Joe Meek: The Producer Britain Forgot
Before anyone understood what a music producer was — one man was ahead of the 60s like nobody else.
We tell ourselves stories about who gets to make art and who gets to take credit for it, and for a long time the story the music industry told itself about Joe Meek was that he was a difficult man, an unstable man, a man whose brief run of commercial success in the early 1960s had been an accident of horseshoes rather than a symptom of genius.
He had come into sound the wrong way, which is to say he had come to it honestly with a heart of passion. With no formal training of any kind Joe Meek worked alongside the RAF National Service. Spending years as a radar technician learning how a signal behaves when you intercept it, when you amplify it, when you bend it into abstraction. When Meek arrived at IBC Studios in London in the mid-1950s as a junior engineer, he carried that knowledge with him into rooms where it was alien.
He moved microphones closer to drum kits, close enough that the microphone was picking up the verbiage of the stick hitting the skin, the crack and the breath of it, and the way the sound bloomed outward before the room had time to soften it.
He ran vocals through compression until they had a sense of pressure, voices were pushing against the inside of the moka like an espresso ready for pouring. In doing this one can hear the vowels gargling in the singer's throat rather than simply the result of a vibrato. He layered recordings on top of one another, returning to the same tape again and again to add new elements, building sounds from components that could never have coexisted in a live performance. What this meant in practice was that the finished record wasn't a document, it was engineering, a process of assembling, of trial and error.
The results were dense, estranged and unmistakably alive in a way that British studio recordings of the period simply weren't, due to the British need for fidelity as virtue. Yet, Meek had already moved past that assumption entirely, having decided that the original performance was just the raw material and that what you did with it afterward was where the real work began.
The people who employed him told him, more than once, that this was not how things were done. He kept doing them anyway. He was fired, found another studio, was fired again, and after a while the industry had run out of patience and Meek had run out of options, and so he did what people do when every door has been closed to them and built the door himself.
The room was on the upper floors of 304 Holloway Road in Islington, which by any objective measure was not a recording studio. The bathroom served as a vocal booth, the staircase, which had a particular quality of resonance that Meek had catalogued and memorised, became a live recording chamber for drums. He wired the building by running cables through walls, and when he needed a spring reverb unit and had no money to buy one he sat down with salvaged components and soldered one together from scratch, and it worked, and the sound it produced was uniquely his. Musicians who recorded there described a space that looked from the outside like barely controlled chaos and sounded, from inside a set of headphones, like nowhere else in England.
That was the thing about Meek that the industry never understood: the chaos was the method. He was building something that was centered around the transformation of sound rather than the efforts to preserve it.
On the evening of July 10, 1962, he watched the television news and saw the Americans launch a satellite into orbit. Telstar 1, the first active communications relay in space, carrying signals across the Atlantic at a speed and distance that seemed, until that moment, entirely theoretical. The broadcast showed the rocket climbing and the signal traveling and the world briefly, improbably connected across an ocean by something invisible moving through the dark. Leaving Meek to his workbench.
Seven days later he had a record, which even now, more than sixty years on, resists easy description. He opened it with a sound he made by running a pen along the teeth of a comb in front of a microphone and then processing the recording through his own equipment until it became an oscillating, silvery shimmer that didn't correspond to any known instrument.
The melody came from a clavioline, a keyboard whose tone was so pure that it seemed to arrive from a different atmospheric layer entirely. He compressed everything, layered everything, ran everything through a chain of gear that was partly borrowed and partly of his own invention, and what came out the other side was a record that sounded like the thing it was about: transmission, distance, the sensation of a signal crossing empty space.
Telstar, credited to The Tornados, went to number one in Britain. Then it crossed the Atlantic and went to number one in America, the first record by a British act ever to do so only two years before The Beatles landed at JFK. If you were to put it on in a room full of people who have never heard it, it is capable of producing a silence.
What Meek had done was to establish the studio itself as a compositional instrument. Before him, the orthodox position was that a studio's purpose was documentary: you put a microphone in front of a performance and you recorded it. After him, the studio became a place where sounds were manufactured, where recordings were constructed in layers, where the final product bore whatever relationship to a live performance the producer decided it should bear. The sense that a record is an object is the grammar of modern music production, and Meek was writing it alone in a bathroom in Islington while the industry still bet on losing dogs.
The French composer named Jean Ledrut filed a plagiarism claim against Telstar the same year it was released, alleging that Meek had stolen the melody from a piece of his own earlier work. The allegation was, in the way of all such allegations, impossible to disprove quickly and ruinous to live with in the meantime, because the lawsuit moved through the legal system with the grinding slowness of all such things. While it moved, Meek's royalties were frozen, which meant that the money generated by five million sales, by a record that was playing on radio stations across two continents, was sitting in an account somewhere that he could not access.
The entire premise of his independence — the flat, the equipment, the ability to record what he wanted with whom — rested on the assumption that success would pay for itself. That the hits would keep coming and the royalties would flow into the room on the Holloway Road.
By the mid 1960's and one missed chart position at a time, the commercial logic that had made his independence possible started to erode beneath him, and the former fortress, which had once been proof of concept, began to feel like something like a trap.
However musicians still came to Meek, those who knew him in those years describe a man who was as brilliant as he was hard working, noting the ear that could hear the individual threads of sound that puzzled most. But what did flee was his momentum and in its absence other things became louder — debts, paranoia, the specific and settled sense that the world had taken what it needed from him.
He had told people, more than once and with a perplexing certainty, that he would not survive to see February 4th, 1967. He had fixed on the date years earlier. It was the anniversary of the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, a loss that had affected Meek in ways he found difficult to explain by fruitinzied through his music.
On February 3rd he was found dead in the flat on the Holloway Road, at only thirty-seven years old and surrounded by the equipment he had built and the tapes he had made and everything he had known. The lawsuit was resolved shortly afterward with a dismissed claim, the plagiarism never proven, and the melody was confirmed as his.
His master tapes were packed into sixty-seven tea chests with no index and no catalogue. They were put into storage, collecting dust for decades. When researchers eventually opened them, they found more than four thousand hours of recordings — completed tracks and half-finished experiments and demos, an entire interior world known only to one.
In 2004, NME compiled a list of the greatest record producers of all time. Joe Meek came first — ahead of George Martin, ahead of Phil Spector, ahead of Quincy Jones, ahead of names that for decades of music journalism had polished into canonical fact.
The list came out thirty-seven years after he died, and the flat on the Holloway Road has swapped out cabled for curlers and the sixty-seven tea chests are in an archive while Telstar is still playing.
