Joe Meek

Wouldn't it be my luck! The day that I wake up late and have tons of other things to do, I have scheduled the portrait of a man who: a. requires a lot of research and b. has a lot of interesting stories about him. So this will probably be a long one. Also it will probably be published much later than usual. It's about a man who was not a musician, yet is responsible for the first #1 ever for a British band in the US. At the end of this there will be a very interesting story whose morale is, when you buy a single, always listen to the B-side as well. Let's go!

Heinz Burt (left) - Joe Meek (right)

A classic story of rise and fall: This is the life of music producer and Pop composer Robert George "Joe" Meek (born April 5, 1929 in Newent, Gloucestershire; died February 3, 1967 in London) - a short life somewhere on the fine line between vision and lunacy, always floating back and forth from the one to the other: funny, sad, euphoric, depressed: a rollercoaster trip with a dramatic finale.

Meek developed an interest in electronics and performance art at a very early age, filling his parents' garden shed with begged and borrowed electronic components, building circuits, radios and what is believed to be the region's first working television. During his national service in the Royal Air Force, he worked as a radar technician which increased his interest in electronics and outer space. From 1953 he worked for the Midlands Electricity Board. He used the resources of the company to develop his interest in electronics and music production, including acquiring a disc cutter and producing his first record.

He left the electricity board to work as an audio engineer for a leading independent radio production company which made programmes for Radio Luxembourg, and made his breakthrough with his work on Ivy Benson's Music for Lonely Lovers. His technical ingenuity was first shown on the Humphrey Lyttelton Jazz single Bad Penny Blues (1956) when, contrary to Lyttleton's wishes, Meek 'modified' the sound of the piano and compressed the sound to a greater than normal extent. The record became a hit.

Since the mid-fifties, Meek had written his own songs from time to time. One of them fell into the hands of producer George Martin who recorded it with singer Eddie Silver, called Put A Ring On Her Finger. The song was a flop in England, but in the US, Les Paul & Mary Ford heard the record. In 1958 they recorded a cover version, and this one reached #32 of the US charts.

In January 1960, together with William Barrington-Coupe, Meek founded Triumph Records. At the time Barrington-Coupe was working at SAGA records in Empire Yard, Holloway Road for Major Wilfred Alonzo Banks and it was the Major who provided the finance. The label very nearly had a #1 hit with Meek's production of Angela Jones by Michael Cox (1960). Cox was one of the featured singers on Jack Good's TV music show Boy Meets Girl and the song was given massive promotion. As an independent label, Triumph was dependent on small pressing plants, which were unable to meet the demand for product. The record made a respectable appearance in the Top Ten (#7), but it demonstrated that Meek needed the distribution network of the major companies for his records to reach the shops when it mattered.

Its indifferent business results and Meek's temperament eventually led to the label's demise. That year Meek conceived, wrote and produced an Album called I Hear A New World with a band called Rod Freeman & the Blue Men. An experimental "Outer Space Music Fantasy", the album was shelved for decades, apart from the release of some EP tracks taken from it. From this album, here's Magnetic Field:

Meek went on to set up his own production company known as RGM Sound Ltd (later Meeksville Sound Ltd) with toy importer, Major Wilfred Alonzo Banks as his financial backer. He operated from his home studio which he constructed at 304 Holloway Road, Islington, a three-floor flat above a leather-goods store.

His first hit from Holloway Road reached #1 in the UK: John Leyton's Johnny Remember Me (1961) written by psychic Geoff Goddard. This "death ditty" was cleverly promoted by Leyton's manager, expatriate Australian entrepreneur Robert Stigwood. Stigwood was able to gain Leyton a booking to perform the song several times in an episode of Harpers West One, a short-lived ITV soap opera, in which he was making a guest appearance.

The Meek composition Telstar, the first #1 ever for a British band in the US, is one of the biggest instrumental hits in Pop history. The space-crazy Meek had named it after he heard about the start of the first communications satellite; it's a devilish, immortal catchy space tune. The Tornados only provided the basic playback and the guitar solos because the band had another appointment after that: There was an older contract still in power that they had to work as Billy Fury's live band, and neither for love nor money was manager Larry Parnes willing to release them from this obligation.

Meek then completed the semi-finished recording with the help of Geoff Goddard. Goddard laid down the melody voice on the Clavioline (a remarkably precise triple overdubbing in two octaves), and it's his voice coming up in the last part of the tune. At the beginning and the end, Meek added some strange noises he had used already in 1961 for his space fantasy suite I Hear A New World. The whole recording, as usual, was sped up and got loads of reverb and compression.

The Tornados, when they heard the track, considered it to be "crap". The record buyers had a different view: This single was in the British charts for six months; on October 3 it replaced Elvis Presley at #1 and remained there for five weeks. Around Christmas 1962, Telstar also, as we've already mentioned, reached #1 in the US. It also made #1 in Belgium, Ireland and South Africa, and #3 in the Netherlands and Norway. All in all, Telstar charted in 17 countries all over the world. In Germany it peaked at #6, but it stayed in the charts for no less than 20 weeks, eight of them in the Top 10.

