In John Repsch’s exhaustive book, ‘The Legendary Joe Meek’, Joe’s brother Eric, now dead, says he always said Joe ‘should have been a girl’. “We used to call him a cissie. And he would usually fly into a tantrum and storm off up to the shed. He thought we were gross and mad. We thought he was feminine, rather than a boy because he would rather dress up in some fancy clothes and be prancing about up the shed, doing a play or something”. But it was a fascination with old radios and record players that really characterised him. He would take the backs off them and with a Practical Wireless subscription, he began building his own electrical gadgets. His talents made him popular. He would rig up speakers in the trees so the cherry pickers could listen to the radio as they worked and, a budding DJ, he would travel the area with his own mobile set up, playing dances for pennies. Joe joined the RAF as a radar technician and would spend his free time borrowing kit to build elaborate radios and tape machines. With his own acetate cutting machine he began recording small time singers before he even made it to London. His talents, unschooled but obvious, he moved there in 1953 and was taken on by IBC Studios, where he learned the ropes as a recording engineer. Regardless of whether he was asked or not, Joe would try and stamp his sonic style- the result of all those Newent bedroom experiments-on the artists he worked with. He recorded Frankie Laine’s ‘Green Door’, notching up the echo effects while nobody was watching. On trad jazz dad Humphrey Lyttleton’s ‘Bad Penny Blues’, he messed with the microphones so the bass line, played with the left hand, was distorted while the brushed drums sizzled like frying bacon. Lyttleton was away while Meek mixed the track. He returned to find it finished and had to admit that, while he would never have approved it, it was quite a result. Although by his own later standards, and the techniques we have now come to take for granted-like taking the front skins off bass drums and moving microphones further to the exact source of the sound- his early experiments seem tame. But in the days of studios ruled by lab-coated technicians who frowned on any experimentation and broke for lunch at exactly 12.30, Joe Meek was putting into practice a sonic sea change that would reverberate down the years. Before George Martin had met the Beatles and before drugs and artist input on recordings became the norm, these were the roots of a revolution. ‘Bad Penny Blues’ made the UK top 20 in 1956 and the word, at least in certain circles in London, was out. Joe Meek was beginning to make a name for himself. Joe concentrated hard on his work and had started writing his own songs. He would vomit them out in a tone-deaf wail, borrowing freely from everywhere. He noted the trends and the methods of success and was especially fond of Buddy Holly, who would later haunt him in more ways than one. Writing home to his mum in Newent with news of his achievements and reports of the supposed jealousy of his colleagues, he was not as quick to report that he had fumbled his was to a relationship with the suave Lional Howard, the homosexuality that he had kept largely to himself during his stint at the RAF coming out to play in the shadows of London’s burgeoning (by Newent standards at least) gay community. Writing in partnership with Charles Blackwell, Joe hacked out an unremarkable skiffle record called ‘Sizzling Hot’ for the inevitably named Jimmy Miller and The Barbecues. The resulting attention was enough to spur him on to set up what can now be regarded as Britain’s first home studio at the flat he shared with Lional at Arundel Gardens. He took a job at jazz producer Denis Preston’s Lansdowne studios where he struck up a friendship with engineer Adrian Kerridge, who, to this day defends Meek’s claim to the innovator’s crown in British pop production. Adrian, himself a respected elder statesman of the backroom comments, “ Joe was unquestionably where it all began. He had no rivals then. He was naturally talented and quite simply a pioneer in those dark and distant days. I believe he stayed ahead of his time, in so many ways, up until his death. In his last days he wasn’t scoring the hits quite as often, but the records he did manage to get out show a man still forging ahead with his own uniquely personal agenda” “ He just had such a taste for work he didn’t ever stop. It was as if he knew he has a limited amount of time to make his mark. He used to take Preludin- the slimming pill- constantly, and that kept him going. He had me up the wall in his endless search for something new. He was willing to try anything. I was a bit more trained than he was, so he would ask me to help him out with his ideas. He once asked me for a half out of phase lead. I told him there was no such thing and it wouldn’t work. But I had to make one anyway, just to prove it.” Adrian remembers that Joe would always take the backs and the tops off pieces of valuable equipment to tinker with them. “He was never happy with what he had. He was always dreaming up other ways of doing things. To be honest, the technology didn’t yet exist for some of the things he wanted to do. He had the boffins at EMI Hayes design him a mixing desk that just confused them. They had never heard of the kind of equalisation he demanded. But they made it anyway and it sounded amazing.” Apart from an obsession with sound, which took up most of his time, Adrian remembers few conversations which revealed the man, despite the many hours they spent working together. “I never had any problems with his lifestyle, but it’s hard to imagine now just what a taboo subject his homosexuality was back then. People judged him because of it and he reacted by hating them”. Joe didn’t suffer fools and because he was gay, Adrian believes he became an increasingly isolated figure. “It was hard for him to fit in”. The songwriting continued while at Lansdowne. Joe would try to interest studio head Denis Preston in his increasingly convincing attempts. Preston once sent him away with a flea in his ear for going on about it during a fraught studio session and was marked down as another ‘rotten pig’ by a frustrated Joe. His adolescent doodle ‘Put A Ring On Her