And that was the way 1963 opened: in style at the top of the American charts. It gave the Tornados the distinction of being the first British group ever to do so and they held the position for three weeks. What was more, the very fact the disc was British gave cause for wonder. Whereas well over half of all the records that had ever reached No.l in Britain were American, only four British ones had ever done so over there: Vera Lynn’s ‘Auf Wiedersehen’, 1952; Laurie London’s ‘He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands’, 1958; Acker Bilk’s ‘Stranger On The Shore’, 1962; David Rose’s ‘The Stripper’, 1962.
In the first week of the year it was announced that the record had earned a second Gold Disc. Now he was really away! Decca’s interest in his product had already trebled; with dollar signs shining in their eyes the Decca hierarchy had pushed his overall output up by a third. What they had yet to realize was that ‘Telstar’ was to give him a measure of power over them with which he could hold them to ransom. Charming them with the promise of another ‘Telstar’ on the way, he would be able to insist that his product was not only released but given the amount of push he wanted; otherwise if they did not behave themselves they would get three duff Tornados follow-ups, each of which would be so shabby it would not be worth pressing. That way he could end the contract and take the group to other bidders. Things were also hotting up elsewhere on the record company front, where Columbia for the first time were accepting recordings and Parlophone were increasing their takings off him, all of which meant that his entire output was now being accepted!
There was less peace than ever at 304 with groups, publishers, record companies and the rest phoning and knocking at his door at all hours. And the media were bursting to make him a celebrity, trying in vain to get him on TV and radio chat shows. He loved it! These were flash, bang, wallop times and life had turned into one long firework display.
Working at full throttle there was little time for social life, and as long as the records kept selling, that worried him not a jot. Starting work at 10 in the morning he would often go on through to 2 o’clock the next morning, with only a meal break and a gallon of coffee in between. Sleep, like bills, was something to be put off as long as possible. When he ate he ate well, which meant a pound of rump steak and chips nearly every day. But time was tight and besides steaks his ravenous appetite for music-making had him munching greedily through the hours on a daily diet of singers, songs, sessions, phone calls and fan clubs. He was bestriding the British music scene like a Colossus. This was what he had been hungering for since first arriving in London: having the industry at his feet with everyone hollering for his attention, and publishers and record companies dancing to his tune rather than vice versa. And at last he had it and it felt good.
On top of that, all this success underlined his standing in the profession. At 33 he was unequalled either as a producer or as a sound-balance engineer and he knew it; he had known it for years. There was no one in Britain to touch him. As producer Jack Good pointed out at the time, nobody else except engineer Terry Johnson of IBC could satisfactorily duplicate the popular sound from America and, with all due respect, the British sounds being turned out for the home market Joe could whip up standing on his head. As for his own sounds, they might just as well have been wafting in from another world; nobody but nobody knew how he got them. The so-called experts would waffle about his endless overdubbing and manic echoing and limiting but however strongly they professed to know his secrets, they were as much in the dark as a mole in a hole. They hadn’t the faintest idea to what degree he was using these techniques, how he was modifying his equipment, where he was sticking microphones or what gadgets he was employing to alter drum and guitar sounds and he was not about to tell them. In fact right up until the day a recording of his reached the record company he would be beside himself ensuring that they didn’t even find out what was going on it, let alone how it got there.25
Not surprisingly he soon detected more jealousy amongst the music fraternity. Many resented the fact that not only was he free to have his own way in his own studio, but was reaping success as well! And whilst studios were astutely accepting all his product the bosses were rumbling and grumbling about the lack of inspiration coming from their own A & R departments. If Joe Meek could create his own identifiable sound and record big, original, money-making productions costing nothing in a dirty old hole over a leather bag shop with live wires dangling all over the place, why the hell couldn’t they, with their hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of technology, do the same? They didn’t know. And while they were trying to fathom it out Joe carried on regardless, bettering his sounds and making them more unusual so no rotten pigs could thieve them off him.
