Visionary, driven and temperamental, British music producer Joe Meek was the man behind some of the most unexpected top 40 songs ever, including Johnny Remember Me, Jack the Ripper and his biggest hit, Telstar. Fascinated by the occult and all things outer space, Meek also produced more esoteric efforts such as the I Hear a New World LP, a musical homage to the extraterrestrial life he knew was out there.
When amphetamines and paranoia finally got the better of him, Meek shot himself at his Holloway Road home studio after also shooting his landlady. Actor Con O’Neill first brought this complex figure to life for writer/director Nick Moran’s play Telstar, and most recently, for his film of the same name. We asked Con about the role of a lifetime.
By Ananda Pellerin
You’ve been Joe Meek for a few years now haven’t you? I played him for three months on tour with the play, then three months in the West End before we did the movie. We first read it about twelve years ago in a pub in Stockwell. It was a bunch of mates reading a play 'what are mate had written' type of thing. After Nick got Lock Stock [and Two Smoking Barrels], he put Telstar on the backburner until a few years ago.
How would you describe Joe Meek? He was one of these people who, if he thought it, it came out of his mouth. He had all these incredible, front-footed emotions that he was able to access, which I find difficult to do in my own life because there’s a constant self-edit in process.
That kind of forthrightness attached to somebody who was so witty and charming and loving, as well as the awful things, it was an incredible mixture of personal traits. He was a deeply complex man but beautifully simple at the same time. I had empathy for him straight away.
Despite this mainline to his emotions, he still had difficulty communicating his vision. Absolutely. I studied my nephew a lot when he was a toddler while preparing for the role. He’s incredibly intelligent and until he could find the words, I saw how frustrated he would get at not being able to communicate. It was the same thing with Joe.
I think a lot of Joe’s temper was down to the fact that because he didn’t write music and he was tone deaf, when he sang his ideas other people didn’t get it; it never sounded like it did in his head. I also think the reason he was so prolific is he never had just one tune in his head. Joe just bounced and bounced and bounced.
Did you get to speak to many people who knew him? A lot of people I spoke to who knew him were in the film. I got the rest of my information from the Internet because his fan base is so wide and varied, access to his life was quite easy. But getting people to open up who knew him was slightly more difficult because, you know, thirty years down the line one tends to romanticise the past. More people came forward when the play was on than did while we were rehearsing – once they saw we weren’t taking the piss or turning him into a hero, we were just trying to tell his story.
Telstar starts when Joe meets composer Geoff Goddard. It seems this relationship was crucial to turning Joe’s ideas into songs – into hits. Absolutely. We did shoot scenes from very early in Joe’s life but once we got into the edit… the story we were telling really only kicks off around Johnny Remember Me, his first big, independent number one. Prior to that, Joe’s success had been fairly pedestrian. I think Joe saw Geoff as a kindred spirit, not just sexually but musically and spiritually, since they both had an obsession with the occult. That was the first real relationship Joe had with another like-minded male.
But I think it was inevitable that he turned against Geoff because with success, his ego became so huge. Geoff was always about the music, Joe became about the business as well. Joe would never wait for somebody to catch up to him and Geoff couldn’t keep up. Also, I think Geoff genuinely couldn’t deal with Joe being in love with someone else.
The film doesn’t shy away from the more difficult aspects of Joe’s personality. Do you think this will make it harder for people to empathise with him? What separates the play and the film from most biographies is Nick and I were adamant we didn’t want to wink at the audience as if to say “underneath this massive ego and this bully there was a heart of gold.” This is the decision we made. Joe Meek was an inherently flawed human being, bipolar, fanatically obsessed, and the interesting thing about this fractured man is that he was capable of all these facets.
I was always fighting the idea that I needed him to be open to more empathy from the audience because I don’t think that’s the point. I worry that when you make a decision to go the other way, that as an artist, a director, writer or actor, you’re making that decision in opposition to the core of the piece, you’re making it as a business decision.
A lot of his paranoia seems justified given the fact that he was fairly open about being gay at a time when homosexuality was still illegal. Also, it’s not unheard of that record companies would use surreptitious tactics to steal ideas. But what tipped him over the edge? The key to the whole thing is he absolutely fell in love with [singer] Heinz and I think it’s the only time he ever really fell in love. And while dealing with everything else—he’s going through the final stages of a complete mental breakdown, abusing amphetamines, the paranoia is feeding itself—he’s also dealing with a broken heart.
Joe had such self-loathing and yet such a huge ego. It was a constant war with him. When he got caught in the toilets [soliciting sex from another man] and the incident was reported in the papers, Joe was upset that it was only a tiny paragraph. He thought it would be on the front of every paper and that it would be huge.
Consequently when things were going brilliantly he was king of the world, and as soon as things turned, all of his self-loathing came to the fore and any instance he could blow out of proportion, he would. I do think though, about this and other things I’ve done of that era, is that paranoia was rife in those times. People were just paranoid.
Did you enjoy playing Joe Meek? Yeah, I did... I wouldn’t say I’ll miss him, but in retrospect, I did enjoy it. It was one of the great experiences of my working life. The play was different because it was two hours a night, but doing the film for over seven weeks was hard. He was with me 24/7 and it became very difficult to switch off, especially when we were filming the breakdown stuff. I was very aware of how much it was affecting me.
Although I had all these wonderful actors around me it was quite a lonely experience because part of you falls in love with him and ultimately, you know what happened. His journey, especially in the last half of his life, was harrowing. Knowing what we know now about mental disorders… he would have been medicated. There’s a futility to it that just breaks your heart.
Telstar, the movie
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