Finger’, was recorded as a Tommy Steele b side, and hit the US top 50 for Les Paul and Mary Ford. Joe got paid and the money gave him the confidence to make the jump he dreamed of. Having lined up his own recordings during unused ‘down time’ at Lansdowne, Joe formed his own Triumph label in 1960 and released a few non- hits. Aside from a Holly-esque vignette called ‘Angela Jones’ by Michael Cox which made the top ten, they are best forgotten. The only Triumph recording truly worthy of the name was the ‘I Hear A New World’ EP which sold in such minuscule amounts that the projected part two bit the dust before it was even pressed. At a tiny flat in Holland Park and stealing hours at Lansdowne, Joe’s groundbreaking soundtracks for astral travel via your Dansette were marketed as Stereo test discs. They broke the sound barrier without making a dent in their day. Speeding up and effecting unused group takes from the studio and layering them with echo and delay, he would add more icing to the cake than was perhaps wise. SFX like scraped combs, bubbles being blown in water, smashed glass, broken clockwork toys, radio interference, backwards tapes and toilets being flushed can be made out. Drummer, Dave Golding played on the sessions for ‘New World’.”At the time it we didn’t know what he was trying to achieve. He wasn’t talking about space when we recorded some of those tracks. He was going on about lighthouses and lights across the sea, which makes some sense when you hear the record and forget about the titles”. Dave recalls the sessions as fraught late night affairs, either at the flat or Lansdowne with Joe attaching knives and forks to his bass drum pedal and insisting he played his drums with pennies spread across the skins. On hearing this record 40 years later you can only comment that Joe is the other lost Aphex Twin, born an age before his time. Charles Ward, whose Thunderbolts record ‘Lost Planet’ is another example of Meek’s outer space obsession, believes Joe was really a child of the times. “Destination Moon was the film of the fifties. In Hollywood they were throwing dustbins up in the air at night and filming them as UFOs. There was plenty of that stuff around, and Joe was listening to as much of it as anyone else". Now feted by electronic cultists like Orbital and Andrew Weatherall, ‘I Hear A New World’s genius is tempered by comic tunes and further warped by Meek’s twisted sense of pop. Aside from the heavily layered effects, these made up the bulk of the record’s musical substance. The sleeve notes, apparently written by Meek, show a man innocently obsessed with aliens, The Space Race, and Sputnik flights into the beyond. Joe dribbles on about the ‘Dribcots Space Boat’. ‘Owned and built by the Dribcots, it is shaped like an egg’, he informs us with barely contained enthusiasm. ‘The Entry Of The Globbots’ is, ‘The sound of, ‘happy jolly little beings. As they parade before us you can almost see their cheeky blue faces’. It’s believed that only 100 of the records were originally pressed. There wasn’t much call for fledgling electronica in 1960. With ‘I Hear A New World’ Joe had revealed the template for his way of thinking, a personal Space Race. This was his particular way of hearing things, with all his secret sounds out on display. It was statement of intent, often underlined in the next seven years. “Looking back at it now, it’s clear that Joe did have a plan for the record”, says Dave Golding. “It was only when Telstar came out three years later that it all began to make sense to me.” Unable to tolerate working with others anymore and with bills piling, (a testament to his disorganisation and a financial mess he was now cultivating) Joe had an ego the size of a house to maintain. He teamed up with a mysterious benefactor called Major Banks who, transfixed by Joe’s echo tricks while watching him play, bankrolled his dreams, buying half the shares in Triumph and so allowing to set up his own studio. This would be castle where none could question his sovereignty for fear of having a rack of compressors thrown at them or being shown the door by one of a stream of assistants like Terry O’Neill and Patrick Pink, people who bore the brunt of an artistic temper frayed on slimming pills and growing paranoia. With equipment borrowed, stolen and made from scratch, the rooms above Mr and Mrs Shenton’s Leather Goods shop at 304 Holloway Road were secured. It was not an ideal set up, with three flights of stairs for budding pop performers to drag their instruments up. Later sessions there were constantly held up while the heavy lorries that made their way up and down this main drag passed. Perhaps Joe knew that when his story was finally told, the fact that his life unfolded above a Leather Goods shop (in truth it sold only handbags and cases) would add a certain frisson to the tale. Together with the Major, Joe formed RGM Sound, utilising his initials while massaging his ego. Dave Adams, one of his growing stable of singers, was a dab hand with a saw and kitted the place out with the surfaces to pile up the machines. Collecting a rent of £17 .10 shillings per week, Mrs Shenton didn’t know what she was letting herself in for. By 1967, her broom pole would be blunted, as he unwittingly tapped in time with some of the best known jukebox jewels of the age, She herself would be hoarse from demanding the rent and cursing the comings and goings of 16 and 17 year olds with cheap guitars and heads full of riffs copped from American heroes. Before he blew her head off, it’s doubtful Mrs Shenton had a chance to note that her tenant had originated Britain’s first independent studio. Adrian Kerridge comments, “Holloway Road was all about control. Now Joe was really in charge and nobody else could tell him what to do. The pressure was piling up on him but he wouldn’t have had it any other way”. At a time when EMI and a handful of other studios built a fence around the status quo, Joe Meek, a John Cage for teenagers whose outlandish experiments were tacked to surly nursery rhymes, unknowingly shadowed the tape splicing music concrete experiments of more academic pioneers like Pierre Henry. There might have been baffling funny noises at the beginning and at the end of Meek’s records but, his