His attitude towards his contemporaries is clearly outlined by Don Charles, in whom he sometimes confided: “After ‘Telstar’ he was very thrilled indeed because they were all writing him off and they said he’d shot his bolt and he’d finished. He would say, ‘That’ll show ’em. I’m still the bloody governor!’ He thought he was the best A & R man in the world – always. And I think that’s what made him produce things. At one time he was the governor, certainly in this country. They always said about Joe that he was ten years ahead of anybody else. He was way, way ahead: his techniques were incredible. What he did with those machines were nobody’s business – the sounds he made! I remember he did something with a kettle; and there was some weird sound on a record. And I said, ‘What’s that?’ And like a child he fell about laughing. And it was made from the steam of a kettle lifting a lid up, and it keeps plopping. He always used to ask you to guess what the ‘Telstar’ effects were but would never tell you and piss about laughing. He was doing phasing on tapes before anyone else was ever doing it. He just slowed the track down: he’d stick his thumb against it; he’d play two, one against t’other, and hold one back, minutely behind each other, giving a swimming-type effect. I think with ‘Telstar’ he was thrilled to pieces that he’d proved to others that he was way ahead and still ahead, basically …
“They always used to knock him: everybody knocked him. Every A & R man knocked him. They always did because they couldn’t produce what he produced. I remember vague conversations of the rows he had when he was an engineer because he used to hear A & R men cock-up things and he would suggest things and they’d just tell him virtually to shut up and produce the sound they wanted. And he wanted to say, ‘That’s wrong; that is not right. This is – it’s screaming at you!’ He used to walk out of sessions in sheer bloody frustration.”
With riches flowing in from far and wide the inevitable question now was whether he planned staying on at Holloway Road, and he did: “After selling about two million and making £26,000 I can stop watching the pennies. I’d like a handsome ground floor studio so the artistes don’t have to lug so much up and down stairs. But then again I like it here.” Despite the traffic noise and cramped conditions, he had well and truly settled in. In fact the previous June after much deliberation he had signed an under-lease on the three floors, which would take him to June ’67.
At the beginning of January the Tornados’ next magnum opus, ‘Globetrotter’, was released. He told the press he felt “quite confident that it will be a No.1, but I could be wrong. Personally I think it’s as good as ‘Telstar’ and it should appeal to the same people – that includes the adults.” Actually he didn’t think it was as good as ‘Telstar’ but he wasn’t going to tell the world that. By any standard ‘Telstar’ was no easy act to follow but regrettably ‘Globetrotter’ came as a complete anti-climax. Taken on its own merit it was a superb record, this time presenting the clavioline in a spacey, laid-back style but after the aggressive intensity of its predecessor it sounded wishy-washy. Furthermore ‘Telstar’ was not the only record with which it invited comparison.
The opening bars bore a striking resemblance to a recent hit by Mark Wynter, called ‘Venus In Blue Jeans’. When he took ‘Globetrotter’ along to Ivy Music, Roy Berry was also surprised: “I couldn’t believe my ears. When he first played it to me I looked at him askance because I thought it was too much like ‘Venus’. And I said to myself, ‘What’s he recording this for?’ I suggested this to him with the same cautiousness I usually employed on these matters with him and he said, ‘Nothing like it!’ So we proceeded. But I was afraid we’d be sued by United Artists – it was so similar.” When Joe asked Tornados drummer Clem Cattini what he thought of it, Clem was less tactful: “I thought we should have stuck to the ‘Telstar’ formula; I didn’t like the record or the sound. I said. ‘Well, I don’t really like it, Joe – it sounds like ‘Venus In Blue Jeans’.’ The next moment all hell was let loose. He stormed out, which he normally did, come storming back in with this stool which he threw at me. I ducked. It hit the top of a tape recorder and shattered the tape holders. He hadn’t even used the machine yet; it had only been delivered the day before. It was an Ampex and cost over £1,000.26 He was yelling away: ‘How dare you criticize my work? Get out!’ I said, ‘All right, fair enough.’ As I was walking down the stairs I heard Joe coming behind. I shot down the last flight. Suddenly I heard ‘clatter, clatter, clatter’ and I looked round and this tape recorder’s following me. I got out of the door at the bottom just in time as it came crashing down against it.”
Someone catching Joe in a calmer moment managed to get a more productive response on the subject: “I wrote this tune long before ‘Blue Jeans’ was released. I know it’s only the opening that is similar, the rest of the melody is completely different, but still I’m a bit worried that people will think I’ve lifted the idea. I honestly didn’t. It’s just an unfortunate coincidence, that’s all.”
