by Alex; Ogg
Meek took a job at a radio shop on Edgware Road briefly but then began working at IBC Studios during 1954 as a “glorified projectionist”, showing prospective advertisers TV commercials broadcast in America at the dawn of commercial television. Soon he was drawn into the Radio Luxembourg road shows that toured the country, and with whom IBC had a contract to provide technical support. Eventually he became a ‘tape monkey’, a junior assistant engineer who would make the tea and place microphones. “There was another character there, Allen Stagg, who became the studio manager, and he wasn’t an ‘inventive’ person,” says Repsch. “It was all rules and regulations. Allen made life very difficult for Joe. He hated homosexuals.”
Meek desperately wanted to become a senior engineer, and would petition Stagg and get nowhere. “So he started asking the producers who came in to put pressure on the office, because he wanted to do big jobs. One of those was Arthur Frewin. Arthur Frewin worked for cheap budget labels, and he was paid for setting up sessions. He said, give the lad a chance. He got nowhere initially, but there was a big studio production, a big orchestral session with Alyn Ainsworth for ‘Music For Lonely Lovers’. Arthur was the producer. Joe had never done a senior balance engineer job before – apart from engineering a Big Bill Broonzy blues record – and it was actually Allen Stagg’s attempt to undermine and capsize Meek’s prospects, because he thought he would fail.”
He didn’t, and Meek quickly gravitated to becoming producer Denis Preston’s favoured engineer. “When Denis discovered Joe, he didn’t want Allen any more.” On his death in 1979, the Sunday Times described Preston as “probably the most important figure to emerge from the British jazz business”. Repsch cites Meek’s debt to Preston as ‘inevitable’. “The fact that they worked together so closely, there’s no way Denis couldn’t have been an influence on Joe. Norman Granz was the king of recorded jazz in America, and Denis had taken a leaf out of his book. In fact, he said, ‘If only I’d had the chance to work with artists of the same calibre, I’d have done even better than Norman Granz.’” That may have sounded a boastful claim, but it was undoubtedly true, at least in terms of sonic fidelity. Granz, the original founder of Verve, was dismissive of ‘hi-fi’, and instead appended the legend ‘Recorded in Muenster Dummel Hi-Fi’ to his record labels. This was actually in tribute to two breeds of dogs he owned, and the sound was, usually, dreadful. But certainly Granz served as the model of kindly patrician that Preston came to be to Meek, until the latter fell out with him in yet another fit of pique. The production company he established in 1954, Record Supervision Ltd, enabled him to work with selected artists to produce recordings which were then licensed to major record labels – effectively the path Meek too would follow. This resulted in a long association with Pye Records and recordings by Chris Barber, Acker Bilk and many others, which evolved into a subsequent deal in 1959 with EMI’s Columbia label, helping to document the ‘trad jazz’ boom. But he also dabbled in other fields, including folk, calypso. flamenco guitar, popular song (Roger Whittaker) and was behind many of Donegan’s skiffle recordings.
Meek’s already fertile persecution complex, meanwhile, was given ample scope to prosper in the stiff, regimented environs of IBC. “He was recording Petula Clark, and they always worked late without overtime, all of the engineers,” notes Repsch. “He got back to bed in the early hours, and he was late getting up. So he walks in all smiles, and there’s the studio manager at the door, tapping his watch. ‘What time do you call this, Mr Meek?’ He couldn’t cope with that attitude.” When Meek told Preston he was leaving, fed up with being ‘picked on’, not just for his sexuality but also the way he liked to tamper with recording equipment, that gave Preston, who had long harboured the ambition of starting his own recording studio, the nudge to leave IBC too.