critics had to admit, the kids were buying them. Meek was totally misunderstood at the time. The record companies and their cutting engineers even refused to master some of his recordings, saying they would damage domestic speakers. “He would say, ‘the rotten pigs, they should just bloody do as I say’ ”, remembers Adrian Kerridge. “ ‘I know what I’m doing’, he would say.” Like Piccasso walking into a stationary shop with Guernica under his arm, only to be told that it might not come out that well in a photocopy, Joe had to face engineers who thought they were producers telling him, “it’s just too distorted”. It may all have ended as a joke without a punchline, a masterplan foiled, were it not for the arrival of a strange boy from Reading with a Berkshire accent to match Joe’s for comic value, an interest in spiritualism which simply adds to this already unhinged story, and a musical talent of it’s time. Joe met Geoff Goddard at an audition arranged by a publisher and listened intently before solemnly declaring, “I shall call you Hollywood”. The title bestowed, Goddard wasn’t happy until he had secured the prefix Anton. Class. “We hit it off straight away”, says Geoff. “I sensed a kindred spirit. We were on the same wavelength”. Anton Hollywood’s career was however short-lived, as Goddard’s seemingly effortless way with the all-conquering catchy tune quickly made itself known. Joe was looking for a song for TV actor John Leyton, on the make on the pop scene like so many others who saw a second wage to be snatched from the hands of the emerging teenage market. Geoff knocked up ‘Johnny Remember Me’ in ‘ten minutes’. He could not have known that this breathless camp classic, chock full of orchestral flourishes and windswept drama, complete with a death disc defining lyric which still resounds any time you choose to listen to it, would be the canvas for perhaps the most famous session at Holloway Road. There was a string section on the stairs, singers in the bathroom, the Outlaws cramped into the front room of the studio floor, and Joe Meek, like some primitive scientist of sound, twisting and tweaking his way to pop perfection- with compressors and limiters glowing hot and his Lyrec and TR51 tape machines criss- crossing takes, working overtime to make a mockery of his lab-coated peers who were more worried about their overtime in the established studios. Chas Hodges of The Outlaws played bass on the track. “I could hear a girl singing but I didn’t know where she was. I remember thinking she must have been in the bathroom. I heard Joe saying, ‘Oh, the violins have arrived’, but I never saw them- they were on another floor in the flat”. Geoff Goddard laughs as he remembers, ‘the boy on the rhythm guitar’. “It took so many takes to get it right that he played until his fingers bled. There were cables all over the place and people squashed in corners. I remember some old boy trying to find enough space to drag the bow across his violin in the corner”. The record was released in July 1961 and made number one the UK charts, staying there for 15 weeks. The industry was too young to understand and mocked that Meek made records ‘in the bathroom’. Arranger Martin Slavin had a column in Melody Maker at the time. He railed against the success of ‘Johnny’. “A recording studio is the place to record. They are there for that specific purpose and they have the best technicians in their employ”. Joe could not resist the opportunity to reply in print. “Fair enough, my studio started out as a large bedroom but it is now a first class studio in which I have made many hit records. I would be a fool to listen to an arranger with a bee in his bonnet. I make records to entertain the public, not square connoisseurs who just don’t know”. The success cemented Meek’s growing friendship with Goddard. “He was a country boy in London, like me”, says Goddard. “We had something in common. We were outsiders, I suppose”. Here was someone who wouldn’t let Joe down, who seemed, despite his obvious talents, to have suffered the slings and arrows too. It didn’t save him from the Meek temper, however. Session drummer Bob Graham remembers Joe punching Geoff in the ear because he couldn’t stop coughing during at take. “ ‘You’re only looking for attention’, he screamed at him.” Goddard himself recalls arriving late for a session. “Joe screamed at me- ‘You fucking bastard’, something like that. I jumped up and shouted something back into the microphone. We all waited for a minute or two in silence. Then this strangulated voice came from the control room- ‘It’s all over, it’s all over.’ We heard him run down the stairs. I said to the arranger, Charles Blackwell, that I might as well go back home to Reading. He said I should just wait a while. About ten minutes later. Joe bounded back in the room with a big smile on his face”. Like Joe, Goddard was obsessed with Buddy Holly, who, despite a tragic early death in 1959, had made a lasting impression on pop music with his geeky charm and a store of melodies others would have died for. Joe had dabbled in half-hearted seances for some time, but Goddard’s more earnest interest in spiritualism pushed them to more serious attempts at contacting those such as Al Jolson, Mario Lanza, and even Buddy himself. The sessions prompted Geoff to pen Mike Berry’s ‘Tribute To Buddy Holly’. Joe and Geoff were deadly serious in their admiration and decided to call up Buddy with the glass to see what he thought. It is said they asked Buddy if the record would be a hit. It’s claimed by Goddard that the glass spelt out the letters ‘SEE YOU IN THE CHARTS’. The record did make the charts although Buddy did not mention anything about it peaking at number 23, and Geoff Goddard rambled spiritually about the amazing story on the front page of Psychic News. Joe entered into another printed slanging match over accusations that the record was an artificial concoction. One critic raged, ‘It sounds as if he is singing down a very deep hole’. While these records and the controversy they generated in the pop press held sway, Joe invented Goth (there is some dispute as to whether we owe him a good kicking for this) with The Moontrekkers genuinely unhinged ‘Night Of The Vampire’. Introduced with wind, rain, thunderstorms