In the UK alone, Telstar in its original Tornados version sold around 4 million copies within two years on 45s, EPs and LPs; at the time of Meek's death probably around 7 million copies had been sold.

In the US today probably the cover version by The Ventures is better known than the original. But as a direct listening comparison clearly shows, the original is unbeatable - a Pop gem that Mojo magazine rightly listed as one of the 100 best singles of all time.

Being the high point of his career, Telstar was also the beginning of Meek's downfall. But more of that in a minute.

The follow-up Globetrotter was released in January 1963, and stayed in the Top 40 for 11 weeks peaking at #5. Meek, by the way, tried to cash in on his big success by recording a vocal version of Telstar (Magic Star with singer Kenny Hollywood), but it was ridiculous and failed completely. Here's Globetrotter:

A couple of months after Telstar had become a smash hit, the French composer Jean Ledrut (1903-1982) surmised that Meek's bestseller had four bars which were lifted from a film score he had written for the movie "Austerlitz", directed by Abel Gance (1960). So Ledrut filed a plagiarism lawsuit against Meek in March 1963. Meek didn't know the movie and, being the producer of a world-wide hit, apparently saw himself as invulnerable and decided to ignore the letter from Ledrut's attorney. Judge for yourselves:

Meek paid dearly for treating this lightly. The lawsuit started in March 1963 in France, grew into a clash with expertises and counter expertises and took five years to reach a decision. During this time the British Copyright Protection Society - as is done automatically in cases like this - froze the still accumulating Telstar royalties on a blocked account.

Finally the judges didn't impute any intention of plagiarism to Meek, but their verdict stated that indeed there were parallels between Telstar and Ledrut's film music, so Ledrut obtained 8,500 Pounds. (Today that would be equivalent of circa 215,000 Pound, 235,000 Euros or 350,000 US Dollars.)

Unfortunately, Meek wasn't alive anymore when the verdict was delivered. The royalties from the blocked account went to his heirs. But most of the remaining money had to be used to make good Meek's tax and rent dues, overdrawn bank accounts and other debts.

More and more problems piled up, feeding Meek's paranoia: the uppers and downers, his inability to delegate even minor tasks, the grueling Telstar lawsuit. And there was one more problem - a special one: his star-crossed love to Heinz Burt (July 24, 1942 - April 7, 2000), bass guitarist of The Tornados. Meek did not only fall in love with him, he also wanted to establish him as a solo Rock star. He wanted to promote him as the answer to the increasing success of Merseybeat. According to his bandmates and his (later) wife, Della, Heinz wasn't gay, but he lived with Meek at 304 for nearly three years. In an eighties BBC interview he denied any kind of sexual relationship with Meek. One may believe this or not.

Meek founded an independent company for Heinz's marketing. He took the money for the "Heinz Burt Ltd." from the profit share of "Major" Banks, but without giving him participation on this new company. When Banks finally discovered this (and of course he did), all hell was let loose - to put it mildly.

Meek had seen the movie "The Village Of The Damned" (1960) with ultra-intelligent platinum blonde extraterrestrial children terrorizing a village, and immediately suggested this hair color to Heinz. Meek rehearsed Heinz in a stage show which presented him as a "wild guy". Meek's lurid promotion touted him as "blond bombshell" and "truly one of the wildest men of Pop". Heinz put up with everything, but it didn't help: Heinz was not like that at all . In fact, he was a friendly, phlegmatic "boy next door" and able to lose his way in a phone booth. His abilities as a guitarist and bass guitarist were OK. The Tornados' drummer Clem Cattini claims that Heinz was "hardly able to hold his instrument", but seriously, this seems to be rather exaggerated. If Heinz had really been such a bad bass player, it would be hard to understand why manager Larry Parnes insisted in keeping the Tornados as the backing band of his star Billy Fury. However, it's a fact that Heinz was anything but a good singer. Studio technology made his voice sound quite good on record, but on stage his singing was short-winded and flat. Some say Heinz had a certain talent in pantomime, but all in all his appearance on stage was simply not impressive. And when he jumped up the piano during his show, it came across as even more daffy.

Heinz's first single, Dreams Do Come True, sold 400 copies and yielded 15 Pounds. As Meek already had invested around 10,000 Pounds into the Heinz project at that time, "Major" Banks became even more uncomfortable than he was already - he saw Heinz as a terrible investment. (Again, the comparison between then and now might be helpful: today the 10,000 Pounds from 1963 would be the equivalent of circa 345,000 Pounds, 380,000 Euros or 560,000 US-Dollars.)

