John Repsch - The Legendary Joe Meek (Woodford House, 1989)
If Joe Meek was touched with genius, he was also a wayward, deeply troubled soul. Homosexual in an age when tolerance of gays was at a premium, his mother - with whom he was besotted - had wanted a girl and dressed him accordingly for the first few years of his life. In 1963, shortly after the Tornadoes had taken their Meek-produced instrumental
Telstar to the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, he was fined for propositioning a man in a public lavatory opposite Islington Central Library and when his arrest made the newspapers, he began to crack, living in mortal terror of rival producers and - especially - his mother finding out. It was then that a group of unscrupulous hoods began to blackmail him over his sexual promiscuity (many desperate up and coming musicians were all too unhappily familiar with his methodical reversion to casting couch tactics), while members of the criminal fraternity tried to persuade him to sign over his best-selling act. This set of circumstances did as little to curb Meek’s notorious paranoia as his incessant gobbling of amphetamines. Joe acquired a 12-bore shotgun from his prodigy Heinz. His increasing occult dabbling was perhaps, not entirely conducive to his well-being either. Meek, an amateur occultist with a keen interest in ghost-hunting was a frequent visitor to Highgate Cemetery. He and his chief songwriter Geoff Goddard would also regularly hold seances in Joe's flat-cum-recording studio above a leather shop at 304 Holloway Road. It was within this workshop of filthy creation that Joe, so legend has it, predicted the date of his hero Buddy Holly’s death via his Tarot deck while Goddard informed
Psychic News (September 9 1961) that he’d received help from the other side in penning John Leyton’s 1961 smash,
Johnny Remember Me.
The Jukebox Jury panel may have given the record an unanimous thumbs down, but Buddy couldn't have been more supportive, “See you in the charts!” he enthused via the Ouija board at one of the RGM Sound seances.
In issue 7 of
Thunderbolt, the official newsletter of the Joe Meek Appreciation Society, Tony Grinham suggests that an Autumn 1965 visit to Warley Lee Farm on the outskirts of Brentwood, Essex, rumoured to be haunted by the ghost of a man who hung himself, further distressed his friend. Then the dismembered remains of Bernard Oliver, a young boy known to Meek, were found dumped in two suitcases in a Suffolk field. Meek, fearing yet more adverse publicity - the Police had made it clear that they intended to interview all known homosexuals in connection with the murder - finally lost it on February 3rd 1967, eight years to the day of his hero, Buddy Holly’s demise on that ill-starred plane journey. Perhaps believing his landlady Mrs. Violet Shenton was about to evict him, he shot her dead and then turned the rifle on himself.
Happily, in this magnificent biography, Repsch enthusiastically details some marvellous r n' r moments on the journey toward the final tragedy. Following a rehearsal in a Muswell Hill Church, Rod Stewart suffered the indignity of being ousted from his then band, the Raiders, when Meek signed the group but dispensed with the front-man's services by blowing a raspberry in his direction. Renamed The Moontrekkers, the surviving members recorded and released an instrumental,
Night of the Vampire, which was promptly banned by the BBC on the grounds of it's eerie sound effects (the creaking of a coffin lid and a blood-curdling scream from Meek himself).
The much missed Screaming Lord Sutch recalls: “It was Joe Meek’s idea for me to visit the streets of Whitechapel late at night dressed as Jack the Ripper; all the places frequented by Jack: pubs, clubs, back alleys. I did and it got local publicity. He did suggest that I did a whole review with this Jack the Ripper and make it like into a mini-opera and he’d have written some more music. He was saying I could make it into a big production for my stage show and stabbing women, running about with a butchers knife. He liked the idea. He was intrigued by horror films like I was; the
Dracula's and the
Frankenstein's and all the classic horror films and he came and saw my act ... ”
Sutch and his Savages were added to Joe Meek's burgeoning RGM roster in 1961. When it came to recording their debut 45
Til the following Night (originally titled
My Big Black Coffin, the name was changed to appease humourless record company executives) the sound effects which had proved so troublesome to the Moontrekkers were shamelessly recycled as a backdrop to the front-man's inspired howling and baying... to limited chart success, it must be said. Like his mentor, Sutch's interest in the macabre spanned his career. At the beginning of August 1970 - within days of the trio of schoolgirls’ discovery of a disinterred, headless corpse strewn on the pathway in fact - the incorrigible old prankster made a pilgrimage up Highgate Hill to prance around the tombs and have his photo taken with a Bride of Dracula (one of his Raving Savages, Carmen Du Sautoy, in the tightest of pencil skirts and the most unscary pair of plastic fangs I ever saw outside the mouth of the excellent Count Ken Gilbert). They made the lead story on the front page of that same weeks
Ham & High. The days promotional stunt behind him, Sutch flitted off unmolested into the night to make a film based on his
Jack the Ripper and
Dracula’s Daughter almost-hits which, to the best of my knowledge, never did surface.
