Techno: Hallucinating History! >>> part one: Joe Meek and Telstar

Techno: Hallucinating History >>> part one: Joe Meek and Telstar is a short article by Flint Michigan on Joe Meek from Break/Flow 1 (1996)

Misguided aspirations, the oddest Infatuations, failed attempts and unintentional accomplishments can often be more provocative than complete, final and flawless realisations.
D.Khan: Wireless Imagination

Joe Meek and Telstar

In the years prior to Phil Spector developing his wall of sound technique, an independent producer working from a home studio at 304 Holloway Road produced a ‘song’ named after the first satellite to orbit the earth.

Joe Meek created Telstar on a clavioline that was overdubbed in high and low octaves to thicken the sound and echoed. This three minute pop song which was.No.1 for 25 weeks in 1962 began and ended with a melange of abstract electronic noise and contained a middle section whose sounds were created from a piano with drawing pins on the hammer heads. The end result was fronted by the Tornados who were, at the time,  Billy Fury’s backing band but all the same Telstar kicked up a fuss about engineers making records and not musicians.

Joe Meek, who produced and co-wrote a string of hits in the early 60s is notable for the way  in which he took  unnotable ballads and overloaded them with excessive echo and electronics often using echo units and equipment he had either adapted or built from scratch himself. Willing to try anything he strove for effects by asking  singers to sing (or stomp) in a nearby bathroom  where  even the tiles  were especially chosen for acoustic effect, on another occasion he also used the vibrations from a steaming kettle.

I Hear a New World

Two years prior to Telstar, Meek gathered a group of session musicians together at the studio and subjected them to playing on his concept album I Hear a New World. They must have wondered what was going on as Meek crafted an amalgam of Morricone sounding guitars, science fiction sound effects and cartoonesque voice, all built up around his clavioline and a belief that there was life on the Moon.

At times this LP, which was released in an issue of 40, reaches heights of eery beauty and an almost avant-garde electronic ambience whilst at others it descends into an equally interesting out-of-tune/time cacophony. The band do not sound competent and it was probably a question of the producer having to salvage material in his DIY studio using his sound-on-sound and tape-phasing techniques. The tracks on the LP follow a pattern that a lot of Meeks’ produced tunes follow in that, like Telstar, they begin and end with break-flows of distorted electronic sound effects.

In the later 60s as Meek vainly searched for a top-ten formula he became excessively paranoid that his studio secrets were being covertly sought by major labels. He was further dogged by a court case in which a French film composer sued Meek, accusing the producer of ripping off one of his scores as the main melody for Telstar. But this was nothing as Meek grew more and more unstable, until, in February 1967, at the studio in Holloway Road he had never left, he shot his landlady and then took his own life.

As a ‘quiet’ homage to Meek an anonymous and one-off group called Ad Infinitum recorded a version of Telstar for Factory records in 1987.

Flint Michigan

• Other texts by Flint Michigan on datacide-magazine.com
• Table of content of Break/Flow 1
• Joe Meek on discogs.com

Source: The Legendary Joe Meek by John Repsch

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