However, in August 1963 Heinz had a veritable hit after all, written by Geoff Goddard: Just Like Eddie - a tribute to singer Eddie Cochran who had been killed in an accident in 1960. But Heinz didn't manage to come up with a succesful follow up. He couldn't be called a "one hit wonder", he had a couple of minor hits, he had a part in a comedy ("Live It Up", 1963) and a cameo appearence in a TV series - and that's all. Until 1966 Meek produced four further singles and an album with Heinz, but it didn't work out, and because of this, the relationship between Meek and Heinz went downhill. Here's Just Like Eddie:

In November 1963, Meek got busted for a couple of hours because of a nightly sex adventure in a public lavatory at Madras Place - nothing very special with him in principle, he could be seen there on and off. The "crime" he was accused of was called "cottaging", based on the cottage house design of the toilet buildings in the parks of London. With a couple of other gay people who were also arrested he had to walk for half a mile in single file to the Caledonian Road police station house. He was registered as a homosexual, a report was made ("persistently importuning for an immoral purpose") and he was fined 15 Pounds. The fine wasn't anything to really trouble him: much worse was a newspaper story resulting from the police report. It was only a small article, but big enough to lead to a couple of attempted extortions. Half-baked teenagers ambushed him, threatening to "confess" to their parents what Meek allegedly did to them or wanted them to do, and more than once he got beaten up in some dark alley. Maybe he knew who did it, maybe not. Even if he knew, for a registered gay man the police was no place to go to anymore.

However, in summer 1964 Meek managed to produce a world wide smash hit again: Have I The Right by The Honeycombs. This band had been recommended to him by songwriter duo Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley who also had written this tune. Meek was especially fascinated by drummer Ann "Honey" Lantree - a female drummer of course was a great subject for promotion. Have I The Right spent 2 weeks at #1 in the UK, preceded by Do Wah Diddy Diddy by Manfred Mann and followed by You Really Got Me by the Kinks. Good times.

Unfortunately the whole matter turned out to be ill-fated. Geoff Goddard filed a lawsuit against Howard and Blaikley for plagiarism. He was sure that these two guys had lifted Have I The Right from his own composition Give Me The Chance. Meek, however, wanted to keep Howard and Blaikley, so he made it clear that he would side with them in court. Goddard then withdrew the suit, but stopped talking to Meek after that.

A few weeks later, Howard and Blaikley introduced two bands to Meek that they also had discovered: The Preachers and a combo named Dave Dee & The Bostons. Meek considered both bands as not promising. Because of this, Howard and Blaikley left Meek and went into the producing business themselves. They had Dave Dee & The Bostons change their name to Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich and wrote and produced for them a number of big hits from 1965 to 1969, begining with You Make It Move. The follow-ups Hold Tight, Bend It, Save Me and The Legend Of Xanadu can be heard on many oldie radio stations still today: the latter became a #1 hit in the UK. Here's my favorite of theirs, Bend It, a #2 UK hit. To obtain a bouzouki sound on the recording, an electrified mandolin was used.

The Preachers, later became known as The Herd. Less succesful than Dave Dee & Co, but a successful act anyway. Lead guitarist and vocalist was a certain Peter Frampton. Here's my favorite song of theirs, From the Underworld:

In 1965, Heinz, realizing that he could reap no further benefits from living with Meek, decided to leave him. Meek was heartbroken. He briefly entertained the idea of a white wedding with singer Glenda Collins, but that did not go very far.

After the breakup with Heinz and the ill-fated marriage plans, Meek seemed to go over the deep end. He was convinced his landlords wanted to terminate the tenancy agreement (there's no evidence of this, even if he was behind with his rent from time to time), and he fell out with collaborators and the few remaining friends for no reason. Even Geoff Goddard gave up completely now - he felt threatened in 304 and left forever.

Meek's paranoia grew to the extreme after the horribly mutilated corpse of a seventeen-year old boy was found in a suburb. This finding started one of the most massive police operations Great Britain had ever seen, and Meek who apparently had known this boy was sure the police suspected and watched him.

He began to hear sidetones on his recordings which he thought could only be caused by hidden bugging devices: to find the bugs he tore off the wallpapers. And he was sure his landlady, Violet Shenton, eavesdropped on him through the chimney every night - for the benefit of rival record companies and other "rotten pigs".

As he confided to a friend, he often heard a creature creeping around his bed when it was dark in the bedroom at night; he said his voice wasn't his own anymore, he felt traced by extra-terrestrial forces controlling his thoughts, and when being alone in the apartment at night, sometimes paintings on the wall would speak to him, but he couldn't understand what they were saying.

In all this chaos Meek went on producing music, day by day. Some recordings from this era are among his best. The music productions were expensive but didn't yield much money anymore. To make matters worse, the tax office field investigators paid a visit to him. They wanted to see the business records - which of course nobody had cared about since Meek had fired "Major" Banks.

In the morning of Friday, February 3, 1967, Joe Meek, as his studio assistant Patrick Pink remembers, burned several letters and other documents in the bathtub and finally handed a note to him: "I'm going now. Goodbye." Pink, however, didn't understand this note's meaning.

For a while Meek messed around in the control room with some recordings he had made with Pink the evening before. Then he sent Pink for Violet Shenton, the landlady. When she arrived at the studio, Meek picked up a quarrel with her, as short-tempered as pointless, probably about the rent. Finally Meek shot his landlady with a shotgun. Mrs. Shenton fell down the stairs and landed in front of Pink's feet.