“It was on the cards when Joe came to realise how appreciated some of his work was,” says Repsch. “It made him ambitious. He wasn’t getting the credit due to him, because he was putting the gloss on those records at IBC, but he didn’t have his name on the records. Denis Preston did put Joe’s name on a lot of jazz records. But Joe was having success with things like ‘Lay Down Your Arms’ by Anne Shelton, and Frankie Vaughan’s ‘Green Door’, and lots of Lonnie Donegan records. A lot of the pop stuff, the engineers’ names weren’t mentioned, but Joe thought he was the one making them hits. One of the recordings that Meek made with Denis was Johnny Duncan’s ‘Last Train to San Fernando’, which sold an awful lot of records. With the income from that, they were able to set up Lansdowne, which was being used as a tiny studio by an amateur cellist. And it was just round the corner from where Meek was living. Denis dived in and bought the place, and Joe helped set it up, and became the studio manager. He was there only for about 18 months, but he made his mark there.”
By 1960 Meek had founded Triumph Records, using downtime at Lansdowne Road and a flat in Holland Park. Few of his initial releases, with the notable exception of ‘Green Jeans’, made much impact, though they are recalled today as visionary experiments and early blueprints for ‘Telstar’. Triumph, formed with William Barrington-Coup of Saga Films, didn’t last long. Meek saw what he believed would be a potential number one hit escape his production of Michael Cox’s ‘Angela Jones’ after the pressing plant he’d found was unable to satisfy demand after the singer appeared on television promoting it. Very quickly Triumph disappeared as Meek assessed he was better served by handing over the masters to those able to get records into the shops. With investment from the colourful Major Banks (to be played by Kevin Spacey in an upcoming film of Meek’s life – “I wanted that part!” laughs Repsch, himself an actor), he took up the flat in Holloway Road that would become his stronghold. They jointly formed RGM Sound as a production company. “Without Banks there would have been no ‘Telstar’,” says Repsch. “He was the one funding it all. Joe was a leper and a pariah in the industry after walking out of Lansdowne. And word gets round. He gave Joe the security. Unfortunately, he could be a little mean too. He was an astute businessman, and he wanted all Joe’s money from composing to go straight back into the company. But apart from that, having anyone in authority over him was something that Meek couldn’t live with. He thought anyone telling him what to do undermined his ability to be creative.” Meek wasn’t himself above being presumptuous about financial matters. Money was dispensed often purely on the basis of favouritism. “He wanted the money going into his pockets, but it wasn’t re-channelled as it should have. A lot of people sold a lot of records and didn’t get remuneration for it.”
Meek dismissed all who stood in his way as ‘rotten pigs’, a term which started out as a collective demarcation for his enemies and increasingly became the basis for a full-blown conspiracy theory. Yet there was evidence to support some of his hostility. White-coated cutting engineers rejected some of his early recordings, believing his distortion techniques would damage speakers. They would be forced to take him seriously after a typically outlandish recording session (some of the musicians involved didn’t even meet their colleagues as they were located elsewhere in the three-storey flat) resulted in ‘Johnny Remember Me’. Sung by TV star John Leyton and written by Geoff Goddard (aka Anton Hollywood), the single reached the top of the UK charts in July 1961 after Meek licensed it to Top Rank.
The second massive hit from Holloway Road linked straight back to Meek’s earlier experiments and, in particular, his fascination with space travel (its subject was the recently launched AT&T communications satellite). ‘Telstar’ again reached the top of the UK charts, and was the first single by a British ‘band’ to reach the top of the US charts. This despite initial concern from Decca, who licensed it, that the recording was technically sub-standard. Sadly, Meek would never receive substantive royalties for the record. A court case, not settled until after Meek’s death, was launched by French composer Jean Ledrut claiming that it infringed copyright on his soundtrack to the 1960 film Austerlitz.
