Among the more oddball singles I played endlessly on that juke box in the coffee bar in Skipton when I was 12 was ‘What Do Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For?’ by Emile Ford & The Checkmates. At the time I didn’t know that it was an old song, originally recorded in 1917, only that it caught my ear because of the way it sounded. A number one UK hit in October 1959, it was a perfect little doo-wop pop song with a hint of Caribbean happiness about it, a record that simply sounded great, two minutes of what the best pop should sound like. The singer was from St Lucia and his voice, drenched in echo, rang out ever so clearly, enhanced by a single sharp drum crack that launched a chorus by a choir of backing vocalists doo-wopping away. There was even an upward key change after the first verse to add to its charms.
I long ago lost that 45rpm disc on the Pye Nixa label and had completely forgotten about it until I read Love and Fury: The Extraordinary Life, Death and Legacy of Joe Meek. Well, I should have guessed. Emile Ford’s chart topper was co-produced by Joe Meek, and that’s why it sounded so good on the juke in the coffee car on Mill Bridge. In the UK in 1959 only Joe Meek made records like this.
Long referred to as the UK’s Phil Spector, after reading this book I’m more inclined to consider Spector as America’s Joe Meek. Both were innovators and there’s a macabre coincidence in that both fatally shot women who’d evidently displeased them, Meek shooting himself immediately afterwards and Spector spending the rest of his life in jail.
Spector’s first hit, ‘To Know Him Is To Love Him’, by his group The Teddy Bears, was in 1958, but to all intents and purposes he and Meek were contemporaries treading the same path. The big difference was in the studio equipment they utilised. In America Spector had the benefit of everything modern technology made available; Meek, on the hand, was a DIY man, cobbling together bits and pieces of equipment he begged, borrowed or stole and wiring them all together in his home, three floors above a leather goods shop at 304 Holloway Road in North London that served as his studio, his control room and bolt-hole. These days there’s a plaque above the door, dedicated to ‘The Telstar Man’, and another one at his birthplace at Newent in Gloucestershire.
‘Telstar’ was Meek’s biggest hit, a UK number one in 1962 and, perhaps more importantly, a US number one as well, only the second UK record to reach top the charts in America after Acker Bilk’s ‘Stranger On The Shore’ earlier the same year. It’s a futuristic instrumental credited to The Tornados, which featured on bass Heinz Burt, the apple of Meek’s eye, on guitar George Bellamy (whose son Matt is the leader of Muse), on drums the venerable Clem Cattini and on keyboards, deputising for Roger Lavern, Meek’s writing partner Geoff Goddard who plays ‘Telstar’’s uplifting, anthemic melody on a clavioline. It opens with a rumble intended to sound like a spaceship taking off that simply explodes out of your speakers, especially on the 7” vinyl single, a remarkable bit of noise previously unheard on phonographic apparatus in the UK up to that time, but this was nothing compared to the sheer exhilaration of the upward key change and a guitar solo that sounds for all the world as if it was recorded on the bottom of a fish tank.
Joe Meek led a complicated life that Darryl Bullock carefully outlines in his richly detailed book. He was gay in an era when homosexuality was a crime, eagerly prosecuted by police with nothing better to do, and suffered as a result. He had a short temper and was constantly worried about money, and he almost certainly suffered from mental illness exacerbated by drugs. He believed in the afterlife and through seances tried to contact the dead. He may or may not have displeased the Kray Twins, who fancied muscling in on the record business, and through his erratic behaviour made enemies of powerful people in the record industry, among them Sir Joseph Lockwood, the head of EMI, and Robert Stigwood, then a struggling impresario, both of whom were also gay.
Meek was also a workaholic, recording countless singers and groups, many of them no hopers really, in his makeshift studio at all hours of the day and night. Many names soon to be famous, among them Tom Jones, Ritchie Blackmore and Jimmy Page, climbed the stairs at 304 Holloway Road, though the rumour that David Bowie recorded there with The Konrads is probably a myth.
Alongside ‘Telstar’ were other hits Meek either produced or engineered, the most notable ‘Johnny Remember Me’ by John Leyton, an eerie masterpiece, and the Honeycombs ‘Have I The Right’ which reached number one in 1964. But this was the tip of the iceberg. “During his career as an independent producer, Meek placed 40 singles in the UK Top 50 charts,” notes Bullock. After his death 1,856 reels of tape from Meek’s studio would eventually find a home at Cherry Red Records.
Meek was the UK’s first independent record producer at a time when most, like George Martin, were salaried staffmen at record labels, and this alone makes him important, so much so that in 1989 I assisted John Repsch in writing and producing The Legendary Joe Meek: The Telstar Man, the first ever biography of Meek. Oddly, Darryl Bullock fails to mention this in the extensive bibliography which, at the back of his 382-page book, is followed by copious research notes and a good index. There are also two 8-page photo sections in what must now be regarded as the definitive work on this most fascinating music man.
