Joe Meek: I Hear a New World

I picked up this remarkably strange album recently and feel compelled to tell you it's weird and wonderful story. In 1960, at the time of the recording of this album, Joe Meek was most famous for his Outer Space inspired pop tunes. A string of hits and the proceeds from a multi-million selling song called Telstar had afforded him the opportunity to set up his own label and he was determined to develop his sound along the lines of what he regarded as his very unique ability to create what the populace wanted to hear. Unfortunately, it seems that Joe was a little out of touch with reality and after being conned out of the proceeds of Telstar, he retreated to a formidably unhomely studio he had built in a dingy flat, accumulating odd sounds that might contribute to his masterpiece.

One of Joe's other main interests was The Occult. Geoff Goddard, his fellow spiritualist and part-time collaborator/hitmaker, believed as Joe did: that part of the inspiration and success they found came from beyond the grave in messages they received during seances. Joe had a vision during a tarot card reading that his idol, Buddy Holly, with whom he was deeply in love, would die tragically on February 3rd, 1958. When the day came to pass, Joe informed Buddy of his prediction and told him how glad he was it hadn't come true. Buddy Holly, of course, died on February 3rd 1959 in an horrible plane crash with Richie "La Bamba" Valens.

Joe assembled a group he christened The Blueman for the recording of I Hear a New World, insisting that they dress in silver space suits and paint themselves blue. He communicated his ideas for the album through recordings of himself humming the tunes and playing out the rhythms by tapping a spoon on a plate. Unfortuneatly, Joe was completely tone deaf and blessed with absolutely no music ability to speak of. The incongruity of moronically tuneless humming and randomly spoon-smacked plates has made these tapes legendary.

The basic ingredients for the recording of the album were an Hawaiian guitar (an highly off the wall instrument for a country band at the time), The Bluesmen rhythm section and a deliberately out of tune piano. Meek fleshed out the songs with treatments of the sounds of bubbles blown through drinking straws, his toilet flushing backwards and electrical circuits shorted together. An eerie and bafflingly snapshot of the scope of his intentions is offered in his extremely forthright and helpful album liner notes. Here is his description of the idea behind the song Globb Waterfall:

"This song may contradict the belief that there is no water on the moon; I still hope there is, if it's not external then it's inside the crust. Gravity has done a strange thing and has formed a type of overflowing well. The water rises to form a huge globule on the top of the plateau and when it's reached its maximum size, it falls with a terrific splash to the ground below, and flows away into the cracks of the moon. Then the whole cycle repeats itself again and again."

The inclusion of an extra b in Globb is consistant with his christening of the lead singer as Rodd and his tendency to hopelessly misspell everything. Meek seemed blissfully unaware of his dyslexia. He did however struggle terribly with both his sexuality and his bi-polar manic depressive condition. Despite the eccentric and gloriously innovative production of I Hear a New World, Meek was a hopelessly inadequate businessman (only 99 copies are thought to have been pressed), and he descended into a horrible cycle of extreme paranoia and destructive behaviour following the dissolution of the project.

In 1963 he got in trouble, for something to do with the laws of "decency," and the story was all over the papers. He felt that any more chance of a hit was gone. Eventually, in the face of lawsuits, lack of financial success, depression, paranoia, strange voices and increasing doses of barbiturates, Joe Meek felt done for. On Feb. 3, 1967, eight years to the day after Buddy Holly's death, he killed his landlady, then himself.

I've made a couple of the tracks available in the usual place. I'm reluctant to make the whole album available given the trauma Joe Meek went through due to his financial failure. It's not a moral stance I'm taking. It's just that I'm genuinely scared of the prospect of being haunted by Joe Meek. Somehow, I don't think his ghost would be a very reasonable one. If this gets to you Joe, I promise to spread the word about your wonderful exploits where-ever I go. If you like what you hear, then buy the album or make a space T-shirt of Joe swimming under a Globb Waterfall with Buddy Holly.