Telstar: The Joe Meek Story
Nick Moran (2008)
The Very Strange Story of the Legendary Joe Meek, a BBC Arena documentary, is one of my favourite pieces of television. When I saw it on its original screening in 1991, I’d never heard of Joe Meek. It transpired that he was responsible for a song which already meant a good deal to me for other reasons (‘Johnny Remember Me’) but that was the tip of the iceberg. Directed by Alan Lewens and based on a book by John Repsch, the film is highly informative about the development of British pop, and the structure of the pop industry, in the second half of the fifties and the sixties. It’s narrated by Pete Murray, a voice which strongly evokes the period and tells the story well – and that story expands powerfully. Best of all, Lewens’ piece is genuinely and effortlessly strange. The people interviewed are such a richly eccentric collection that, even as you’re watching, you think it would be hard for a writer to invent them as credible characters.
Meek’s elder brothers Eric and Arthur, exercising their greyhounds in the Forest of Dean, with Sidney Bechet’s ‘Petite Fleur’ on the soundtrack, are a great double act. (In fact these two might have been invented – by Dennis Potter.) Arthur, the elder, has a grizzled but maternal quality (and somewhat resembles Joe). He talks affectionately about Joe, whose homosexuality he chooses protectively to deny (yet when Arthur describes Joe’s culinary preferences – sausages and artichokes – he seems to be talking in doubles entendres). Eric, better looking and straightforwardly masculine, is less comfortable – as if taking part in a television interview were dodgy in itself. Geoff Goddard, who wrote ‘Johnny Remember Me’ and other Meek-produced hits, suggests Frankie Howerd in fortune-teller get-up. Giving a Semprini-verging-on-Liberace-style rendering of ‘Johnny Remember Me’ on the piano in the college canteen where he worked after his days in the limelight were over, Goddard talks in an entre nous tone that has the effect of a stage whisper. He’s keen on big words (like ‘importuning’), which he pronounces with a luscious confidentiality that makes them sound filthier and funnier than plain speaking would allow. Heinz Burt, the peroxided front man of The Tornados when they recorded ‘Telstar’ and Meek’s golden boy, tells – with an incredulous, electrifying bitterness – how this smash hit should have set them all up for life and didn’t. Patrick Pink, Meek’s office assistant and the sole witness to his killing of his landlady Violet Shenton and suicide, has a hurt, baffled quality which makes his description of the events of 3 February 1967 vividly touching.
That date was the eighth anniversary of the death of Meek’s musical hero Buddy Holly, by whose spirit he and Goddard believed they were being guided. (There were regular séances.) The climax to the film’s description of Meek’s interest in the occult is the playing of a tape-recording of his graveyard meeting with a cat which he’s convinced is really a soul in torment. (Its mewing is translated – in subtitles – as ‘Help me, help me’.) There are entertaining insights from, among others, Humphrey Lyttleton, Lonnie Donegan, John Leyton, Mickie Most and Screaming Lord Sutch. There is, briefly, Margaret Thatcher, commending ‘Telstar’ (‘It’s a marvellous tune – full of life’). And there are snippets – sound recordings, library film and cine-camera holiday footage – of the unaccountable star of the show, Joe Meek himself, mostly presenting the character he wanted people to see and hear.
Telstar: The Joe Meek Story has, then, a very tough act to follow. Based on James Hicks’s 2005 stage play, it doesn’t seem to have been much rethought for the screen adaptation (which Nick Moran did with Hicks). That’s evident in the shape and staging of numerous scenes, and in some of the acting. The opening sequence describes the recording of ‘Johnny Remember Me’ in Meek’s cramped, homemade studio in the flat he rented in the upper part of 304 Holloway Road – above the leather goods shop of his landlords, the Shentons (we never see Mr). Unlike their real life counterparts in the BBC film, several of the cast of Telstar are hard at work from the start to convince us of their character’s eccentricity. The effect is too broadly comic and detracts from the reality of the extraordinary setting and the people in it. (It would be funnier, as well as truer, if played straight.)