and featuring a guitar so eerily effected it made the drums, like large boulders rolled down a mountainside seem comparatively unremarkable. It was banned by the BBC as being ‘unsuitable for people of a nervous disposition’. This is the Meek sound at it’s zenith, when his confidence was so high he wouldn’t have cared that the whole street began banging on his door. Unaware and lost in his muse he would tell them to piss off or ignore them. In later years he would try to accommodate them, wearied by their complaints. A reel of surviving demo tape has him asking Geoff Goddard not to banging his feet while playing piano, “in case the people next door start banging on the walls”. It was in his proto-Goth period too that Joe would wander about graveyards at night with his portable tape recorder, searching for voices and sounds of the other side. One famous recording, of a cat Joe believes is trying to talk to him, survives. Still making tracks for the prince of darkness, but with a comic tongue poking partially from his cheek, Joe began recording Screaming Lord Sutch. Sutch had already made a name for himself with outlandish joke-shop horror shows where he’d splatter the audience with fake blood. On tracks like ‘Til The Following Night’ and ‘Monster In Black Tights’ with it’s camp Carry On lyric co-authored with Goddard, Joe surrounded Sutch with intensely detailed audio montages of creaking coffins and doors, with howls and screams echoing into infinity. With wires held together with chewing gum and a trusty spring echo which was in fact a garden gate spring stretched out and nailed to a plank, on these records, 306 Holloway Road was as dangerous a place to be as it sounded. When there was time to spare, Joe would spend hours on his own; wailing tunelessly over inappropriate backing tracks in search one more hit. Chas Hodges recalls, “Most of the guys would laugh at him doing that. But some of us believed in him and wanted to help. You knew that in there among all the, ‘dang, dang, doing, doing, doinging’, was a tune. He had a way with music, but it was a strange way….”. “We were trying to record a tryout for a new Ready Steady Go! theme he had been asked to do”, says Tony Dangerfield, a young singer and bass player who was in Sutch’s Savages and recorded two solo singles with Joe. “He kept singing this weird tune to us and we tried desperately to translate it for him. It just wasn’t working and I remember him running out of the studio crying”. The industry was now unable to ignore Meek and, bit by bit, invited him to join the party. His hard work seemed to be paying off, but not without a price. He admitted in an interview; “People say I’ve been working too hard lately, that I’m ready to crack up”. Geoff Goddard, taking a break from washing the dishes at the Reading University catering department where he has worked since ‘retiring’ from the music industry in 1972 (he occasionally entertains college Xmas parties with his distinctively Liberace-eque piano playing) recalls, “He literally drove himself into the ground. He was suffering from mental illness anyway, I’m sure. He once told me without joking, that he thought something was growing inside his head”. His previously nameless in house band, who had provided backing hour after hour for what seemed like an endless stream of good looking young boys and lumpy girls with hair like helmets, were asked to back the then hot Billy Fury on tour. Joe named them The Tornados and began taking more notice, seeing as others were doing the same. He was flattered by the attention and, despite tales of his aggressive attitude and confrontational style in business, he recorded a debut called ‘Love And Fury’ for them in deference to the Mersey marvel himself. Never shy of gimmicks and now trying to market the artists he also managed too, he put himself under increasing pressures. He sent his hard-edged beat group, David John And The Mood to Max Factor for a make up course. “He wanted to make us look gaunt and moody to match the name”, says the band’s Pete Illingworth. “It was OK when the Max Factor ladies were doing it for us but, when we did it ourselves, we looked like clowns”. Tony Dangerfield says Joe would buy him suits in an effort to groom him for stardom. “He bought me a pink mohair one. He asked me to go upstairs and try it on. I came back down in it, feeling ridiculous. I can hear him saying, ‘It could be a bit tighter there’, pointing at my crotch”. Joe took a shine to the Tornados German bass player, Heinz Burt, and decided as Svengalis often do, that a change of image was in order. Playing Larry Parnes, Brian Epstein and Colonel Tom Parker as well as Phil Spector and John Cage, after watching the horror film, Village Of The Damned, with its army of menacing blond children, Joe decided he would have a blond boy too, and sent Heinz down the hairdressers for a rinse that was to become his trademark. But Heinz would have to wait a while. Joe had space on his mind again, and with the launch of an American communications satellite called Telstar, he returned once more to the shorting wires and radio interference that had transfixed him during the recording of ‘I Hear A New World’. Powered by the futuristic sounds of the pre- electronic Clavioline keyboard, ‘Telstar’ orbited into view. A member of Joe’s Syndicats at that time, later Yes guitar man Steve Howe, says that when he hears this record now, he can clearly envisage Joe at the controls. “ His studio seemed to come alive when he worked. Sparks would fly in there. He was a performer and an artist. So much more, really, than a record producer”. On what became Meek’s unquestioned signature, the Space Age was defined for all suburbia to hear. The record was released in August 1962, despite complaints from the Decca technical department who were, ‘horrified at it’s levels of limiting and compression’. It made number one and stayed in the charts for over half of that year. ‘Telstar’ compacted the hours Joe spent putting together ‘I Hear A New World’ into one handy two minute futuristic chunk. Nobody could claim that Joe invented science fiction- Hollywood had b-movied itself to death with aliens in silver diving helmets since the fifties, but sonically, this mirrored the