Wednesday, May 05, 2004
JOE MEEK AT 75
“I could afford to be arrogant if I wanted,” chuckles an impossibly youthful-looking Sir Joe Meek, gazing out from the top floor of his recently refurbished Triumph plc Studios in Holloway, “but I realise that a lot of what I’ve achieved in my career has been down to luck as well as my skills, such as they are. I’ve had a lot of bad breaks followed by an avalanche of good ones. Most people buckle under the bad ones. I ought to know – I nearly did.”
Looking back at Sir Joe’s remarkable career, it’s easy to forget how close he came to a nervous breakdown in early 1967. His run of pop hits had dried up and he was in imminent danger of eviction and bankruptcy. “God it was depressing,” he reflects. “I’d wake up every morning and argue myself into existing for another day. That is if my landlady didn’t start the arguing first. I didn’t feel I was getting anywhere. The money from ‘Telstar’ was tied up in a court case, money wasn’t coming in elsewhere because I wasn’t getting any hits, I was doing drugs – I really felt like packing the whole thing in, and I don’t just mean the music business. Everything seemed dead or in the past to me.”
As everyone knows, salvation came in the unlikely shape of Kenneth Williams, with whom Meek was in the tendency of socialising in the Holloway area around that time (“Don’t forget, it was only made legal towards the end of ’67…”). Impressed by his performance in the 1963 Home Service production of Gogol’s Diary Of A Madman, Columbia Records had asked Williams whether he wanted to turn this into an album.
“They had strange ideas,” remembers Sir Kenneth, now 78. “I think when they heard the original BBC broadcast they were interested in the sound design as much as, if not more than, my actual performance of the text. So Columbia wanted me to come into the studio and redo it as a record, but they wanted to update the background – ‘make it more psychedelic,’ I was told at the time, though of course then I didn’t have the faintest idea what that meant. But it seemed as though they wanted the sound design to be a bit more far out, to mirror the narrator’s gradual mental disintegration. When I asked about who was going to oversee the production of all this, they suggested Joe, whom I knew vaguely from the gay scene of the time, as someone who was good at producing interesting noises. I was sufficiently intrigued to say yes. And I’m glad I did because that experience really opened a door for me – before then I was going nowhere in all these farcical comedies, Carry On and what have you, and I was getting pretty frustrated about it I can tell you. I was just past forty and just about ready for the scrapheap, or at least that’s how I felt. But after doing Diary Of A Madman with Joe, I felt less pent-up about trying new and different things and I came out of it with a determination to improve my skills and develop myself as a proper actor, not just some lard-faced raconteur. Hard to know where I’d be today if I hadn’t taken the chance and done it.”
Williams’ career – including his surprise 1973 best actor Oscar for his performance in Death In Venice – is of course well documented. And, on Diary Of A Madman, Meek also enlisted the musical aid of a group of Cambridge art students who would become as closely identified with him as the Beatles with Lord Martin – Pink Floyd.
“They were a fairly standard blues band of the period,” recalls Meek, “but Syd in particular was interested in stretching the music out. He was listening to Stockhausen, Coltrane, all sorts, and that was very much the direction in which he wanted to push the group. In particular he was very interested in sonic manipulation – getting weird effects out of his guitar, the use of pure feedback, etc. – which I suppose must have been a consequence of Hendrix coming over here. It took a while but the rest of the band slowly followed his lead. And when I was looking for musicians to work on Diary Of A Madman, Pink Floyd sprang immediately to mind.”
Diary Of A Madman caused a sensation when it was released in March 1967. Hailed as the first true British psychedelic album almost by default, it notoriously sent the Beatles, then ensconced in Abbey Road recording Sgt Pepper, into a tizzy. “Our mouths dropped open when we heard the playback,” remembers Paul McCartney. “It was like, how the hell are we going to top this? We’re sitting here doing jolly little songs about traffic wardens and old age pensioners – clarinets, if you will – and we knew immediately that that wasn’t the way forward.” Thus the astonishing Sgt Pepper album which emerged, and which blew virtually all of pop music apart in that summer of 1967 with its extraordinary tracks such as “Carnival Of Light,” “A Day In The Life” and “Revolution #9.”