The ‘Globetrotter’ story in America was something of a nonevent. Disc jockeys had been listening in closely to the Tornados’ album and within a week of ‘Globetrotter’s’ release they got an LP track ‘Ridin’ The Wind’ out as well. It seems they were knocked out by the thunderclap effect at the beginning, and indeed the whole production was a more commercial one. Of course, any meagre hope ‘Globetrotter’ had of emulating its predecessor’s success went straight down the pan taking ‘Ridin’ The Wind’ with it. Had they both appeared in a blaze of publicity it might have been another tale; both singles in the Top Ten would have been some coup and won laurels galore for Decca’s man in New York responsible for their dual release. Instead hardly any publicity was forthcoming. Each sabotaged the other, with ‘Ridin’ The Wind’ fizzling out at No.72 and ‘Globetrotter’ lasting one week only at No.93. The man in New York lasted a further week – then he was out too.
Over here in Britain both records were faring much better: ‘Ridin’ The Wind’ on a very good Tornados EP at No.2 in the EP chart and ‘Globetrotter’ at No.2 in the Melody Maker singles chart. Of ‘Globetrotter’ some people were saying its release onto the market had been too soon, taking the wind out of ‘Telstar’s’ sales, but Joe was more than happy. ‘Telstar’ and ‘Globetrotter together in the Top Ten were repeating the ‘Johnny Remember Me’ - ‘Wild Wind’ double-act of ’61; whilst further down, there once again was a Mike Berry record freshly in to make it three in the Top Twenty, just like before. At the same time, coasting along at the other end was ‘Can Can ’62’ by Peter Jay & the Jaywalkers, giving him four in the Top Thirty. He would have hogged the lot if he could. ‘Telstar’ at last dropped out of the Top Twenty at the end of January after a five months’ run, handing over the baton to the ‘Telstar’ EP on which it was to grace the EP Top Twenty for a further five months.
Meanwhile taking over from ‘Telstar’ in the Top Ten was Mike Berry’s bouncy ‘Don’t You Think It’s Time’, co-written by Joe and Geoff Goddard. At first glance their co-writing efforts hardly look worth mentioning, since during the four years they were together only four releases claimed their combined talents. Actually their total output was prodigious, and it seems that were it not for Joe tricking publishers, their names would have appeared together on many other titles. Instead he would give authorship to either one or the other, depending on whose concept the song was based on.
Harking back to his songwriting days with Joe, Geoff says that one of their methods was to work separately, assembling a quota each and later taking turns in presenting their own: “I would take the initiative on one and he would come in and join me and finish the song off. And the next one he’d take the initiative and the same thing would happen. We produced several like that in a batch.” Between them they turned out dozens of songs, many of which were to end up unpublished. Their rapport was much enhanced by the fact that they wrote the same kind of lonely lyric, easy-to-remember melodies. Continuing, Geoff says he often worked better with him than on his own: “I could sit at home all day and not come up with anything, but it seemed when we sat together at the piano we could just knock ’em up one after the other. A lot of them would be rubbish but there’d be a potential hit or two amongst it.”
Songwriting times together were happy times, and judging by some of the tape recordings of these sessions which have come to light in recent years the two men relished every second. Along with the usual melancholy songs there was everything from rock’n’roll to evangelical to bawdy with broad accents. Sometimes they worked on through the night, each acting as a catalyst on the other, intoxicated by their love of making music in an atmosphere electric with prospective Top Ten hits. Joe had a highly attuned sense of detecting something magical in a phrase and would have Geoff ad-libbing hour upon hour on the piano. Now and then he would suddenly say, “Stop, that’s great, let’s develop that.” And all the while a tape recorder was running so nothing was lost.
When both were satisfied with their collection of compositions the next stage was making demos. Geoff goes on: “I’d play the piano and Joe might bang on the door to put on some rhythm accompaniment to it. Then he’d play the tape to whoever he thought it would suit, then I’d come up for the session. A lot of the arrangement was already there on the demo. We’d usually do the backing tracks first and then the singer would go along on another day, then they’d finish off.” It sounds pretty straightforward the way Geoff tells it, and the demos he was involved in generally were. But the demos Joe put together alone of his own compositions were another matter entirely, presenting 304 with its most notorious melodramas: an equal source of mirth and heartache.
It seems that just about everyone who had anything to do with recording at his studio has memories of him flaring up during sessions. And it was his demos that were often the root cause. They were a major problem for him, offering the fearful possibility of treble trouble.