genius of ‘Forbidden Planet’ and the likes of the early Sun Ra in his ‘Rocket Number 9’ taking off for Planet Venus. And as a pop record,‘Telstar’ is a defining moment in the culture. The Tornados followed up with diminishing returns like ‘Robot’ and ‘Life On Venus’, but their place in history was bookmarked already. Pleased as punch and with money in the bank, Joe, the original Puff Daddy on the make, bought himself a car, a Zodiac, and celebrated by making a vocal version with one of his boys, a teenage Kenny Hollywood with a voice nearly as bad as his, at the microphone. Joe hardly noticed when, complete with mind-numbingly romantic lyrics about a ‘Magic Star’, it sold next to nothing. He continued to buy new equipment, placing it on top of older machines. He neglected however, on this occasion, and on many others, to consider the financial needs of his artists. “I don’t remember ever being paid for anything”, says Mike Berry. “Joe convinced himself that he’d done all the work anyway. That way, I think he convinced himself that he didn’t need to pay anyone”. Tony Dangerfield also says that Joe never paid him but can remember many occasions when his generosity showed through. “I never had any royalty cheques. But he was always handing out money to people. You only had to ask. I remember getting behind with maintenance payments and asking for sixty quid to get the police off my back. That was quite a bit of money back then. He didn’t even want to know what it was for. And he would never ask for it back. I think I got more from him than I would have done had he paid me for the records which never sold very well anyway”. But, despite ‘Telstar’s success, problems appeared on the horizon when a French composer, Jean Ledrut claimed Meek had stolen the tune from some little known piece of his own. The record's speedily accruing profits were frozen at £29,000, and the legal matter dragged on for years, notching up the tension on a man who, with increasing temper fits, a workload big enough to punish a chain gang, and a suspicious inability to delegate (his personal assistants spent most of their time making tea and going out for ice creams) was starting to drown in the chaotic success he had almost single-handedly created. He was not averse, on minor provocation, to howling expletives at fleeing musicians, perhaps sending a couple of loaded tape spools down the stairs after them for good measure. When they returned there was likely to be no excuse or apology, more likely a softly spoken count in to yet another take. But Heinz, as much a romantic diversion for Joe as he was a marketable star after his Billy Fury tour (where he stole at least some of the great man’s limelight) loomed large in his thoughts. Joe obsessed on him and, when not throwing things at miscellaneous Outlaws and Tornados, he took time out to devise a masterplan of a record to prove his love. Though rumour still bubbles, Heinz insists that he and Joe never got it on, despite the fact that he lived at the top floor flat at Holloway Road for some time. Before his recent death, Heinz had grown bored of talking about such things. Interviewed for the Arena BBC documentary some years ago he remarked of Joe, “ I told him straight, I wasn’t interested. But when you’re told you can’t have something, you want it even more”. Joe never made any secret of his affection, with some of the songs he wrote in this period dripping in genuine heartache. Though many of them are sung by women, the ‘he’s’and ‘she’s’ are obviously untranslated. Still, there are enough unrequited metaphors to sink a battleship full of sailors so we might do well to take Heinz at his word. Perhaps accepting that Heinz wouldn’t sing a song called, say, ‘I Love You Heinz’, Meek set Geoff Goddard to work, after his own yearning ‘Dreams Do Come True’ failed to make a dent for his blond bombshell. Goddard didn’t let him down. The clomping teen spirit of ‘Just Like Eddie’ was the result. This paean to rocker Cochran was hardly subtle, but Joe simply required a hit. With a pre-pixie booted Ritchie Blackmore, a Meek session regular and Outlaw providing scorched earth guitar, ‘Eddie’ indelibly stains the memory with a single hearing. “It’s a beautifully made record”, says Ted Fletcher, who worked with Joe from 1963 to 1966 as an assistant. Fletcher now owns a company which makes retro studio gadgets, using the Meek name to sell them around the world. “You can hear that so much effort was put into it. The equipment used back then was so primitive in today’s terms. When you listen to this you know it’s almost impossible that he could have squeezed any more energy out of the set up he had”. On the merest mist of talent, Heinz became a star. Joe devoted much of his diminishing energy to keeping it that way. With pills keeping him fizzing fresh ideas, he recorded a run of largely undiscovered flops by the standards of the time. Even though they didn’t make the charts they were sold to the major labels for big money- the kind of money a man of substance with hits to his name could command. Entrepreneurs like Mickie Most and Jonathan King (King recorded for Meek but never made vinyl) readily admit that Meek was the original successful independent. These records have subsequently become latter day Holy Grails for Meek Geeks. They underlined his idiosyncratic vision with startling success. With releases by Gunilla Thorne, The Thunderbolts, Geoff Goddard (the unbelievable rustic UFO anthem, ‘Skymen’, a tribute, says Geoff to, ‘our friends in space and the sighting of extra terrestrial beings over Reading’), Joe was still on a high in more senses than one. It’s the pop hits which cornerstone his story but these records that have laid the foundations of an unlikely legend. Still, there was a life to be led and, though Joe never seemed to come out from behind his compressors and tape machines for longer than it took to bollock someone for a bum note he himself could have multiplied by a thousand (tapes exist of Meek singing demos. They are scary.) the later Tornados b side ‘Do You Come Here Often’, in which two unknowns Parlay camp gags over a deliberately cheesy organ instro, showed he was getting about and was unafraid to admit his ‘scene’ connections. “Well I must be off.