It certainly caused Meek’s shares to go up. Soon afterwards, he and Pink Floyd locked themselves away in the Holloway Road studio to record their classic double album debut Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, with side four given over to the 25 glorious minutes of “Interstellar Overdrive.” Says Meek, “It pretty much gave me a kick up the arse; I knew that I didn’t necessarily have to stay with pop, that I could go and explore different and new territories and that somehow I’d still find an audience. I think the experience was good for the band as well. I was very old-school strict with them; no drugs, no booze. One day Syd came in with some funny-looking pills which he said some German mates had given him. I took one look at them and immediately flushed them down the toilet. Syd was just about ready to take a swing at me, but ever since then he’s thanked me for doing that, almost on a daily basis.”
Further extremes were to come. In 1967 Pink Floyd shared management with the then already notorious improvising collective AMM, and it was on the direct recommendation of Syd Barrett that Meek was approached to produce AMM’s second album for Elektra Records. Remembers AMM percussionist Eddie Prevost: “Joe didn’t just produce it, he effectively became our fifth member. The nuances of his production – done live, on the spot – gave our music a new dimension in which to move, more sounds to manipulate and nurture.”
The Crypt became a surprise bestseller, the essential record to be seen with in every student bedsit, a Top 3, gold album in the UK, and a declared influence on Hendrix’s approach to production on Electric Ladyland. Suddenly Joe Meek gained the reputation of the most happening, avant-garde record producer in Britain, if not the world. And while he was busy breaking sonic boundaries with Pink Floyd and AMM, he was continuing to produce equally extraordinary pop hits, including “Fire” by the Crazy World of Arthur Brown and Scott Walker’s groundbreaking number one hit of February 1969, “The Electrician” (“Scott was screaming for my services! Joe’s the only one who will understand where I’m going with this! He probably could have done the job just as well himself, as he’s proved on his records since then”).
With the “Telstar” court case finally resolving itself in his favour in July 1968, Meek’s royalties were unfrozen and he received a welcome flow of several million pounds into his bank account. “Nothing could stop me then,” he recalls. “It was the ideal opportunity to upgrade the old Holloway studios. I was able to buy the whole building outright – as well as pay for a nice cottage for my long-suffering landlady to retire to! – whereupon I gutted the place, completely refurbished the studios and made it as state-of-the-art as I could. I think I had the first polyphonic Moog synthesiser in England.”
Among the lengthening queue of musicians queuing up outside his doors for a touch of that Meek magic was David Bowie. “David was at a bit of a loose end by ’69,” says Meek. “He’d been knocking around the fringes of the scene for so long, no one was taking him seriously any more. He had this song about being an astronaut, and having heard songs I’d done like ‘Sky Men,’ thought I’d be the ideal person to arrange and produce it. He was very worried about turning into an Anthony Newley for the ‘70s, with the working men’s clubs but without any money or career to speak of. He didn’t want ‘Space Oddity’ to be a cheesy novelty.
“So I really worked on it for him, put everything I could think of into the pot. I got Keith Rowe to play that amazing guitar line which sounds like 20,000 pods exploding in gravity-free silence. Echoes, backward phasing…as far out as it was possible to get in 1969. And it got to number one. He trusted me after that.”
In fact, Bowie trusted Meek enough to let him oversee most of his classic early albums – 1971’s Ziggy Stardust, for example, with its startling number one single “Boys Keep Swinging.” And all the while Meek continued to develop his close relationship with Pink Floyd, culminating in their record-breaking 1972 epic Kid A – a pioneering album which ran the gamut of sonics, involving the participation of a 190-strong line-up of Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra on one track, and the entirety of side two being performed by the band on household objects. In the grey autumn of 1972, Kid A struck a resonant chord, giving Meek a double albums and singles number one, as it topped the album chart the same week as Lieutenant Pigeon’s “Mouldy Old Dough” – virtually a throwback to Meek’s Tornados days - made it to the top of the singles chart.
When punk came along, Meek was immediately sought out by Malcolm McLaren to produce the first Sex Pistols records. However, Meek got on particularly well with John Lydon – who admitted that his “I Hate AMM” T-shirt was ironic – and as such was instrumental in the startling personnel changes which saw Steve Jones and Glen Matlock replaced by Keith Levene and Jah Wobble (Meek: “I mean, I turned down the Beatles in ’62, silly fool that I was – why would I want to produce them again?”) and even more instrumental in the era-defining first Sex Pistols album, Metal Box (1977), with its songs like “God Save The Queen” (which, as number one in Jubilee week, kept another Meek production – Hot Chocolate’s “Put Your Love In Me” – off the top), “Death Disco,” “Poptones” and “Submission” which forged a decisive way out for the cul-de-sac which punk was then already becoming.