I don’t know if Nick Moran, directing his first cinema feature, has encouraged a replication of the acting used in the successful stage show but the heightened performing style is detrimental to the film. For the first half hour, I wondered how anyone on the screen, except for Meek himself, could be integrated believably into the tragedy that was to follow. (Although Moran interleaves the forward narrative with cuts to Meek on the last morning of his life, he uses these inserts very sparingly at first. The picture turns serious abruptly, about halfway through – by the end, the deaths of Mrs Shenton and Meek are presented in a graphically realistic way.) In fact, the actors manage the transition remarkably well but the residue of caricature means they remain slightly unreal – and weakens the contrast between the real world and Meek’s increasingly paranoid perspective. (And it’s not as if we’re seeing these other people from his point of view: if we were, they would need to be a good deal more menacing.) Nick Moran seems to admire Meek for his music and influence but he’s unable to engage with his weirdness, even though he presents his declining mental health with sympathy. It’s understandable that Moran finds it hard to tune into Meek’s and Goddard’s supernatural proclivities but, even allowing for that, he fails to give them their due – to make us realise not just that Meek and Goddard believed in the spirit world but that the belief informed their musical creations. Although he has a few effective moments, Tom Burke as Goddard always seems to be straining for oddness.
Moran does a reasonable job of conveying the alchemical aspect of Meek’s best-known songs – how these brilliant numbers could emerge from the ingredients Meek put together in the circumstances in which they were produced – but he doesn’t connect their emotional qualities to the men behind them. There’s a good moment when Meek describes what each bit of the ‘Telstar’ melody signifies (‘Now we’re going out into space … now we’re looking down at all the people on the earth below’) and describes ‘Telstar’ as a tribute to the ‘wonder of science’. But the picture doesn’t find a way of expressing the bizarre marriage of techn(olog)ical skill, enthusiasm and imagination with vibrant, yearning irrationality that makes ‘Telstar’ and ‘Johnny Remember Me’ so memorable. (The fusion of these two things can just as easily result in something which, to me, sounds ludicrous – like Meek’s concept album ‘I Hear a New World’, although it’s widely regarded as seminal in the development of electronic music.) Nor do Moran and James Hicks get at the thread of self-isolation running through Joe Meek’s solitary childhood sessions, fiddling around with a wireless and recording equipment (away from his ‘outdoor’ brothers, as Arthur and Eric describe themselves in the Arena programme), his determined, hostile detachment from the pop music establishment, and his eventual paranoia. These are essentially linked. If they all express Meek’s unhappy mentality, they’re also a remarkable illustration of how pathology can make good things happen: Meek’s approach prepared the way for independent record producers. (Isn’t this part of his legacy more important than the musical content of his work?)
I used the word ‘unaccountable’ about him so it may seem unfair to criticise the film-makers for an uncertain attitude towards Meek but this uncertainty turns Telstar into something of a back-handed tribute. Moran and Hicks find it difficult to dramatise Meek’s strengths or what his extraordinary success meant to him (‘Telstar’ was the first single by a British group ever to top the American ‘Billboard’ charts). The way the film presents his prejudices against Billy Fury (when Larry Parnes won’t release Fury from his stable for Joe to manage) and The Kinks (when Clem Cattini goes to work with them) is OK but the scene in which Meek rejects the demo tapes of The Beatles that Brian Epstein has sent him is crudely overdone. It’s not enough for Meek to pronounce that Mersey Beat is a nine-day wonder or end a phone conversation with Epstein asking him avidly to ‘Give my love to the boys’ (a cheap shot): Moran has to give us a close-up of the tapes in the waste paper basket where Meek has thrown them. He tells Goddard to tell the ‘Welsh boy’ waiting downstairs at 304 Holloway Road to get lost: this is almost certainly meant to be Tom Jones, whom Meek did in fact record. It’s true that Meek passed up golden opportunities (David Bowie and Rod Stewart were others) but, even if he made a lot of mistakes, Telstar gives too much emphasis to his rash, ill-judged decisions and too little to Meek’s professional acumen and vision. (There are disappointingly few songs heard in anything like their entirety – but perhaps that is the story of Meek’s life: without the three number one singles, his oeuvre might well have sunk without trace.)