Carmen du Sautoy (former Raving Savage, later to appear in an episode of
Midsummer MurdersA tortured unhappy man but a genius. Joe is one of those bizarre and wonderful characters that crop up every now and then to make life interesting. Did he dress in black and have a bumpkin accent? I've a Sutch compilation that features some of his work, a Woolies £5.99 special (Go Go! 20 Rockin' Beat Instrumentals) that features The Tornadoes, The Moontrekkers and the Fabulous Flea-Rekkers. A holiday in Cornwall brought forth I Hear A New World by Joe Meek and the Blue Men - a strange smurfs meet Forbidden Planet sci-fi romp. He even appears in Jake Arnott's novel The Long Firm. Dem - did he have anything to do with The Honeycomb's Have I The Right?
demonik That was certainly him, FM.
Amazingly (or perhaps not), Repsch couldn't find a publisher for his book, so he had 2000 copies printed up at his own expense. It sold out within weeks, went to a reprint, and there's been talk of it being made into a movie.
I was never so much interested in the music as I was all the whispers of occult dabbling, and that led to a couple of interviews with a witchy fellow and a correspondence with Repsch who I met a few times - friendly, charming fellow, steeped in rock 'n pop lore. One of the terminological inexactitudes he disabused me of was Rod Stewart's oft-repeated claim that, in 1962, he worked as a gravedigger at a certain North London cemetery. Apparently he'd taken the job in a bid to confront his "morbid fear of death". If the following description of the bizarre initiation ceremony he underwent (a hazing not dissimilar to that endured by mass-murdering muso Saxon 'Axel Crypt' Hyde in the notorious Michael Slade gore-fest
Ghoul is to be believed, he certainly got more than he bargained for.
"One experience that scared the crap out of me when I first went on the job. What happens when you start is that the other guys who work in the cemetery sort of christen you when you get the job by putting you inside one of the coffins and closing the lid, which is a very, very frightening experience. It doesn't sound like it, but once you get in there and they close the lid on you, you wonder if they'll just leave you in there" (Tim Ewbank & Stafford Hildred,
Rod Stewart; A Biography, Headline, 1991).
Happily, despite his alleged premature burial, Rod the Mod did not degenerate into a serial killer although it could be argued that he's spent the best part of his august years indiscriminately murdering any rock standard that takes his fancy.
Anyhow, JR dismisses much of Stewart's " history" as patently bogus myth making. As to his stint with a sexton's shovel: "Rod never did dig any graves, he was too small. They just stuck him on the gates."
I've not read
The Long Firm, but I thought the three-parter on BBC1 in 2004(?) was excellent. Gregor Truter - who I know nothing about - played a really wired, twitchy version of Meek circa the suitcase murder.
Something that strikes me about the book is that, for all Repsch's commendable efforts to celebrate Joe's life rather than dwell on his tragic and bloody death, filmed straight
The Legendary Joe Meek would qualify as a legit horror movie. Filmed well and it has the potential to be a classic.
Franklin MarshManaged to skim through some of this book - it really is an amazing portrait of the music world of the late 50s and early 60s. Meek is such a bizarrely wonderful person - a classic example of British Amateurism occasionally triumphing that you can't help rooting for whenever he releases a record. The 'pop charts' seem such a lottery - records that should have been massive either flop or go unreleased, stuff thrown together without thought of chart success (Telstar) can go ballistic - Meek had entered into a deal with Larry Parnes - The Tornadoes became Billy Fury's backing band and set out on a massive star package tour - Telstar is rush released and soars to No. 1 - The Tornadoes can't be released from their contract and get a three minute spot each night to play their hit! Incredible stuff in here - I was very taken with Joe's suggestion to Sutch that they buy an ex-Navy submarine, sail it down the Thames and threaten to blow up the Houses of Parliament - all in the name of publicity! Another amusing stunt was that of the (Wild West themed) Outlaws riding around London's West End in a stage coach, marching into an HMV shop and holding it up with their cap-guns to demand their latest release - they got it but had to pay for it. The Old Bill moving them on for 'advertising within a mile of Piccadilly Circus' - and virtually no pressmen around to record it.