Thereafter, the chaotic world Meek had built began
to fall apart. Smitten by blond star Heinz Burt, he dedicated many of his efforts to securing a pop success for him (finally doing so with ‘Just Like Eddie’). He was then arrested and fined for importuning at a toilet in Madras Place, resulting in unwelcome press attention on the front page of the London Evening News and eventually an escalating number of blackmail threats from alleged former conquests. All of which pushed Meek further into a vicious cycle of pill-popping and bizarre seances where he would consult the spirit of his father, Buddy Holly and Pharaoh Ramesses The Great of Egypt. There was another number one success with the Honeycombs’ Have I The Right’, but even that brought a further legal stand-off over disputed authorship and a rupture between him and former ally Goddard. “He got worse when the hits stopped coming,” Repsch notes. “He felt he was being elbowed out, and then he thought it was due to being caught messing about in lavatories. They [the majors] didn’t want to know him any more. They also got fed up with his floods of tears. He’d take a recording that he’d worked very hard on and it would be dismissed, and he’d break down into tears. They’d say, ‘Sorry Joe, there’s no market for this.’ Sometimes he’d get on to Joseph Lockwood, his knight in shining armour, who looked after him because they were similar in a way; he was gay too. But as the hits stopped he became more and more strange. A weird psychic lady would tell him which days to record and which not. And the drugs he was experimenting with made things worse. He was a hypochondriac. All that loud noise, I don’t think that’s good for you, either. He once said he had to listen to Ted Heath when he was with Denis Preston – he said it was so loud it made his ears bleed. That control room of his was only 10ft by 10ft, full of spinning tape machines as well, which probably made it more like 3ft by 3ft.”
Meek had begun routinely bugging his own studio, so convinced was he that the place was awash with spies stealing his ideas and selling them to other record labels. When Phil Spector came to London and asked if he could pass by Holloway Road to show his appreciation, Meek slammed the phone down on him with such force it broke. On 3 February 1967, exactly eight years after the death of Buddy Holly, following an argument with his landlady Mrs Shenton, almost certainly about unpaid back rent, he discharged a shotgun into her back, killing her, and then turned the gun on himself.
The Meek story is as tragic as it is gripping – he would doubtless have been feted had he been able to overcome his neuroses, which Repsch believes could have happened had suitable psychiatric intervention taken place. But for our purposes it is probably the prime example of the way in which an independent producer could overturn the apple cart. Meek paved the way for the likes of Jonathan King (who also recorded unreleased work with Meek) and Mickie Most. “He showed prospective engineers and producers that they could do it,” says Repsch. “You didn’t need to hire the Royal Albert Hall, or have a studio the size of Abbey Road – you could do it in your own front room.” There is sufficient evidence that the establishment did indeed loathe him, though not nearly to the extent his troubled mind presumed. But for a golden period, what is indisputable is that the majors were so dismayed at the way the charts had been overtaken by an ‘amateur’ that they came to him for hit singles. Meek took enormous delight in the fact that the ‘rotten pigs’ were emasculated so, if only for a brief but glorious period. As it was, his life mirrored his art rather too closely. “He wouldn’t know when to stop,” says Repsch. “He would do things that other people were not prepared to do. He would turn the dial that extra turn. And if it wouldn’t turn, he’d get his screwdriver out.”
By the mid-60s a new generation of labels were evolving. Continuing the producer as independent hitmaker ethos of the likes of Spector and Gamble and Huff in the US and Meek in the UK, came Chicago native Shel Talmy, who had shared a classroom with Spector. Arriving in London to convince Dick Rowe of Decca that the demo tapes he played of the Beach Boys and Lou Rawls were his own work (they were not), Talmy became a freelance at the label. Regardless of the propriety of his appointment in 1962, Talmy soon rewarded his new employers with a hit record, the Bachelors’ ‘Charmaine’. And, after a couple of years working on stock pop fodder, he became one of the most celebrated producers in rock via his work with first the Kinks and then the Who. By 1965, inspired by Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate, he decided to take the plunge and form his own record label, Planet. The idea was to work across the board in terms of genre, to make the imprint a mark of quality rather than style, and to this end he set about recruiting R&B singers, crooners, girl groups and strains of the emergent Mod movement.
It didn’t quite pan out that way. The label was extant only from December 1965 to December 1966, failing to enjoy commercial success for any of its 22 singles. He was naïve in signing a contract with Philips that was heavily slanted in their favour, and took his eye off the ball while he continued to work on production for major label artists. That said, there is much to admire about (some of) the releases on Planet – notably the Creation’s ‘Making Time’ and ‘Painter Man’, the group’s name subsequently inspiring one of the great UK independent labels of the 80s and 90s. But when Phillips wouldn’t renegotiate the contract, Talmy shut it down.