Meek receded into the control room, disappeared from Pink's sight and reloaded. A few seconds later Joe Meek turned the shotgun on himself.

In all likelihood Meek had planned his suicide. When a couple of weeks earlier Meek had set up his will, he hinted that maybe he wouldn't be present much longer. And it was only a few days before February 3rd that he bought ammunition and placed it in the control room, along with the shotgun (since Heinz had moved out in 1965, Meek kept Heinz's shotgun under his bed). Apparently he also called up a friend on Thursday night to ask him how to operate a gun like this. And, last but not least, there's the date - the 8th anniversary of the death of Buddy Holly. Would it really be imaginable that a fervent Buddy Holly fan like Joe Meek wasn't aware of that?

Probably there will never be an answer why Meek shot his landlady. Usually the two of them were on good terms, so there's no reason to believe that taking her life was a planned act. Whatever it was, an accident or an irrational action: Her death is pointless and inexplicable - "Why he did this we don't know. He just did it", as the coroner said.

His reputation for experiments in recording music was acknowledged by the Music Producers Guild who in 2009 created "The Joe Meek Award for Innovation in Production" as an "homage to [the] remarkable producer's pioneering spirit". In 2014, Meek was ranked the greatest producer of all time by NME, elaborating: "Meek was a complete trailblazer, attempting endless new ideas in his search for the perfect sound. ... The legacy of his endless experimentation is writ large over most of your favourite music today."

His legacy, apart from his own productions, includes the work of musicians that were directly influenced by him: Joe surrounded himself with youthful session musicians who were able to exercise a stylistic freedom in their playing (while at his studio) that was discouraged at the majors. This freedom gave artists like guitarists Jimmy Page (Yardbirds, Led Zeppelin), Steve Howe (Yes, Asia), Ritchie Blackmore (Deep Purple, Rainbow), Big Jim Sullivan (Tom Jones band), Chas Hodges (Chas & Dave) a rare opportunity to hone their individual styles and sounds — sounds that Joe further tinkered with and transformed electronically — after-hours and behind closed doors — into #1 chart-topping hits. (Page himself admitted that there are specific Led Zeppelin tracks whose production was directly influenced by what he learned from his time at Joe Meek’s studio).

On researching Joe Meek, I came upon this 2006 article in the Guardian by Jon Savage. I found it extremely interesting, so I'll present it in its entirety. I will just insert the songs mentioned (the ones that I haven't already presented. I will also not present songs that are scheduled to appear in future stories in GCL). Here is the article:

On 12 August, 1966, the Tornados released their last ever record with Joe Meek. Beginning with the sound of waves and seagulls, Is That a Ship I Hear? bore all its producer's hallmarks: the boot-stomping drums, the extraterrestrial keyboard sound, and fierce, fierce compression. Like its predecessor, Pop-Art Goes Mozart, it was constructed around a gimmick. Meek hoped that the title and the ocean effects would convince the DJs on the pirate stations - Radio Caroline, Radio London, Radio City et al - to put his new record on heavy rotation. Just when the pirates' influence on the British charts was at its height, it seemed like a good angle.

However, this was not the Tornados' time. On 12 August, Revolver was on its first week in the British record shops. Blonde on Blonde was issued on the same day as Is That a Ship I Hear?. While the Dylan album got detailed track by track rundowns in the British music press, the Tornados got short shrift: 'a whistleable little melody of promise'; 'good of its kind and doubtless a hit three years ago, but not for today's market'. It had been a long slow fall since Telstar, number one in the UK for five weeks in autumn 1962: the group hadn't had a hit since late 1963 and there were none of the original members left.

Yet while Is That a Ship I Hear? was a shameless attempt to ride the pirate wave, the flip was something quite different. Do You Come Here Often? begins as a flouncy organ-drenched instrumental and stays that way for over two minutes. By that time, most people - had they even bothered to even turn the record over - would have switched off. Had they remained they would have heard two sibilant, obviously homosexual voices bitching, well, just like two queens will.

The scenario is the toilet in a London gay club, possibly the Apollo or Le Duce. The organist is still pumping away, but that's only background, as the sound dims and the bar atmosphere comes in.

'Do you come here often?'

'Only when the pirate ships go off air.'

'Me too.' (giggles)

'Well, I see pyjama styled shirts are in, then.'

'Well, pyjamas are OUT, as far as I'm concerned anyway.'

'Who cares?'

'Well, I know of a few people who do.'

'Yes, you would.'

'WOW! These two, coming now. What do you think?'

'Mmmmmm. Mine's all right, but I don't like the look of yours.'

(A sniffy pause)

'Well, I must be off.'

'Yes, you're not looking so good.'

'Cheerio. I'll see you down the 'Dilly.'

'Not if I see you first, you won't.'

Exeunt, to swelling organ.