Work with the Damned, Alternative TV and Magazine followed – how different would the latter’s “Permafrost” have sounded without Meek’s inspired input? – and he was also responsible for producing the original RCA demos of Joy Division, though the band demurred from using him as producer of their debut album (“too much fookin’ Kraftwerk and Moroder, not enough Iggy!”). Trevor Horn, a session bass player on some of Meek’s mid-‘70s hits (for example, Tina Charles’ 1976 number one “Search And Destroy”) and later a studio apprentice of Meek’s, certainly took many of Meek’s lessons to heart when embarking on his own production career (Meek was the arranger on Dollar’s “Give Me Back My Heart” and Propaganda’s “P.Machinery,” and judging by his epic work on the Pet Shop Boys’ “Rent,” Meek later seemed to have learned something from Horn in return).
In recent years Sir Joe has concentrated on recording contemporary classical and improvised music (“Those royalties have to be put to some use; you can’t shove all of it up your nose!”) though in 2003 made a surprise return to his early ‘60s roots with his production work on the White Stripes’ Elephant album (“they came to me and asked if we could make it exactly as I would have done in 1963. Naïve pair – I had to explain to them that it wasn’t quite that simple, but I think they were more than satisfied with the results”). However, of his recent work he will probably be best known for his astonishing sound design for the films of David Lynch – he won an Oscar for his innovative “score” to Blue Velvet (Lynch: “I’d been listening to I Hear A New World quite a lot and wanted the bones of the music to be re-gutted, like a candle, only middleweight”) and his seamless fusion of abstract sonics and pure song for Mulholland Dr. has rightly been adopted as a template for future development, although, as Meek says: “It was only the logical development of what I’d started with the KLF when they asked me to produce their Chill Out album. It was a bizarre experience, trying to resuscitate Acker Bilk…” Living in domestic harmony with his partner of 20 years, the playwright Lord Orton of Leicester, one suspects that the best of Joe Meek is yet to come.
“I could afford to be arrogant if I wanted,” chuckles an impossibly youthful-looking Sir Joe Meek, gazing out from the top floor of his recently refurbished Triumph plc Studios in Holloway, “but I realise that a lot of what I’ve achieved in my career has been down to luck as well as my skills, such as they are. I’ve had a lot of bad breaks followed by an avalanche of good ones. Most people buckle under the bad ones. I ought to know – I nearly did.”
Looking back at Sir Joe’s remarkable career, it’s easy to forget how close he came to a nervous breakdown in early 1967. His run of pop hits had dried up and he was in imminent danger of eviction and bankruptcy. “God it was depressing,” he reflects. “I’d wake up every morning and argue myself into existing for another day. That is if my landlady didn’t start the arguing first. I didn’t feel I was getting anywhere. The money from ‘Telstar’ was tied up in a court case, money wasn’t coming in elsewhere because I wasn’t getting any hits, I was doing drugs – I really felt like packing the whole thing in, and I don’t just mean the music business. Everything seemed dead or in the past to me.”
As everyone knows, salvation came in the unlikely shape of Kenneth Williams, with whom Meek was in the tendency of socialising in the Holloway area around that time (“Don’t forget, it was only made legal towards the end of ’67…”). Impressed by his performance in the 1963 Home Service production of Gogol’s Diary Of A Madman, Columbia Records had asked Williams whether he wanted to turn this into an album.
“They had strange ideas,” remembers Sir Kenneth, now 78. “I think when they heard the original BBC broadcast they were interested in the sound design as much as, if not more than, my actual performance of the text. So Columbia wanted me to come into the studio and redo it as a record, but they wanted to update the background – ‘make it more psychedelic,’ I was told at the time, though of course then I didn’t have the faintest idea what that meant. But it seemed as though they wanted the sound design to be a bit more far out, to mirror the narrator’s gradual mental disintegration. When I asked about who was going to oversee the production of all this, they suggested Joe, whom I knew vaguely from the gay scene of the time, as someone who was good at producing interesting noises. I was sufficiently intrigued to say yes. And I’m glad I did because that experience really opened a door for me – before then I was going nowhere in all these farcical comedies, Carry On and what have you, and I was getting pretty frustrated about it I can tell you. I was just past forty and just about ready for the scrapheap, or at least that’s how I felt. But after doing Diary Of A Madman with Joe, I felt less pent-up about trying new and different things and I came out of it with a determination to improve my skills and develop myself as a proper actor, not just some lard-faced raconteur. Hard to know where I’d be today if I hadn’t taken the chance and done it.”