Telstar’s presentation of Meek’s sex life is confusing, especially in the light of a recent article in The Big Issue, in which Moran and Con O’Neill, who plays Meek, characterise him as a homosexual who preferred straight men – so that his sexual ambitions were doomed to failure – and who rejected effeminate men like Geoff Goddard (as the film shows). Moran shows Meek out cottaging as well as exploiting his position of power by having sex with the young pop hopefuls who visit 304 Holloway Road. (On the film’s account of Meek, it’s a wonder that, even if he thought their music wasn’t built to last, he didn’t invite The Beatles to pay a call.) But the screenplay makes his relationship with Heinz Burt central and presents this as an achieved gay relationship. In the BBC film, Heinz agreed that he lived for a time in Meek’s flat but made very clear that he ‘wasn’t into that sort of thing’, and that knowing this only increased Meek’s desire for him. Heinz may not have been telling the whole truth but it’s surprising that Moran and Hicks contradict him so completely, given that Heinz’s account chimes with the description of Meek’s sexual profile in The Big Issue piece and that it seems beyond argument that Heinz epitomised the type of boy that Meek was drawn to. Even if they did have a physical relationship, the film doesn’t make this convincing. Heinz is played by J J Feild. (In profile he resembles the real Heinz, in other shots his face recalls the young Alec Guinness.) He has some affecting moments, especially his first arrival at the Holloway Road flat, but he seems to equate Heinz’s being thick with looking wan and sounding dopey and, in the sexual moments with Meek, he’s ambivalent in a conventional way, with protracted unsure looks to the camera. Feild, well cast physically as the streak of piss Heinz is described as at one point, doesn’t begin to suggest Heinz’s aggression, which was so startlingly evident in his contributions to Alan Lewens’ documentary and, more important, was likely to have made him all the more attractive to Meek. The latter’s relationship with Lionel Howard, with whom he lived for some years and with whom he remained friends, suggests a different side to Meek’s sexual nature that the screenplay ignores (except that someone called Lionel momentarily appears to accompany him home from the police station after he’s been charged with ‘importuning for immoral purposes’).
Various elements of Telstar are ropy and amateurish. Although the incidents chosen and the dialogue often suggest that the BBC documentary was the main source for the screenplay, it appears at some points that Moran hasn’t been allowed to use the original BBC broadcast material featured in the Arena film – for example, the introduction to the episode of Harpers W1 on which John Leyton sang ‘Johnny Remember Me’ and the transmission of the first transatlantic pictures by satellite. (In the latter sequence, a characterless voice speaks Richard Dimbleby’s lines from the transcript of the broadcast.) There’s a tediously protracted sequence involving The Tornadoes et al getting into trouble with the police for delinquent behaviour on the roads. The use of legends to indicate the year and date of what’s on screen is erratic.
The film ends, however, with a fascinating summary of the afterlife of most of the significant characters in the story. The additional or updated information about Geoff Goddard and Patrick Pink is particularly interesting. Goddard sued over copyright of The Honeycombs’ chart-topping ‘Have I the Right?’ but was too shy to appear in court; he died in 2000. In the same year Heinz Burt also died, of motor neurone disease. It was a shock to learn that, immediately after the deaths of Mrs Shenton and Meek, Patrick Pink was charged with their murders. The charges were dropped but Pink derived no benefit from the fact that Meek left RGM Records to him in his will: the company went into receivership and Pink to work as a train driver on the London underground. The main session players went on to enjoy variously successful careers. Clem Cattini (who appeared at the BFI screening of the Arena documentary in 2007) became one of the best employed and most durable session drummers in the business. Charles Hodges turned into the first half of Chas and Dave. The guitarist Ritchie Blackmore was a major figure in the rock world as a member of Deep Purple.