On November 11 1963 Meek was arrested for importuning in a Gents Lavvy at Madras Place. It transpires that he may well have been set up but, as a regular visitor, he was bound to have his famous collar felt sooner or later. The police claimed he had’ ‘smiled at an old man’. He later railed against the injustice: ‘who wants a fucking old man?’. He was fined £15 pound which would hardly break his bank. But the scandal made the national press at a time when, as a homosexual man, you were treated as if you had an incurable disease. By this stage, Joe talked about the men he picked up in Madras Place like a junkie does his fix. He had spoken of such liaisons; ‘easing the pressure’ he had put on himself. But, with a ready supply of young blood at his studio and young men eager to get on who were willing to do anything for a recording tryout, it was hardly like he needed to put himself in such danger. Certainly he was not shy of asking young musicians if they wanted to ‘come upstairs’. “Sex was always on the menu if you were like minded and you wanted to get on”, says Mike Berry, who recalls the Outlaws would take the piss out of him behind his back, calling him ‘Tweedledum’ and mimicking the way he combed back his hair constantly. If you got caught, it is said, you might have got chased out into the street with some piece of studio gear handily doubling as a weapon. An 18-year-old Steve Howe had to deal with Joe’s quietly predatory ways. “ He used to tell me he liked my trousers a lot. Then he would call me into the office. I would always go because I was keen to get on, get some more session work, maybe. I was terrified when he would come on to me. It was like meeting some shady guy in a Mac in some Nags Head somewhere.” A 16 year old Chas Hodges, later to Rabbit to fame with his Rockney mate Dave, recalls a Saturday afternoon watching the wrestling in Joe’s flat above the studio. Joe asked him in his quiet country burr if he liked ‘the wrestling’, then made a grab for his balls. Interviewed for Arena’s TV documentary, The Strange Story Of Joe Meek, Screaming Lord Sutch grins as he recalls, “He was always asking members of my band to stay over, ‘to do a bit of overdubbing’. They’d say, ‘I’m not going up there on my own’. But it was never the ugly sax player or the drummer without any teeth”. Peter Meer, a member of The Hotrods who recorded at Holloway Road, would sometimes sit and watch TV with Joe. “One time he put his arm around me. I said to him, ‘what’s going on?’. He said, ‘People put their arms around each other in pubs’. I said, ‘This isn’t a pub’. He looked a bit embarrassed and said, ‘I’m just trying to be friendly with you, I’m just trying to see what you’re like. I’ll still listen to your songs” Whatever, the thrill and potential danger of picking up outside his studio seemed to fascinate him. He had feared the effect such a thing might have on his career, the thing that really mattered to him, but it was too late anyway.Two days after the Madras Place story got out, he pinned one of the press stories to the studio wall. ‘Fuck ‘em’, he was heard to say before the session in hand continued. But his apparent nonchalance was to be short lived. People began knocking at his door with blackmail threats after the publicity, claiming he had slept with them, their friends and family, and demanding money before they passed their stories on to the press. Joe paid up fivers and tenners, but that simply multiplied his problem. Word got around that he was an easy touch. “Everything went wrong after that importuning offence”, observes Geoff Goddard. “ I heard that people had broken into the flat and threatened him. It got scary. In the early days, if a session ended late at night, I would walk down to the tube station. Later on I would get a cab to come to the door and take me home”. It is said that his moodiness and mercurial temper were much more prevalent after the Madras Place incident. With The Beatles and Merseybeat on his tail- a sound which elevated the group above the producer/auteur Joe so obviously was- his ‘matchbox music’ jibes showed he was feeling the heat. His songs of the time are either virtually psychotic reactions to his problems or near-depressive poetry. Still, there was always the hope of another fix of happiness. The Number 1 success of The Honeycombs gonzoid stair-stomping classic, ‘Have I The Right?’, provided the Preludin jolt he needed. Ego and attitude held sway once more. He went in all guns blazing when Dave Clark’s ‘Bits And Pieces’ made its way onto the horizon. With typical petulance, Joe claimed they had stolen his patented ‘stomp’ sound. Otherwise, the walls were closing in so many ways. Geoff Goddard was suing, not Joe but the writers of ‘Have I The Right?’, claiming he had penned the song. Curiously, Joe sided against his séance buddy and the pair fell out. With Tom Jones having hit the big time with ‘It’s Not Unusual’, Joe decided it was a good time to dust off a recording session he’d done with the sandpaper-throated Welshman a year earlier. Jones was pissed off and did little to hide the fact in the pop press. Joe was under attack and probably deserved it. The shooting stars that had been Heinz and The Tornados were tailing off rapidly, and the court case over Telstar, a hit around the world by this stage with it’s considerable profits up in the air for the foreseeable future, continued. Major banks pulled out. Bad decisions were made. Tornados drummer Clem Cattini says that the group left a serviceable deal at Decca because Joe, ‘hated someone who worked there’. Syndicats guitarist Ray Fenwick says that some of the original groups have been able to buy back their own tracks from the labels they were licensed to because Joe secured such dodgy deals for them, full of ridiculous legal loopholes. Meek popped pills, both uppers and downers, consulted Mediums and Tarot cards and continued with his seances, still calling up Buddy and newer spiritual pals like Egyptian Emperor Rameses The Great, to ask advice on an increasingly troubled life. In an interview with the fan club magazine Thunderbolt, songwriter Tony Grinham, who knew Joe, tells how he had confided he was experimenting with LSD. “He said he had had some bad experiences. In one, he saw himself on a raft, lost at sea”. With The Tornados having bit the dust, Joe tried to revive the name with new musicians. Mitch Mitchell, later to play with Jimi Hendrix, was drafted in on drums. Mitch played like his life depended on it, but it was too wild for the controlling Joe. Mitch didn’t get the message as Joe stomped about demanding the individualistic drummer do exactly as he asked. Mitch continued as he had done before and Joe is said to have emerged from the control room with a shotgun and a promise: ‘If you don’t do it properly I’ll blow your fucking head off’. Meek met the challenge of changing times better with beat boom classics like David John And The Mood’s blinding ‘Bring It To Jerome’, and the stunning Syndicats b side ‘Crawdaddy Simone’. With Joe, all FX guns on stun, aiding and abetting Syndicats guitarist Ray Fenwick in an intergalactic blues solo the equal, in intensity at least, of any Hendrix nugget, this is an acknowledged freakbeat masterpiece. “He got so excited”, remembers Ray. “He was so pleased that he seemed to be getting his head around this beat boom