Williams’ career – including his surprise 1973 best actor Oscar for his performance in Death In Venice – is of course well documented. And, on Diary Of A Madman, Meek also enlisted the musical aid of a group of Cambridge art students who would become as closely identified with him as the Beatles with Lord Martin – Pink Floyd.
“They were a fairly standard blues band of the period,” recalls Meek, “but Syd in particular was interested in stretching the music out. He was listening to Stockhausen, Coltrane, all sorts, and that was very much the direction in which he wanted to push the group. In particular he was very interested in sonic manipulation – getting weird effects out of his guitar, the use of pure feedback, etc. – which I suppose must have been a consequence of Hendrix coming over here. It took a while but the rest of the band slowly followed his lead. And when I was looking for musicians to work on Diary Of A Madman, Pink Floyd sprang immediately to mind.”
Diary Of A Madman caused a sensation when it was released in March 1967. Hailed as the first true British psychedelic album almost by default, it notoriously sent the Beatles, then ensconced in Abbey Road recording Sgt Pepper, into a tizzy. “Our mouths dropped open when we heard the playback,” remembers Paul McCartney. “It was like, how the hell are we going to top this? We’re sitting here doing jolly little songs about traffic wardens and old age pensioners – clarinets, if you will – and we knew immediately that that wasn’t the way forward.” Thus the astonishing Sgt Pepper album which emerged, and which blew virtually all of pop music apart in that summer of 1967 with its extraordinary tracks such as “Carnival Of Light,” “A Day In The Life” and “Revolution #9.”
It certainly caused Meek’s shares to go up. Soon afterwards, he and Pink Floyd locked themselves away in the Holloway Road studio to record their classic double album debut Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, with side four given over to the 25 glorious minutes of “Interstellar Overdrive.” Says Meek, “It pretty much gave me a kick up the arse; I knew that I didn’t necessarily have to stay with pop, that I could go and explore different and new territories and that somehow I’d still find an audience. I think the experience was good for the band as well. I was very old-school strict with them; no drugs, no booze. One day Syd came in with some funny-looking pills which he said some German mates had given him. I took one look at them and immediately flushed them down the toilet. Syd was just about ready to take a swing at me, but ever since then he’s thanked me for doing that, almost on a daily basis.”
Further extremes were to come. In 1967 Pink Floyd shared management with the then already notorious improvising collective AMM, and it was on the direct recommendation of Syd Barrett that Meek was approached to produce AMM’s second album for Elektra Records. Remembers AMM percussionist Eddie Prevost: “Joe didn’t just produce it, he effectively became our fifth member. The nuances of his production – done live, on the spot – gave our music a new dimension in which to move, more sounds to manipulate and nurture.”
The Crypt became a surprise bestseller, the essential record to be seen with in every student bedsit, a Top 3, gold album in the UK, and a declared influence on Hendrix’s approach to production on Electric Ladyland. Suddenly Joe Meek gained the reputation of the most happening, avant-garde record producer in Britain, if not the world. And while he was busy breaking sonic boundaries with Pink Floyd and AMM, he was continuing to produce equally extraordinary pop hits, including “Fire” by the Crazy World of Arthur Brown and Scott Walker’s groundbreaking number one hit of February 1969, “The Electrician” (“Scott was screaming for my services! Joe’s the only one who will understand where I’m going with this! He probably could have done the job just as well himself, as he’s proved on his records since then”).
With the “Telstar” court case finally resolving itself in his favour in July 1968, Meek’s royalties were unfrozen and he received a welcome flow of several million pounds into his bank account. “Nothing could stop me then,” he recalls. “It was the ideal opportunity to upgrade the old Holloway studios. I was able to buy the whole building outright – as well as pay for a nice cottage for my long-suffering landlady to retire to! – whereupon I gutted the place, completely refurbished the studios and made it as state-of-the-art as I could. I think I had the first polyphonic Moog synthesiser in England.”