This brief but diverting exchange has the ring of authenticity. Its bickering is not just beastliness but the most important component of the camping which, as English academic Richard Dyer writes, is 'the only style, language and culture that is distinctively and unambiguously gay male'. In its social mode, camp privileges a caustic wit, best expressed by the quick-fire verbal retort, partly as a form of aggression, partly as a form of self-mockery, partly as a form of self-defence. It's an insider code that completely baffles the heterosexual majority, as it's meant to. (Why are they being so horrible to each other? Because it's good sport, and good practice for when you really need it.)

Like the n*gro 'dirty dozens' - the ritualised insults of the Twenties and Thirties that have become embedded in rap - the camping spotlighted on Do You Come Here Often? represents a complicated response to a hostile world. Its poisoned psychological arrows can help to control and neutralise the threat of homophobic violence: many bullies are right to fear the queen's forked tongue. Camping can provide a bulwark from which the gay man can sally forth into the world at large: it freezes the typecasting of homosexuals as effeminate, internalises it, and then throws it back in the face of the straight world as a kind of revenge.

However, that long 'mmmmmm', reverberating right through the diaphragm down to the male G-spot, gets to the heart of the matter. Meek's queen bitches are briefly united by an unstable mixture of camaraderie and competitiveness. Ever hopeful, ever alert, the gay man in cruising mode is relentless in pursuit of cock: the usual social rules go right out of the window. Sex drives the gay scene, its iconography, its economy, its inner and outer life. Meek's scenario highlights that heart-stopping instant, that highwire walk between acceptance and rejection that every gay man knows: when the Adonis turns into a Troll - not just the object of your desire but your own self.

Do You Come Here Often? was an extraordinary achievement: the first record on a UK major label - Columbia, part of the massive EMI empire - to deliver a slice of queer life so true that you can hear its cut-and-thrust in any gay bar today. Before 1966, homosexuality had been hinted at in odd mainstream records like Donovan's I'll Try For the Sun or the Kinks' See My Friends, indeed had saturated Meek epics like Johnny Remember Me, but the allusions had been veiled. They didn't offer an insider viewpoint, just a mood or a stray word that seemed to briefly open a door usually locked and barred.

While these tragic figures, in accepting their exiled status, took care to be non-specific, the period's other archetypes were far more feisty. Unlike their more sober compatriots, drag queens could not pass, and so camping was honed into a corrosive chatter that could strip paint at 10 paces. Dovetailing into the market for outrageous adult albums by the likes of Rusty Warren (Banned in Boston!), nitroglycerin queens like Rae Bourbon, Mr Jean Fredericks and Jose from the Black Cat offered frank meditations on queer life: Nobody Loves a Fairy When She's 40, Sailor Boy, et al. Too real and too ghettoised, none had a hope of finding any wider distribution.

There were firm reasons for this state of affairs.

Although the law that would decriminalise it was passing through Parliament during 1966, homosexuality was still illegal in the UK, as it was in the US: punishable by prison and social ostracism. However, laws do not always reflect contemporary realities, and gay people continued to conduct their illegal sexual and social lives. For older men like Joe Meek, pleasure might have been irrevocably stained by guilt but, for the upcoming generation of 20 year olds, the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 was an anachronistic irrelevance. F*ck Lily Law and her evil twin, Laura Norder.

In fact, Joe Meek was unusually privileged, if only he had been able to take some comfort from that realisation. The music industry was one of the few places where gay men could be themselves, and indulge their sexual predilections in a way that was economically viable. Forty years ago, it was far from being the respectable career option that it is today, and indeed derived much of its energy from its outcast status. This was a natural consequence of its roots in showbusiness and theatre, but even more basic was the way in which the sexual and social aesthetic of genuine innovators such as Larry Parnes alchemised the raw material of working-class adolescents into hit parade gold. From 1957 on, Parnes bossed British rock'n'roll, and transformed all his Reginalds and Ronalds into a new Olympus peopled by emotional deities-cum-archetypes like Billy Fury, Dickie Pride, Vince Eager, Georgie Fame. His sensibility, and that of many who followed him, transmuted gay lust into the erotic longing that excited the passions of the young women who pushed these idols into the charts.

Meek arrived as the period's foremost independent producer with John Leyton's summer 1961 smash, Johnny Remember Me, an eldritch spasm that epitomised the heightened melodrama of teenage emotions. (Meek used to speed up all his records to achieve that very effect.) It also acted as a metaphor, for those who chose to hear, for the sense of loss and disassociation that many gay men then felt. Telstar confirmed his elite sta tus and, although superseded by the Beat Boom, he was able to pull out huge hits such as Have I the Right? by the Honeycombs, a summer 1964 number one and an oblique comment on his own blocked right to sexual and emotional fulfillment.

This was his last chart-topper, but Meek adapted to the prevailing conditions better than most of his contemporaries. Although identified with Fifties Rock'n'Roll - Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran in particular - he was too restless and forward-thinking to get totally trapped in the past. He made a stone freakbeat classic with the Syndicats' Crawdaddy Simone, a Brit R'n'B record so frenzied that it put the Yardbirds' rave-ups to shame. His 1966 singles with the Cryin' Shames featured the sinuously menacing garage stomper, Come on Back, while the overwrought vocal contortions of Please Stay - Meek's last ever hit - attracted the attention of Brian Epstein.

