Jake Arnott: Joe Meek and Me

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Tortured soul: Con O’Neill as Joe Meek and Ralf Little as Chas Hodges in the film Telstar out next week

Trapped in the tale: writer Jake Arnott

Visionary: Joe Meek has been credited with inspiring Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound

It-and-miss: The Tornados, with Joe Meek, centre, and Heinz Burt seated right

Joe Meek's sound has always haunted me, his weird and wonderful tunes echoed through my childhood.

This wildly imaginative and innovative record producer was one of the great English eccentrics, whose mad genius transformed cheap pop music into something wildly expressionistic and strangely ethereal.

He had three great hits in the 1960s: the mournfully elegiac Johnny Remember Me; the frenetically urgent Have I the Right?; and his triumphant instrumental Telstar.

They still summon up childhood memories of fairgrounds and ice-rinks, of space-age dreams and obscure emotions that I could not yet understand.

Joe was quite a character. Addicted to amphetamines and obsessed with séances and the occult, he created techniques in recording that were years ahead of their time.

Gay when it was still illegal, he was immersed in the demi-monde of Swinging London and was destroyed by a paranoia that drove him to shoot his landlady before turning the gun on himself.

My research into his life took me to some strange places.

The most intriguing thing I discovered was that he had been questioned by police about the “Suitcase Murder” as part of an investigation into what the evening papers of that time called the “twilight world of homosexuals”.

The Suitcase Murder was a particularly gruesome crime.

On 16 January, the dismembered remains of 17-year-old Bernie Oliver were found in two suitcases in a field in Tattingstone in Suffolk.

Bernie was from north London and had been last seen hanging around the West End.

Police were soon following leads that there was a “homosexual motive” to the murder.

Bernie had lived close to Joe's Holloway Road studio and there was a rumour that he had been employed as a tape-stacker there.

And Joe was a “known homosexual offender” (he had been arrested for cottaging in 1963). He soon became caught up in the intrigue that surrounded the case.

The criminalisation of homosexuality created an underworld of suspicion and blackmail.

Gay gangsters like Ronnie Kray used this intensely secretive atmosphere to further their own dubious activities and to cultivate friends in high places.

This was the world that I wanted to investigate in my first novel, The Long Firm, which charts the rise and fall of fictional homosexual villain Harry Starks against a background of real events and real people.

So the Suitcase Murder became part of its story and Joe Meek one of its characters.

Meek was already dangerously unbalanced at the time of the killing.

Heinz, a pretty blond bass-player he had unsuccessfully groomed for stardom, had left him and Joe was descending into a drug-fuelled psychosis.

The Suitcase Murder remains unsolved and a link between Bernie Oliver and Meek was never proved, but Joe committed suicide less than a month after the discovery of the body and in my fictional re-telling I could speculate that the case had contributed to pushing him over the edge.

So I stole something of his tortured soul for my own purposes, but I ended up being caught up in his mystery.

Ten years on and Joe Meek still haunts me, and I have become part of the telling of his tragic story.

In April 2000, a year after The Long Firm was published, Heinz died, aged 57, after a long battle with motor-neuron disease, and I wrote an article for Attitude magazine about him.

I was still trying to make sense of the world of Joe Meek.

With silver lamé suits and peroxide hair, Heinz was Joe's protégé and the unrequited love of his life.

Launched as a solo star with looks but little talent, he just about ruined Joe, but there was something nonetheless intriguing about Heinz.

The uncompromising artificiality of his act bordered on the avant-garde.

Heinz was an unconscious Pop Art statement: even his name conjures up a sort of British version of Warhol's soup cans.

A year later, I became involved in developing a television documentary that would reopen the Tattingstone Suitcase Murder as a cold case.

I had taken many fictional liberties in using this crime in my novel and I now felt some sort of duty to the truth.

Would I finally be able to find out if there was ever a real connection between Joe and the unfortunate victim? In the end, the film didn't go ahead and I never found out.

Working on the project with us, though, was a detective inspector who had grown up in Suffolk and remembered the case from his childhood when, he told me, they had joked grimly with bus drivers about getting “two halves to Tattingstone”.