sound”. On ‘Jerome’, Joe recorded a toilet chain being dropped in a rusty biscuit tin to give the percussion a typically distinctive edge. His studio was chock full of rubbish. It was apparently hard to discern whether the lengths of lead piping were to be used to beat the drums or to threaten someone with. Either way you had to be careful in there. Session drummer Bob Graham recalls Joe shouting constantly: “Don’t tread on the wires, you’ll ruin me sound”. Bob says there were many times when the artists had to hold back from losing their temper with him. “I’d drag a bloody drum kit up three flights of stairs, set it up and he’s say, ‘No, I don’t want you to play the drums, I want you to try something different, I want you to play the drum cases today”. Matchbox maestros The Beatles themselves, or more specifically Brian Epstein, made contact when Joe had a hit with Liverpool group The Cryin Shames ‘Please Stay’. They left to be looked after by Epstein, despite his jealous pleading. This was a painful nail in the coffin of a man now seeming to trace ever-decreasing circles. Phil Spector, who was visiting London and was apparently a fan, called to tell Joe how much he loved his music. The call was taken by Clem Cattini of The Tornados. Clem couldn’t believe it was really Spector. He can still remember how Joe took the call, shouting at Spector that he’d ‘stolen his secrets’. “He slammed the phone down so hard that the receiver cracked”. The following Christmas without a trace of irony, Joe was said to have bought a box full of Spector’s celebrated Xmas LP, giving them out as gifts. All and sundry were accused of helping others plant telephone bugs and listening devices in the flat. In his increasing madness, and with the major labels turning down more and more of his productions, he was resolutely convinced that his recent lack of success was down to others stealing his ideas. Though the idea seems unlikely, there are stories of the many people who came and went at 304 walking off with acetates and information which may easily have found their way into the hands of interested others. Joe placed bugs about the flat himself to see if he could catch anyone talking about him. He was off the rails in so many ways. Steve Howe remembers these as strange times at Holloway Road. “There was an impending sense of doom about the place. And there were always arguments going on, with sundry Tornados and even Heinz running up and down stairs, banging doors.”. The LSD stories may help to explain instances of him staring mindlessly into space while people looked on. It seems sad to think that, while others were taking the drug in the company of friends, Joe was taking it alone and heading out on bad trips sparked by his paranoia and isolation. Perhaps marriage was the solution. Joe gave some serious thought to the idea of getting hitched to his singer Glenda Collins, a nice Jewish girl who he got on well with. He would always parcel away his temper tantrums when she was around, and seemed to concentrate hard on her sessions. Hindsight shows that he did some of his best work on these records. Glenda sings the stunning sci-fi lament, ‘It’s Hard To Believe It’. He even discussed the possibility with other people but couldn’t go through with it. He seemed to try his hardest to fit into the outside world he looked on as a spectator. He would say that he ‘envied’ straight people, sometimes seeing his sexuality as another of his problems. It is said he even took a few female prostitutes to his bedroom in the hope that they might, ‘straighten him out’. His nocturnal lifestyle picked up pace again. He was once spotting flying down the Holloway Road in his pyjamas, screaming that someone was chasing him with a knife. Another time he was found beaten up and unconscious, hanging out of the side of his well-known red Ford Zodiac. Whether this was something to do with his sexual tourism or something more sinister, relating to talk of London gangland attempts to muscle in on his conspicuous wealth, is open to question. It is known that The Tornados were approached by two fairly notorious gangland figures who, in no uncertain terms, told them they would now be managing the group. They told the men that Joe Meek managed them and, “would never let them go”. One of the pair is said to have replied, “Leave that to me.” On January 16 1967 the body of 17-year-old Bernard Oliver was found at a Suffolk farm. Joe knew the boy and was alarmed when newspaper reports mentioned police were planning to question all of Oliver’s known gay associates. He had been chopped to pieces and dumped in a suitcase. Joe was now broke, with the Telstar case still unresolved. Hiding from his creditors and with the hits having all but dried up, John Repsch’s ‘The Legendary Joe Meek’ talks of him only eating when assistant Patrick Pink brought food he'd’ stolen from his own family’s cupboard. His new recordings were still being turned down. Séance calls to Rameses The Great and, it’s said, Aleister Crowley for advice, did nothing to help him. Some believe he developed an obsession with Crowley, and say his interest in the black arts had now taken him much further than using an upturned tumbler to ask his beloved Buddy Holly about chart positions. His mind awash with pills and, with the police, he was sure, closing in on him, his state visibly took a turn for the worse. He apparently looked worn out and had taken to dressing completely in black most of the time. Whether Joe was actually in any way party to the murder of the boy, or he simply felt he could not stomach the blows dealt by another newspaper scandal, initiated simply by his being questioned, is not clear. On February 2 1967 he tried hard to record Patrick Pink, as he had promised.
He asked his assistant to mine to the music because he knew the place was
bugged again. Patrick left him to get on with it and, when he got up in
the morning Joe was still in the studio. Patrick noticed he was urgently
sorting things out, tying things up perhaps. He was writing notes and then
burning them in case the spies he feared found them. He burnt a painting
he had done- an image of naked black boys dancing around a fire, rambling,
“they’re not fucking getting this”. Author John Repsch suggests Joe may
have been expecting the police to call any day. Joe burned unknown
letters and documents too. He returned to his studio where Patrick Pink
was, and handed him a note which said: ‘I’m going now. Goodbye’. Joe continued
tinkering with the track he was putting together for Patrick. One of his
little helpers, a boy called Michael, started banging on the door. Joe
dispatched Patrick downstairs to send him packing. While he was there he
shouted for him to send his landlady, Mrs Shenton up. Joe could be heard
shouting about ‘the book’- it could only have meant his rent book. It seems
likely that Mrs Shenton had retained his rent book and was intending to
throw him out, finally having had enough of the hit searching stomping
and the fact that Joe found it hard to keep up with his payments. She was,
it transpired, always last on his list of his financial priorities. An
argument was heard. Mrs Shenton is said to have turned her back to return
downstairs. Joe blasted her as she walked away from him with the shotgun
Heinz had left among belongings when he’d left the flat some time ago.