Although he found it difficult to place many of his productions during 1966, Meek was far from being a spent force: his interest in the possibilities of sound remained vital. He also remained a player among the British music industry's gay mafia. During the brief entente cordiale that followed Please Stay, Meek accompanied Brian Epstein to witness Bob Dylan's June 1966 Royal Albert Hall concert from the Beatles' box. When the freezing of all Telstar royalties thanks to a copyright dispute threatened to render him bankrupt later in the year, Meek was thrown a lifeline by the EMI chairman, Sir Joseph Lockwood, who offered him a job as an in-house producer.

Do You Come Here Often? also emerged into a more open cultural climate. The playwright Joe Orton had used camp's caustic cadences in his smash 1964 West End success Entertaining Mr Sloane : this was the key weapon in his desired 'mixture of comedy and menace'. The extremely popular BBC radio serial Round the Horne featured two flagrant queens talking in the gay argot of the time. Executed by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams, Julian and Sandy's quickfire Polari - that mixture of gypsy language, cockney backward slang, and thieves' cant - slotted right into the verbal surrealism that the Goons had made the hallmark of British comedy.

At the beginning of the decade, Meek had entitled his futuristic but stillborn space concept album I Hear A New World . Music is always ahead of social institutions, and the new world that Meek had dreamt of became tangible after 1963. The Beatles' unprecedented success marked the death knell of the Fifties hegemony, and during the next few years, the agitation for social and sexual liberation gathered pace throughout the Western world: the civil rights struggle, the women's movement, the campaigns for homosexual equality in America and Britain. The long years of stasis and repression banked up the flood, and it was ready to burst.

The most obvious sign of this uprising was teen fashion's hothouse blooms, as young women went Op and young men squeezed themselves into striped hip-huggers and polka-dot shirts - topped off with Prince Valiant bangs. 1966 saw the full mainstream media recognition of Swinging London and its associated fashion, mod. Trumpeting the 'revolution in men's clothes', Life's 13 May cover showed four young men, making like Brian Jones in front of the Chicago skyline. The cutaway teal corduroy jackets, Rupert Bear check trousers and fruit boots were not standard male gear, and the copy played up the freak-ish angle: 'The Guys Go All Out To Get Gawked At'.

Mod's hint of mint was not entirely in the heads of hostile observers. Peter Burton, who ran London's Le Duce in those years, remembered the crossover between the mods and his young gay clientele: 'both groups paid the same attention to clothes; both groups looked much alike.' Not surprising really, as their clothes came from the same shops - initially Vince in Carnaby Street (whose catalogue of swim- and underwear could almost be classified as an early gay magazine) and eventually from the John Stephen shops in the same street. Both groups took the same drug - basically 'speed', alternatively known as 'purple hearts', 'blues', 'doobs' or 'uppers'.

In February 1966, the Kinks had a huge UK hit with their dissection of this Carnebetian army. They backed up the risque Dedicated Follower of Fashion - 'he pulls his frilly nylon panties right up tight' - with some extraordinary costumes, like the thigh-length leather waders sported with such gusto by Dave Davies. On the flip was one of the period's definitive statements of outsider pride, I'm Not Like Everybody Else, to be racked up against other garage band staples like the Yardbirds' You're a Better Man Than I and the Who's Substitute. These calls for non-conformity and the acceptance of difference were becoming more and more strident.

This urgency defined Pop's cutting edge during the first half of 1966: the unforeseen complexities and demands of 1965's emblematic records were amplified, their abrasion and innovation honed to a razor-sharp point. 1966 was a hot year, crowded with clamour and noise as seven-inch singles were cut to the limits of the then available technology. Hit 45s by the Yardbirds, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Supremes, James Brown, the Byrds, the Who, Junior Walker, Wilson Pickett, and Bob Dylan were smart and mediated, harsh and sophisticated, monomaniacally on the one or, raga-like, right out of Western perception into the eternity of one chord.

A blistering hostility was in the air on 12 August, so much so that you could taste it. That day the Beatles faced the first concert of their third American tour, an event marred by the controversy surrounding John Lennon's comment that the group were 'more popular than Jesus'. The formerly inviolable avatars of youth were suddenly vulnerable as DJs burned Beatles' records and the Ku Klux Klan threatened.

Time magazine's 12 August cover - 'The Psychotic and Society' - featured Charles Whitman, the sniper who installed himself in the clock tower at the University of Texas and, without warning, killed 15 and wounded 31 people. The horror triggered an anguished self-examination: Whitman's 'senseless mayhem' was not an aberration but intimately linked to American society. 'Potential killers are everywhere these days,' a psychiatrist warned; 'they are driving their cars, going to church with you, working with you. And you never know it until they snap'.

