Throughout 1959, Meek worked on his own pet project: I Hear a New World: An Outer Space Music Fantasy, a vision of a trip to the moon that let his creativity run wild.
These included Gary Miller's "The Garden of Eden" and "The Story of My Life" (from 19, respectively), and Emile Ford & the Checkmates' "What Do You Want to Make Those Eyes at Me For?" and David MacBeth's "Mr. During this time, Meek worked on numerous jazz and calypso records as well as a few Top 20 hits. These creative impulses didn't mesh well with the demands of industry-standard studios, and Meek soon departed for an independent career as an engineer. On another 1956 single, Anne Shelton's "Lay Down Your Arms," Meek mimicked the sound of marching with a rhythmically shaken box of gravel - one of the earliest examples of his simple yet surprisingly effective sound effects. Much to the jazz trumpeter's chagrin, Meek compressed the song's pianos and drums despite Lyttleton's concerns, it became his lone top 10 pop hit.
One of the first recordings to bear his unmistakable production techniques was 1956's "Bad Penny Blues" by Humphrey Lyttelton.
To pursue his dream of becoming a producer, Meek moved to London and worked as an assistant engineer for a radio production company and for studios such as IBC and Lansdowne. While working for the Midlands Electricity Board, he obtained a disc cutter and produced his first record. During the early '50s, Meek's passions grew to include music production. These skills came in handy when he joined the Royal Air Force at age 18 and became a radar technician, a trade that only heightened his fascination with technology and outer space. Along with cooking and cleaning, he spent as much time as he could learning about and experimenting with electronics, and soon taught himself to build circuits and radios. Early on, he distinguished himself from his brothers instead of playing outside, he preferred to stay in the house. Despite his troubles, Meek's many achievements as a songwriter, producer, and engineer make for an influential - and fascinating - legacy.īorn Robert George Meek on April 5, 1929, Joe Meek grew up in a family of farmers in Newent, Gloucestershire. His status as a gay man when sexual acts between men were still illegal in the U.K., his untreated mental illnesses, and his legal and financial troubles contributed to his turbulent state of mind when he killed himself and his landlady in 1967. The ways in which Meek was different also led to difficulties. When his chart hits began to wane in the mid-'60s, the hard-hitting sounds he captured with freakbeat acts like the Syndicats presaged punk and grunge. charts, it defined Meek's signature sound: half driving and dirty, half eerie and futuristic. He popularized these innovations on the singles he recorded with other artists, chief among them the Tornados' otherworldly 1962 hit "Telstar." The first single by a British rock group to top the U.S. Though it wasn't released in its entirety during his lifetime, it anticipated the concept albums that became popular later in the decade and featured some of his most inventive electronic devices and production tricks. Meek was among the first to use the studio as an instrument, an approach he developed on his 1960 album I Hear a New World: An Outer Space Fantasy. Overdubbing, spring reverb, compression, sound separation, and close miking all became industry standards, while his experiments with tape loops, sampling, and handcrafted electronics paved the way for later generations of hip-hop and electronic music artists. A short list of the techniques he pioneered explains why he's considered one of the most influential engineers ever to work in a studio. A truly visionary figure within the recording industry, Joe Meek helped shape the sound of pop music in the '60s and for decades to come.