Strike Records, and its subsidiary Go, with releases by Neil Christian, the Deputies, JJ Jackson and a pre-‘Kung Fu Fighting’ Carl Douglas, added to the 60s pop dynamic over the course of 35 singles. Established in 1965 by Adrian Jacobs and Lionel Segal out of their publishing company, it hinged on the talents of songwriters Miki Dallon and Pierre Tubbs. The latter was the beneficiary of a bespoke studio installed in his parent’s Surrey Garden – two pre-cast concrete garages laid end to end with cork and egg boxes for soundproofing. But distribution was one of Strike’s great obstacles. Like Ember before them, they used Lugton’s, which operated out of a flat above a shop on Tottenham Court Road. Other attempts were made to overcome distribution problems using the services of Max Factor and Smith’s Crisps, while releases were supported with airtime on pirate radio stations. But after the initial success of Neil Christian’s ‘That’s Nice’, Strike floundered, as Tubbs and Segal moved on to their next business venture. The first Neil Christian knew about its closure in 1967 was when the tour van he was travelling to Germany in was impounded by bailiffs.
In the legal fallout that followed Strike’s dissolution, Dallon launched Young Blood Records with his then lawyer Gerry Black. With distribution via EMI and Beacon, it was better facilitated to succeed than its forerunner. And Dallon this time ensured he would spread his net wider, securing deals and licensing arrangements throughout Europe, to facilitate the growth of the label. Launched in August 1969, with an advance from German label Hansa on condition they had an option on any of his recordings, Dallon deliberately targeted records at the French and German markets, tying up a deal with Eddie Barclay in France in addition to Hansa. Famously he was paid in the currency of onyx ashtrays by one Yugoslavian licensee. “I didn’t want to be a pop label,” Dallon later told Kieron Tyler, “I thought we can be a bit of a rough diamond R&B label, something different to your run-of-the-mill pop.” Yet their first UK hit was Don Farden’s tribute to George Best, ‘Belfast Boy’, in February 1970, though by then Dallon had already enjoyed a handful of European hits. ‘(The Lament Of The Cherokee) Indian Reservation’, recorded with Sorrows’ singer Don Farden and already an unexpected success in America after it was licensed to independent GNP Crescendo, finally became a major UK hit when released on Young Blood. It was followed by ‘In A Broken Dream’ by Python Lee Jackson, fronted by Rod Stewart, which charted in 1972 (two years after it was first released). The label persevered with a bizarre mixture of acts, including Apollo 100, who had a major American hit with ‘Joy’, their reworking of Bach’s ‘Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring’, the rock-operatic Julian’s Treatment, who enjoyed surprise popularity in Germany and the incomprehensible Dando Shaft. Other oddities, however, like the glam-influenced Damned (titled prior to Sensible et al taking the name in the punk years) fell off everyone’s radar, though even Bearded
Lady stumbled upon a German hit. Despite scoring a novelty chart success with the awful ‘Nice One Cyril’, Dallon’s interest in Young Blood faded and he departed in 1976. The label struggled on for a few years without ever enjoying the same stature.
But the most important, and most arresting UK independent label of the 60s was the aforementioned Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate enterprise. Oldham, self-confessed ‘godfather of hype’, was manager of the Rolling Stones and a man upon who you could comfortably weave a narrative that takes in most of the essentials of the 60s music revolution. He founded Immediate in 1965 alongside Tony Calder, with the focus on the British blues boom as well as R&B, though if anything, the label sound-tracked the Sound Of Swinging London. The ethos was to indulge its artists by giving them free reign to make the ‘hippest’ records they could – artistry without financial impediment – with results that confirmed the genius and the folly of such an approach. With Mick Jagger and Keith Richard serving as producers (and occasionally songwriters), the label’s slogan ‘Happy To Be A Part Of The Industry Of Human Happiness’ did not seem unduly hyperbolic at one point. However, an enterprise untethered by accountants and obeying only its own internal logic, somewhat waylaid by the fleshpot and pharmaceutical attractions of the time, was ultimately destined to consume itself in an implosion of ego and recrimination.