The first peril lay in the way he made them. Their diabolical presentation highlighted one of his biggest hang-ups: lack of communication. He was severely limited in what he could personally commit to tape, for whereas he only had to hum a phrase to Geoff to have it immediately played back with harmony, the best he himself could manage was an old backing track or just a bash on the door along with the melody line – and what a melody line! His completely tone deaf la-la-ing had to be heard to be believed, for as Saints guitarist Roy Phillips explains: “His demos were the greatest in the world. He says, ‘Right, I’ve got a demo upstairs I’ve made.’ He’s made. And he’s used no musical instruments. All he’s done is get hold of a microphone and hum out of tune and pound on the floor and there is a tune in there somewhere and you have to find it.” Andy Cavell, the singer Roy Phillips often backed, elaborates: “Most of the songs he’d written were based on him singing into the microphone and just banging away. It was comical to hear him – always very high-pitched. He used to play to you and say, ‘This is the song I want you to sing,’ and while he did it I wanted to laugh and he’d say, ‘Well, you can’t do better than that anyway, so what are you laughing for?’ That’s how the tunes were; there was no music. And then Dave [Adams] would come along and start playing it and the rhythms were all wrong and Dave would say, ‘You can’t do that, Joe, because it just doesn’t go. It’s either 2-2 or 4-4 or 12-bar this or that, but it can’t be one minute this and the next minute that.’ Because half the tunes would change the beat halfway through. That’s how he used to write them: it was just a bare voice with him banging. He used to bang on the piano and stamp his feet. That floor – you could see it sinking, but he never took any notice of that.”27
It was unfortunate he could not have someone like Geoff or Dave Adams there full time to lay down his compositions for him. But if friends were not around, people had to be paid and that kind of luxury was not acceptable to Major Banks. Therefore much of his work had to go through the vocal chord mutilation process first, saving money and wasting time.
The amazing thing was that despite having such a well tuned ear for a commercial sound that ear could not tell him how out of tune his own voice was. So of course, when the tune was finally harnessed, the delay had been due to the incompetence or bloody-mindedness of the musicians rather than any vocal deficiency on his part.
Sometimes he would treat the band to a backing track by picking out one of his old records with a similar tempo and singing along to it, regardless of the tune already on it. Then again musicians were sometimes faced with his singing along to the wrong beat entirely with a slow melody like ‘Son, This Is She’ on the back of a fast rhythm like ‘Johnny Remember Me’. And if that didn’t confuse them enough there were other occasions when he would perform alone, simply walking into the studio to whine or wail in front of the musicians: “What do you think of this one?” and with his hands in his belt and his feet stamping the floor, away he’d go, banging and shrieking, his face lighting up as if he were in a fantasy world. He thought it was all there – and sometimes by fluke it actually was; usually it wasn’t. Then it all had to be interpreted, with Joe leaping in and out of the studio, getting ever more frustrated with himself and everyone else while he struggled to put across what he thought was a perfectly obvious tune. These kind of proceedings can be likened to those of a cook who spends half the morning searching for a saucepan. Meanwhile the musicians would be growing more and more restless, and at any point Joe could suddenly erupt and disappear downstairs.
His imitations of guitar sounds were hysterical! No wonder so many sessions broke up when musicians were expected to take such hilarious affairs seriously. But serious they were, and time and time again a happy atmosphere would be destroyed by the second crisis.
Playing or singing one of his homemade efforts would trigger off a predictable chain of events: someone would grin, Joe would sweetly enquire why, tension would mount to be broken by a fit of giggles from the group, whereupon he would throw an instant tantrum and anything else that came to hand. Although he realized he was no Caruso he saw nothing in his voice that could possibly be construed as funny. That kind of reaction could only stem from scorn, and reminded him of the catcalls he had faced as a child, dressing up in his plays.