In December 2003, the BBC began filming its dramatisation of The Long Firm.

I went along on location on the initial day of shooting and the first take has Joe Meek played with startling verisimilitude by Gregor Truter in a lovingly recreated version of his Holloway Road studio.

It was a scene where my fictional Harry Starks calls on Joe to try to find out about the Suitcase Murder.

I had written all this several years earlier and I no longer had any control over it; indeed, it no longer even belonged to me.

I was now “adapted”, and my work had become part of the popular culture from which it borrowed.

The following summer, I was interviewed by Americans Howard S Berger and Susan Stahman for their documentary, A Day in the Death of Joe Meek.

They talked to almost everybody who knew Joe or was influenced by him, and the range of testimony they had accumulated was impressive and bewildering.

They used an anecdote I recounted about Meek's great rival Larry Parnes, of the ways he used his position as the most successful music business agent of his time to prey on young men.

It's a story that made its way into my fourth novel, Johnny Come Home.

The next January, in 2005, to my fascination, I found myself at the South Bank Awards sitting next to Alan Blaikley, who worked with Meek and wrote one of his number one hits, Have I the Right? for The Honeycombs.

Alan had plenty of marvellous stories of that time, my favourite being that his song was inspired by the last paragraph of Radclyffe Hall's classic lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness. Later that year actor-turned-writer/director Nick Moran's stage play about Joe, Telstar, opened in the West End.

In September 2006, Johnny Come Home was withdrawn due to a libel suit.

Once more I had used a homosexual record producer as a character, this time a fictional one.

Unfortunately I'd unwittingly given him the name of a real person who worked in the music industry and is still around.

I've had no real trouble from Joe (you can't libel the dead), but I couldn't help feeling this was poetic justice.

The same week, when my book was unceremoniously pulped, the spoken-word version (also to be withdrawn) was named audiobook of the week. It was narrated by Nick Moran.

It wasn't until a couple of months later, at a party at Ronnie Scott's, that I finally met Moran. Full of energy and manic humour, he talked about his own obsession with Joe Meek and his plans for a film of Telstar.

I thought he was joking when he offered me a walk-on part, but there I was on set in the summer of 2007, ready to walk on as Board of Trade Man One, in a scene where Joe's goods are being possessed for non-payment of tax.

I watched Con O'Neill, as Joe, in an electrifyingly emotional performance.

And he still found time to pat me on the back encouragingly when I fluffed my lines.

It wasn't until last year that I saw the finished version of A Day in the Death of Joe Meek, at a special screening at Cream Studios, west London, for the Music Producer's Guild.

It really is the definitive documentary of Joe Meek's life and work and a perfect companion piece for Telstar.

Afterwards, various well-known record producers talked of their debt to Joe.

One reported Phil Spector phoning Joe personally to acknowledge how he had influenced the famous Wall of Sound, but Meek wouldn't take the call, thinking that it was a set-up.

I was introduced at the screening to Jonathan King, who has had his own brushes with the law, and he talked of how he and Joe recorded some songs together that were never used.

I felt slightly awkward, knowing that the fictional record producer that got me into so much trouble owes more to King than the guy that actually sued me.

But it's Joe's ghost that haunts me — and it seems that he will always be with me.

At the premiere of Nick Moran's film, I spotted Cathi Unsworth in the row in front of me.

She is one of my favourite authors, who uses the dark side of the music business as a fictional setting for her novels.

She told me her next book is called Bad Penny Blues, after a tune Meek recorded in the Fifties with Humphrey Lyttleton.

Joe's story continues to be told, his work continues to inspire and his influence can be found in wildly differing places.

He is the patron saint of the indie scene, and yet Margaret Thatcher chose Telstar as one of her Desert Island Discs.

After years of near obscurity, he is destined for mass consciousness as a brilliant, if deeply flawed, national treasure.

Telstar is released next Friday. Jake Arnott's new novel, The Devil's Paintbrush, is out now published by Sceptre.

 

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