Monday, June 15, 2009

Jake Arnott: Joe Meek and Me

Jake Arnott, author of The Long Firm, tells the Evening Standard of the influence the gay music producer Joe Meek had on him on the occasion of the release of Telstar, a biopic of Meek.

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. [...]

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.
Read the full article here.

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