Cliff Bennett & the Rebel Rousers made a lot of recordings up there, and Cliff gives a vivid description of the situation: “He’d come in during a session and say, ‘No, no, no, no, no. It goes like this: dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee.’ We’d all break up because it was so funny to hear him singing his heart out in that terrible strangulated way of his. He’d stamp his foot: ‘I’m not going to stand for it; if you’re all going to piss about I’m going to go downstairs. I’m not going to put up with this silly laughing.’ He’d stomp out slamming the door and off he’d go downstairs to make some tea or something while we sobered up a bit. Then he’d come back half an hour later: ‘Now, are you all going to behave yourselves? Right, let’s get on with it. It goes like this: dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee.’ And no one in the band dared look at each other; we had to look at the wall or something. Otherwise if one of us caught someone else’s eye they’d burst out laughing and we’d all explode. Then it would just go on and on and on like laughing gas, until your sides ached and you just wanted to stagger out of the studio before you fell apart. And there was Joe standing there looking so angry and it was like being back at school: he was the schoolteacher and we were the naughty pupils. And the angrier he became, the more we tried to hold it back and the funnier it was. We’d just laugh and laugh until it became quite impossible to work and sometimes he’d start laughing too – he couldn’t help it. Twenty minutes later we’d forgotten what we were laughing about – we were absolutely past it. When we’d all cooled off he’d say, ‘You might as well go home now. You’re a real bunch of bastards. You know what I’m trying to do and you send it all up. I’ll tell you this: it’s just as well you’re good musicians. When you boys behave yourselves you’re great to work with.’ Then, come the next session, we’d all be there in the studio ready to get on with the recording and he’d come in and say, ‘I hope we’re not going to have any stupid antics like last time.’ Of course, at once we could feel it coming back again. I’d say, ‘Oh Joe, why did you have to mention that? We’d forgotten about it.’ He’d say, ‘Well I haven’t.’”
In future instead of giving them his infamous impromptu performances, he took some time properly preparing demo tapes for them to copy.
Thirdly there was always the danger that the band would not like his composition anyway, however well it was presented. This happened when he offered the unruly Rebel Rousers a song of his, ironically titled ‘Poor Joe’. The timid melody and lyrics were at odds with the band’s own rock’n’roll style and, as Cliff Bennett explains, Joe was very unhappy with their reaction to it: “We were doing the session and we were just f––– about; we didn’t like the song, and he knew. He came in and really got upset. I actually saw him in tears: ‘If you don’t want to do the song, pack your stuff and get out.’ He could get hurt very quickly if somebody criticized his work. But even so, every time we went back for sessions he’d say, ‘I still think you should do it.’ He was so persistent, in the end we gave in and recorded it, but never played it at gigs. We would also clash if we didn’t like his approach. He would say, ‘You’re doing it this way because it’s my time and money.’ We’d say, ‘Fair enough.’”
25. In November ’62 he sat down and recorded a potted life story for the magazine Audio-Record Review. It was not published but this technical, off-the-cuff description of his studio and equipment is interesting, especially since it is the only known recording still around of his talking on the subject. During it he was quite composed but it is not hard to imagine him fairly fizzing with enthusiasm when chatting to friends about this, one of his favourite topics: “I’ll describe first of all the studio itself. It’s on the second floor and it’s the size of an average bedroom – no larger. I’ve covered all the walls with acoustic tiles – except one, which is covered with a thick curtain. This has a very good absorbing power and the studio is extremely ‘dead’. The floor is carpeted and the ceiling is completely covered in tiles. And only the one wall has a few tiles missing and this gives me a certain amount of brightness. But basically it’s completely ‘dead’. I have no playback speaker in the studio and no cue lights. I have a piano which I’ve put drawing pins in the pads and it produces a more metallic sound which is much better to record, and is much more suitable for pop records.
“The microphones: the cables lead straight out into my control room which is about the size of a small bedroom. It was actually used as a small bedroom, I should imagine. In this control room I have a desk with the equipment piled on it and I have a table and a rack.
“Let’s go back to the studio and I’ll describe the microphones. The main microphones are two U47s. I think this is a wonderful microphone and I use it for all my vocalists. It has a very good characteristic for close-work, that is for instruments that you need a lot of presence on. To help this I use a small piece of foam plastic on it – this stops pops and bangs when a vocalist is very close to it … The others are AKG mikes – the small microphones, dynamic types that are very popular nowadays. I have about six of those. I have also a couple of Reslos. I use one on the bass drum and one sometimes for a vocal group, working on both sides of it. Really the microphones aren’t all that expensive, but they’re very efficient, and being such a small studio they’re used pretty close to the instruments, and later in the control room I add echo to different channels. This way I get what I feel is a more commercial sound than to get the instruments to balance themselves in the studio.
“Anyway, we go into the control room now and the main recording machine is a twin-track Lyrec. I usually record the voice on one track and the backing on the other. The other recorder is a TR51 and this I use for dubbing, and I must say it’s turning out to be a marvellous little machine, but I would prefer to change it soon for something like an Ampex, which will possibly be a little more reliable. This machine tends to pop just a little bit. Sometimes you get bumping in the background. I think it’s to do with the bias.