Among the lengthening queue of musicians queuing up outside his doors for a touch of that Meek magic was David Bowie. “David was at a bit of a loose end by ’69,” says Meek. “He’d been knocking around the fringes of the scene for so long, no one was taking him seriously any more. He had this song about being an astronaut, and having heard songs I’d done like ‘Sky Men,’ thought I’d be the ideal person to arrange and produce it. He was very worried about turning into an Anthony Newley for the ‘70s, with the working men’s clubs but without any money or career to speak of. He didn’t want ‘Space Oddity’ to be a cheesy novelty.
“So I really worked on it for him, put everything I could think of into the pot. I got Keith Rowe to play that amazing guitar line which sounds like 20,000 pods exploding in gravity-free silence. Echoes, backward phasing…as far out as it was possible to get in 1969. And it got to number one. He trusted me after that.”
In fact, Bowie trusted Meek enough to let him oversee most of his classic early albums – 1971’s Ziggy Stardust, for example, with its startling number one single “Boys Keep Swinging.” And all the while Meek continued to develop his close relationship with Pink Floyd, culminating in their record-breaking 1972 epic Kid A – a pioneering album which ran the gamut of sonics, involving the participation of a 190-strong line-up of Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra on one track, and the entirety of side two being performed by the band on household objects. In the grey autumn of 1972, Kid A struck a resonant chord, giving Meek a double albums and singles number one, as it topped the album chart the same week as Lieutenant Pigeon’s “Mouldy Old Dough” – virtually a throwback to Meek’s Tornados days - made it to the top of the singles chart.
When punk came along, Meek was immediately sought out by Malcolm McLaren to produce the first Sex Pistols records. However, Meek got on particularly well with John Lydon – who admitted that his “I Hate AMM” T-shirt was ironic – and as such was instrumental in the startling personnel changes which saw Steve Jones and Glen Matlock replaced by Keith Levene and Jah Wobble (Meek: “I mean, I turned down the Beatles in ’62, silly fool that I was – why would I want to produce them again?”) and even more instrumental in the era-defining first Sex Pistols album, Metal Box (1977), with its songs like “God Save The Queen” (which, as number one in Jubilee week, kept another Meek production – Hot Chocolate’s “Put Your Love In Me” – off the top), “Death Disco,” “Poptones” and “Submission” which forged a decisive way out for the cul-de-sac which punk was then already becoming.
Work with the Damned, Alternative TV and Magazine followed – how different would the latter’s “Permafrost” have sounded without Meek’s inspired input? – and he was also responsible for producing the original RCA demos of Joy Division, though the band demurred from using him as producer of their debut album (“too much fookin’ Kraftwerk and Moroder, not enough Iggy!”). Trevor Horn, a session bass player on some of Meek’s mid-‘70s hits (for example, Tina Charles’ 1976 number one “Search And Destroy”) and later a studio apprentice of Meek’s, certainly took many of Meek’s lessons to heart when embarking on his own production career (Meek was the arranger on Dollar’s “Give Me Back My Heart” and Propaganda’s “P.Machinery,” and judging by his epic work on the Pet Shop Boys’ “Rent,” Meek later seemed to have learned something from Horn in return).
In recent years Sir Joe has concentrated on recording contemporary classical and improvised music (“Those royalties have to be put to some use; you can’t shove all of it up your nose!”) though in 2003 made a surprise return to his early ‘60s roots with his production work on the White Stripes’ Elephant album (“they came to me and asked if we could make it exactly as I would have done in 1963. Naïve pair – I had to explain to them that it wasn’t quite that simple, but I think they were more than satisfied with the results”). However, of his recent work he will probably be best known for his astonishing sound design for the films of David Lynch – he won an Oscar for his innovative “score” to Blue Velvet (Lynch: “I’d been listening to I Hear A New World quite a lot and wanted the bones of the music to be re-gutted, like a candle, only middleweight”) and his seamless fusion of abstract sonics and pure song for Mulholland Dr. has rightly been adopted as a template for future development, although, as Meek says: “It was only the logical development of what I’d started with the KLF when they asked me to produce their Chill Out album. It was a bizarre experience, trying to resuscitate Acker Bilk…” Living in domestic harmony with his partner of 20 years, the playwright Lord Orton of Leicester, one suspects that the best of Joe Meek is yet to come.