Across the Atlantic, 12 August saw 'the worst crime London has known this century'. Around 3pm, three police officers stopped a suspicious looking van near Wormwood Scrubs prison, north of the mod stronghold Shepherd's Bush. All three were gunned down by the vehicle's three occupants. A 10-year-old boy saw the whole thing: 'I saw a man shoot the policemen,' he told the newspapers; 'it was horrible and I was so scared.' Cop-killing was a huge taboo, and the nation recoiled.

Do You Come Here Often? partook of that season of violence, as did its author. Its candid dialogue uncovered a deep seam of outcast aggression. Camp's downside is that, unless employed with a light touch and a sure understanding of the game's rules, its ritualised viciousness can reinforce the hostility of the wider society. Peter Bur ton remembered that when he was entering the gay scene in the mid-Sixties, nothing 'was more daunting as an encounter with some acid-tongued bitch whose tongue was so sharp it was likely to cut your throat. These queens, with the savage wit of the self-protective, could be truly alarming to those of us of a slower cast of mind.'

Internalised homophobia fuels the twisted expression of an outcast's low self-esteem: instead of fighting the oppressors, why not fight those nearest to hand? Donald Webster Cory's groundbreaking 1951 survey, 'The Homosexual in America', had clearly identified poor self-esteem as one of the greatest threats to gay men's mental health - infecting every aspect of life - but it was difficult, given society's attitudes, to break the cycle of prejudice and self-hatred. Despite his bravado, Meek felt his homosexuality as a deep source of shame. He was too stubborn to tell it otherwise than it was but, ultimately, Do You Come Here Often? presented gay life as a nitroglycerin nightmare.

Born in April 1929, Meek was sensitive, almost clairvoyant, but highly volatile. Brought up as a girl for the first four years of his life by a mother who had hoped for a daughter, uninterested in most boyish pursuits, Joe was called a sissy and left alone by most of his peers. This difference, coupled with his hair-trigger temper, led to the start of the persecution (both real and imagined) that lasted for the rest of his life.

As soon as he could, Meek fled rural England for London, but in the late Fifties, despite his reputation as one of the best sound engineers in the capital, he remained haunted by the fact that his emotional and sexual orientation was illegal. This laid him open, as it did generations of gay men, to ridicule, arrest, imprisonment, violent attacks and - perhaps worst of all - blackmail. In November 1963, Meek was arrested for cottaging, importuning in a public toilet: the news of his conviction made the front page. His friends were amazed. Joe could have had all the young men he wanted, as they were queuing up to be recorded by him: they concluded that he actually liked the risk.

It didn't help that Meek was spooky: obsessed with other worlds, with graveyards, with spiritualism. He claimed to be in regular contact with Buddy Holly through the spirit world, while the negativity that he experienced clung to him like worn-out, not yet shed skin. Charles Blackwell - who arranged 'Johnny Remember Me' - remembered Joe as scarier than Phil Spector: 'He was a split personality. He believed he was possessed, but had another side that was very polite with a good sense of humour. He was very complicated.' Meek terrified the usually confident Andrew Loog Oldham: 'He looked like a real mean-queen teddy boy and his eyes were riveting'.

By mid-1966, Meek's mental state was worsening as his heyday receded into the past. Giving free rein to his instincts with Do You Come Here Often?, he gained satisfaction from exposing a reality long suppressed. But this was a small victory, a transient revenge, as the forces ranged against him gathered speed. Jekyll overtook Hyde, as his money troubles and declining fame caused him to up his pill intake and to dabble further in the occult. He was beaten up and his prized Ford Zodiac trashed. He was also threatened by gangsters who wanted to take over the Tornados' management. His paranoia was justified; his loneliness became all-consuming.

Meek's slide into the depths of decline was played out against a minatory Pop climate. Disturbance had already hit the US top 10 that summer with Napoleon XIV's banshee They're Coming to Take Me Away and Count Five's Psychotic Reaction. During September and October, the pure punk propulsion of Love's Seven and Seven Is, the Yardbirds' Happenings Ten Years Time Ago and the Rolling Stones' Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow? rode the year's white line fever right off the rails. The last was an amphetamined apocalypse, glossed thus by Andrew Loog Oldham: 'The Shadow is the uncertainty of the future. The uncertainty is whether we slide into a vast depression or universal war.' Later that autumn, David Bowie's The London Boys and the Kinks' Big Black Smoke delivered bleak cautionary tales of speed psychosis. Meek's own productions - the few that were actually released - had already reached new levels of pill-saturated oddity: the bizarre helter-skelter rhythm of Jason Eddy and the Centremen's Singing the Blues, the nuclear-winter visions of Glenda Collins's late protest, It's Hard to Believe It.

Like the Marvelettes sang, the hunter gets captured by the game, and, in January 1967, Meek's game was up. While his last ever single, the Riot Squad's Gotta Be a First Time, was dismissed as 'a corny bit of beat', he was implicated by association with a gruesome gay crime dubbed 'the Suitcase Murder'. Although the hapless producer had nothing to do with the young victim's dismemberment, the police interest tipped him over the edge. On 2 February, he burst into a friend's house all dressed in black, claiming he was possessed. The next morning, the 18th anniversary of Buddy Holly's death, he blasted his landlady with his shotgun before eating the barrel himself.