“The mixers: there’s a varied selection. I have a homemade mixer which has got four channels with ‘top lift’ on each. Then I use a Vortexian mixer, which is a pretty good solid job, and the sort of thing that you leave and sort of forget, but it has been very useful for me. Then I use a Vortexian tape recorder for delaying the echo; this gives me ‘tape delay’ echo, which I use. Then above my control room I have a room which I’ve made into an echo chamber. It’s quite remarkable for the size of it. It really gives me a very, very good echo sound, which is on all my records. Also I use electronic echo and this is used quite a lot on my records too, especially on guitars and percussive sounds. The vocal mike goes through a little cooker I’ve made which has got bass, top and middle ‘lift’ in it; it was originally a small amplifier. It has three channels so I can mix in a vocal group with it and possibly the frontline instrument. And this is on top of the Lyrec … and is quite handy: I can mix without having to walk about the control room too much.
“The speaker is a Tannoy ‘Dual-Concentric’ in a Lockwood cabinet – the type they use in most studios today. I also have the same purpose speaker downstairs so I can play my acetates and records through to make sure they’re cut properly and that the standard’s well up. I’ve also got in my control room for the second channel – a vocal channel. I have another Tannoy speaker cabinet, a smaller type that fits into a corner. I don’t know the model. This I find rather metallic and I only use at low levels. I can’t really balance on it, I’ve tried but I can’t seem to get a balance on it. It seems to have an artificial ‘top lift’ that rather misleads you.
“Well, I service my own gear. I have an advance oscillator and a small oscilloscope – the type you can pick up for £15. The oscillator is very important. I quite often use it on sound effects on some of my records. I have some bits of gear that you don’t usually find with the keen recordist. That is, an old BBC limiter which I use on voice tracks quite often. It is very ancient and has got the old large pin, large bass-type valves. It must be at least 30 years old. That is very efficient and isn’t all that noticeable in its operation. Then I have a compressor which I built myself. I found the design in one of the magazines, and it works very, very efficiently and I’m very pleased with it.
“For the electric bass: I feed this through an equaliser unit. On this unit I have experimented and I feed the output back. I believe it’s positive feedback but when carefully done and through a choke, it gives you the effect of the string being plucked; you get a sort of metallic pluck of the string itself and this is quite effective on recordings. I don’t always use it but on the Outlaws’ records, for instance, I use it.
“Well, I think that describes pretty accurately the equipment. By the way, I feed my output to the speakers through Quad amplifiers. They are a wonderful amplifier. I also use a Quad downstairs for playing my records.”
26. This machine would take over from the TR5I. Helping him get a cleaner sound it would at last give him the means to master recordings at 304, instead of having to finish them off at outside studios.
27. “Joe would never let me sing the way I wanted to sing. He was in two minds whether to let the accent come out because I had a Greek accent at the time. And he would make me smile as I sang – it was a terrific strain on the singing because the accent wouldn’t come out and he’d say, ‘I want you to sing very soft into the mike. I don’t want you to punch the words out.’ I always wanted to sing like everybody else – like Elvis Presley or Cliff Richard. One of the things they said at the time was that I looked like Cliff, and Joe was trying to build me round him and at the same time make me individual. But a lot of shows I did I got more screams saying ‘Cliff ’ than screams saying ‘Andy’. But it was better getting them for Cliff than not at all and getting boos. I didn’t have a group at first. I think in the studio it was the Outlaws backing because I remember Chas swearing at me. The first record ‘Hey There Cruel Heart’ took a whole week to make because I was flat as a pancake, so he said, ‘Maybe your voice is better different hours.’ So he used to have me record very early in the morning: 5.30 – the Outlaws hated me! In the morning when you get up, your voice is a bit more resonant and powerful and I would run out of breath in the manner he made me sing; he used to make me smile and sing very softly into the microphone, and pound a lot of echo into it. When he had finished with it I couldn’t for the life of me repeat that voice again because it was double-tracked, spliced and so on. He’d say, ‘I’ve worked so hard on your record, it deserves to be a hit.’ But whatever sound came out in the end, it was like a motor car making a noise and Joe turning it into a tune. It was Joe’s work that made it, not my voice; anybody else could have done it.”