As Meek’s business manager Major Banks (who didn’t feature in the BBC film), Kevin Spacey sometimes (and surprisingly) has trouble concealing his American accent. The larger problem is that he’s too sophisticated an actor to be effective in a part written as crudely as this one. Moran must have been thrilled to get Spacey for the role and seems to have left him to it without noticing that he doesn’t fit in – he’s like visiting royalty. You can see that Spacey understands how to do the character – the fact that this is what you see is evidence that he’s at a slight remove from it. Pam Ferris, in the only significant role for a woman, is very likeable as Mrs Shenton; it’s a busy performance but Ferris really engages with the character, even though it’s so obviously written. Ralf Little (Hodges), Mathew Baynton (Blackmore) and, especially, James Corden (Cattini) are all good; they play off each other and have a loose, funny style that eludes Spacey, Tom Burke and J J Feild. Sid Mitchell has an appealing helpless loyalty as Patrick Pink. There’s some amusing casting in cameo roles. Jess Conrad, who, as himself in the BBC film, was dislikeable, is rather good as Larry Parnes (the showbiz glaze seems to come easily to him). Conrad himself is well played by Nigel Harman. Although he’s uncredited, I thought I spotted an elderly John Leyton as the man who presents Meek with his Ivor Novello award. The casting of familiar TV comedy faces like Jimmy Carr and Marcus Brigstocke in minor roles isn’t successful – they’re too self-aware.
I’m keeping the best till last: Con O’Neill is wonderful as Joe Meek. From our first sight of him at the recording of ‘Johnny Remember Me’, O’Neill’s Meek is multi-faceted in a way that the script fails to make him. This bustling, clumsy figure, with his camp inflections and gestures that don’t go with the burly physique, is partly ridiculous but he’s someone to respect too. He evidently knows what he’s doing getting the extraordinary production together, and his energy and absorption in the task are compelling. O’Neill is stronger looking than the real Meek, whose face had an amorphous, doughy quality and whose attempts to look cool and hard appeared uncertain. Wearing dark glasses, O’Neill is tough and authoritative – Meek’s fantasy of the way he wanted to look – but Telstar would be almost too upsetting to watch if the film’s Meek were as unprepossessing as the real thing. O’Neill played the part in the theatre and there are moments when he takes up a position that looks stage-set but this may reflect Moran’s lack of ease with the camera rather than any falseness in what the actor is doing.
There are so many highlights in this performance: Meek’s bursts of uncontrollable anger then instant reversion to normal level; his sobbing shock as he’s leaving the police station after being charged; going to pieces but getting on with the job of recording ‘Have I the Right?’ after Heinz has walked out (‘Come right back, I just can’t bear it’); an edgy-cosy teatime conversation with Mrs Shenton; recollecting, with an extraordinary blend of nostalgia and horror, how he came to be known as Joe (his real name was Robert George Meek). The actor has the invention and empathy to go much further into the character than the script does. In a meeting to wind up their partnership, Major Banks scorns Meek’s business ineptitude and O’Neill starts to blow a raspberry. This turns from a comical moment into a gripping demonstration of Meek’s realisation that it’s giving him the upper hand and he doesn’t want to lose the feeling: it’s the longest raspberry you’ve ever heard. In the last half hour of the film, O’Neill brings Meek’s paranoia horribly, palpably alive. Just as he’s about to blow his brains out, Patrick Pink calls from downstairs and the end must briefly be postponed. Con O’Neill’s exasperated little sighing moan – this untimely interruption really is the last straw – is as grimly funny as it’s distressing.
2 July 2009