Joe Meek's was an extreme pathology, to be sure, with its incredible highs - just listen to the aerated hysteria of John Leyton's Wild Wind - and annihilating lows, but what remains shocking is just how much his suicidal impulse was shared by many gay men of his generation. In his diary for 11 March 1967, Joe Orton wrote about a conversation he had with his friend Kenneth Williams, by then a national figure in the UK for his appearances in Round the Horne and the Carry On film series. Orton found Williams 'a horrible mess' sexually: 'He mentions "guilt" a lot in conversation. "Well, of course there is always a certain amount of guilt attached to homosexuality".'

Williams talked to Orton about a friend who had been caught soliciting: 'Found in a cottage she was,' he said. 'They gave her a choice of gaol or a mental home. She chose the mental home. "Well," she said, "there's all the lovely mental c*ck. I'll be sucking all the nurses off. I'm sure it'll be very gay." Kenneth said this man went into the mental home and was given some kind of treatment "to stop her thinking like a queen". The man apparently was very depressed after this and committed suicide. Kenneth then spoke of all the people he'd known who killed themselves ... he told all the stories in a way which made them funny, but it was clear that he thinks about death constantly.'

By early 1967, Orton was so successful and well-regarded that he had access to the new elite. He was approached by Brian Epstein to write the screenplay of the Beatles' third movie, which he titled 'Up Against It'. His diary entry for 24 January describes meeting Paul McCartney and listening to a pre-release copy of Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever. As the public avatar of the new, aggressive homosexuality and, in private, an enthusiastic sex hunter - one of his most memorable diary entries concerned an orgy in a public toilet in Holloway Road in north London, just down the road from Meek's studio - Orton totally rejected Williams's sexual guilt as the holdover from a bygone era.

But even he could not escape its shadow, embodied by his older partner, Kenneth Halliwell. As the playwright's star rose, the balance of their 15-year relationship tipped irreversibly. The more that Orton flaunted his promiscuity and revelled in his success, the more depressed and inhibited Halliwell became. On 9 August 1967, he murdered Orton with nine frenzied hammer blows to the head, and then swallowed 22 Nembutals. Their bodies were found side-by-side in their shared bedsit.

Eighteen days later, the body of Brian Epstein was found in the locked bedroom of his Belgravia house. The cause of death was, according to the coroner's report, 'poisoning' by Cabrital - a kind of sleeping pill. Epstein's mental state had deteriorated since August 1966, after the Beatles' stopped touring: he hadn't been able to attend their last ever show at San Francisco's Candlestick Park because his then current boyfriend, a hustler called Diz Gillespie, had robbed him of money and valuable documents. According to his attorney and close friend Nat Weiss, that accounted for 'his first major depression: that was the beginning of his loss of self-confidence.'

The deaths of Meek, Orton and Epstein occurred just at the point when the freedoms of the Sixties were institutionally recognised, in Britain at least. As well as the relaxation of the laws on abortion and divorce, the famous 1885 statute that had done for Oscar Wilde and several successive generations of gay men was finally overhauled. The Sexual Offences Act, which became law right at the end of July 1967, substantially decriminalised homosexuality: allowing for the existence of gay social and sexual relationships, it removed the threat of blackmail and enabled the first, very basic steps to be taken towards the ultimate goal of total parity.

'Hey, you've got to hide your love away,' John Lennon had sung in one of the Beatles' most poignant songs, and, for almost every adult gay man born before the mid-1940s, the strain of having to do so was psychologically disastrous. In far too many cases, the result was alcoholism, drug addiction, compulsive cruising, crippling guilt, an inability to form lasting emotional relationships - a monstrous waste of lives.

Reactions to the new law within the gay underworld were not always positive: a renewed bout of 'queer-spotting' in the media unleashed all the old venom about bestial 'buggers'. The historian Jeffrey Weeks remembered meeting men who were 'actively hostile, nervous that the new legality would ruin their cosily secret double lives'. In the same way that the gay underworld had existed despite, if not in defiance of, the law, then the long fought-for turnaround towards partial acceptance would not easily erase the decades of vitriol and prejudice. 'We'll be free,' Kenneth Halliwell had exclaimed to Joe Orton in late July, but it wasn't that simple.

Nearly four decades on, Do You Come Here Often? remains sad, eerie, funny, and true: you can still hear its vivid vituperation in the gay hardcore dance records of the 21st century. By the same token, it is time-locked, a bulletin from a pivotal point in homosexual history: that moment when an oppressed minority began to claim its rightful place in society. However, that struggle was not without its sacrifices. Like Orton and Epstein, Meek would not live to see the sun, and his August 1966 single remains testament to the lethal power of the homophobia that, once rampant in Western society, is still virulent. Guilty pleasures can kill.