Patrick tried to tend to her. He may have held her as she died. He called out to Joe, “She’s dead”. That seemed to be the cue for Joe to reload the gun and point it at himself, blowing his own head off on the same date his hero Buddy Holly had died in 1959. Whether this is coincidence or a deliberate decision on Joe’s part depends how far you get lost in this fantastic story. Both Heinz, who still owned the gun and Patrick, the only witness, were treated as suspects and subjected to serious police grilling. Joe made the papers one more time as the tragic events became clear: ‘TOP POP MAN SHOT DEAD AT HIS LONDON STUDIO’. “His suicide was no surprise to me”, says Geoff Goddard. “It was a logical end to the pressure he put himself under”. Among the last dozen recordings that made it to release, among the increasing rejections, was The Cryin Shames poignant ‘Nobody Waved Goodbye’. At a funeral in his home town of Newent, maybe 200 people turned up. Joe Meek was largely forgotten until his records began to fester in the minds of a few obsessives in the mid 70s. It is only in the last ten years, with the publication of John Repsch’s book, A BBC Arena documentary, and the contemporary appreciation of Joe’s sonic vision, together with the appeal of an irresistibly absurd and tragi-comic story, that Joe has become an icon for those able to laugh as they a marvel at his garden Wall Of Sound. “He turned the British record industry on its head and though they may not have bugged his flat, there were some people who hated him for that, for showing them up. They were having to buy hits from Joe when there were people being paid good money to bring the new groups in house before the likes of Joe got a look in”, says Tornado Clem Cattini. “There was no doubt that he was genuinely hated by the establishment”, says Ted Fletcher, “He made them look stupid”. But The Meek, they say, shall inherit the earth. Maybe Joe himself might
come back; summoned from the mists by an upturned glass in a darkened room
full of Meek Geeks, to collect some of the praise he so richly deserved.
Not that real adulation and respect in his day would have changed anything.
Like a rocket pointed at the stars, Joe seemed to be on course for self-destruct
long before he had perhaps realised it himself.
SOURCES: John Repsch ‘The Legendary Joe Meek’ (Woodford House).
Thanks to John Repsch, Roger Dopson, John Beecher, Mark Newson, Mark
Stratford, Derek Lawrence, Jim Halley, Spencer Leigh and the artists whose
quotes appear.
THE JOE MEEK C-(19)60
SIDE ONE The Blue Men ‘I Hear A New World’ 2.43 (‘I Hear a New World’ RPM CD)
Tornados ‘Telstar’ 3.15 (‘Telstar- The Complete Tornados’ Repertoire
CD)
Geoff Goddard ‘Skymen’ 2.40 ( HMV single)
Glenda Collins ‘It’s Hard To Believe It’ 2.54 (‘This Little Girl’s Gone
Rockin’ RPM CD)
Moontrekkers ‘Night Of The Vampire’ 2.44 (‘Intergalactic Instros’ Diamond
CD)
Screaming Lord Sutch ‘Monster In Black Tights’ 2.41 (‘Screaming Lord
Sutch And The Savages’ EMI CD)
The Spooks ‘The Spook Walks’ 1.55 (‘Intergalactic Instros’ Diamond CD)
Ricky Wayne ‘Muscles’ 2.21 (‘Hidden Gems’ Diamond CD)
Tornados ‘Do You Come Here Often’ 3.01 (‘Telstar- The Complete Tornados’
Repertoire CD)
Joe Meek ‘My Baby Doll’ 1.54 (‘Work In Progress- The Triumph Sessions’
RPM CD)
The Outlaws ‘Barbecue’ 1.56 (‘Dream Of The West’ Beat Goes On CD)
Flee Rekkers ‘Sunday Date’ 2.53 (‘Joe Meek Presents 304 Holloway Road’
Sequel CD)
SIDE 1 TIME 30.07 SIDE TWO Glenda Collins ‘I Lost My Heart At The Fairground’ 2.32 (‘This Little
Girl’s Gone Rockin’ RPM CD)
Jenny Moss ‘Big Boys’ 2.08 (‘Let’s Go! Joe Meek’s Girls’ RPM CD)
Pamela Blue ‘Hey, There Stranger’ 2.39 (‘Let’s Go! Joe Meek’s Girls’
RPM CD)
Bobby Rio ‘Value For Love’ 2.51 (‘The Pye Years’ Sequel CD)
The Honeycombs ‘That Lovin’ Feelin’’ 2.24 (‘The Pye Years’ Sequel CD)
Houston Wells ‘North Wind’ 2.30 (‘The Complete Houston Wells’ Sequel
CD)
Mike Berry ‘Loneliness’ 2.10 (‘Sounds Of The Sixties’ Rollercoaster
LP)
Cryin Shames ‘Please Stay’ 2.14 (‘The Musical Adventures Of Joe Meek’
Kenwest CD)
David John And The Mood ‘You’re Holding Me Down’ 3.02 (‘RGM Rarities
Vol 2-The Beat Era’ Diamond CD)
The Syndicats ‘Crawdaddy Simone’ 2.43 (‘Ray Fenwick- Riding the Rock
Machine’ RPM CD)
The Thunderbolts ‘Lost Planet’ 2.59 (‘Can’t Sing! Won’t Sing!’ Rollercoaster
cassette)
The Blue Men ‘The Bub Light’ 3.08 (‘I Hear A New World’ RPM CD)
SIDE 2 TIME 30.56 TOTAL TAPE TIME 31.03
____________________________________________________________
|
Links coming soon........
|
