“I think he’s got tremendous potential, very individual,” Joe told the press. “By this time next year, or even before, he could be one of the biggest names in the pop world.” Although he had decided Heinz was to sing “the quieter type of ballad”, he stressed that the young man was full of enthusiasm and so often dreaming up ideas that “he seems to have some new ones every time he comes round to see me.”
Heinz’s debut disc was to feature in the new pop film. Called ‘Dreams Do Come True’ its title was a pinch from a telegram Joe had received when ‘Telstar’ reached No.l in America. He had dreamt it would get to the top over there and when he was sent that line he put it aside as a useful title. The lyrics were suffering from writer’s cramp but that did not matter, if the overall sound was right.
I’ve been told and I’m sure it’s true
That when two lose their hearts, dreams do come true.
I believe that out of the blue,
Someone will fall for me and make my dreams come true.
I drift on a big, white cloud, over the house-tops high above,
Dreaming there must be someone, a certain someone for me to love.
Heinz was getting the full treatment. Throughout January when he was not on tour with the Tornados, Joe spent hours and days on him polishing him up like a brass button, practising the song, arranging every move and inflexion to the nth degree. With eight years of firsthand experience to call upon he knew what he wanted, darting about like a TV director eyeing him through camera-shaped hands. He loved it all and saw himself in the young man but the perfectionist in him made him a hard taskmaster who took a lot of satisfying. With time fast running out he was far from happy with Heinz’s voice, so when he put the recording together he did an ‘Ian Gregory’ on him by blending the voice of another singer into it. That voice would feature strongest on the record, with Heinz’s drooping delivery safely out of harm’s way underneath.
During February their scenes in the film were shot in the old Metropolitan Music Hall where Jimmy Miller & the Barbecues had had their shirts ripped, ironically the last use to which the hall was put before being bulldozed. He went along as well to make sure his stage directions were followed to the letter. Once that was safely in the bag Larry Parnes whisked them off for another of his bumper package tours, this time billed second to Joe Brown above Susan Maughan, Jess Conrad, Eden Kane, Rolf Harris, Shane Fenton and Peter Jay & the Jaywalkers.
That month the Tornados’ American LP peaked at a respectable No.22 and there were a couple more awards for ‘Telstar’. One went to the Tornados from Cashbox who had decided to start presenting a new trophy of their own to anyone topping their American chart. The other was a special Gold Disc which was to be presented to Joe himself, who the papers stated was the first A & R man ever to get one. The following month he received it from the Tornados on Thank Your Lucky Stars and promptly burst into tears.
February also brought an announcement that ‘Telstar’ had the highest certified British sales of 1962 at 850,000, and as composer he was to be presented with Britain’s top music honour, the coveted Ivor Novello Award. (The worldwide figure had passed 2¾ million outstripping ‘Stranger On The Shore’s’ 2½ million plus to become Britain’s biggest seller ever!)
At this time ‘Telstar’ was still figuring well in Top Tens around the world. It had topped the charts in many countries, and dozens of cover versions were floating around too, apparently with the most absorbing variations being Latin-American, Hawaiian and Chinese.
Midway through March came the release of the Tornados’ next disc, ‘Robot’. After ‘Telstar’, ‘Robot’ was arguably the most inventive and commercial track they were to put out. Joe had given it a very strong runaway melody line set to a heavy beat with little this time in the way of space connotations, unless you were looking for them. It was interesting to note that a year had passed since the release of their first disc, the instantly forgettable ‘Love And Fury’. At that time it had looked like the Tornados were set to be stuck in the same rotten tune rut as his other groups. Instead they were now basking in the sunshine with a harvest of good tunes, and being given a boost by Public Relations man and gossip columnist Keith Goodwin, who Joe was hiring at £40 per month to say all the right things in all the right places.
Soon after ‘Robot’s’ release Joe flew over to Paris with the Tornados. While the group were being filmed by the Scopitone juke box company, miming to ‘Robot’ as they walked out of some woods wearing space helmets, he was visiting a French promoter in the hope of booking Heinz some dates in France. The band also had time to mime footage for ‘Telstar’. In the evening he rushed back to join Heinz in a studio where the juke box company were filming him miming ‘Dreams Do Come True’. For the next four hours until 3 in the morning he was busy telling everyone how it all should be done. As always he knew what he wanted and was ready to fly Heinz home if he did not get it. And so followed the farcical situation where Joe, as director, was directing the director who was directing Heinz, who was being redirected by Joe. Eventually, against all odds it was actually finished, and all three filmstrips were juke boxed.
Three weeks after the Tornados’ day-trip to Paris they were back again for their first foreign venue: a fortnight at the acclaimed Paris Olympia. The show was a sellout. The only trouble was that the Paris Olympia ought never to have been their first foreign venue but their second and could be little compensation for the cancellation of their February dates in the States. In fact they should have been able to go to America, and with any other management they would have done.
In a nutshell the Larry Parnes/Joe Meek partnership was a dead duck. About the only thing they could agree on was the time. They were forever rowing about the group’s affairs: where they should play, what they should wear, how they should move onstage.
As soon as the contract had been signed it became obvious that to Parnes the Tornados were of no importance whatever compared with his golden boy, Billy Fury. That “very good” US offer had not been quite good enough, because Parnes had merely seen it as a chance to get Fury in on the act too, and as the Americans had never heard of Billy Fury they didn’t want him. So the Parnes ultimatum was: “No Fury, no Tornados”. Thus everyone failed to capitalize on the disc’s enormous sales in what was and still is the world’s largest pop record market. While ‘Telstar’ was chalking up 2 million in that country alone, instead of the Tornados riding on the back of it to a small fortune they were stuck over here tied to a succession of weekly venues and one-night-stands; besides which they were still bumming around doing session work backing Joe’s artistes in the studio. And all the glamour in being Britain’s first group to top the American listings ran silently to waste.
Naturally the lads were very disappointed with the American fiasco, and none more so than Joe who had dearly hoped they would perform on TV over there and perhaps even give him the thrill of a lifetime with a ‘live’ transmission of ‘Telstar’ via Telstar. Fortunately he never allowed himself long for disappointments. A whole pot of goodies was on the boil, including a blueeyed boy of his own.
The latest good news was that he had managed to get Heinz a TV spot on Thank Your Lucky Stars. A promoter had also placed him on the forthcoming Jerry Lee Lewis-Gene Vincent package tour, and the Outlaws had grudgingly agreed to back him. Thanks to a multi-millionaire heating company manager they let themselves be bribed with an open cheque book for new instruments. There was also a new teenage film in the offing called Live It Up, starring David Hemmings, and Heinz was to play a part as a member of a pop group who go through the usual hassles before getting their big break. In fact Heinz was set for a busy week’s filming and touring because the two were due to run concurrently.
As zero hour drew closer so the excitement grew. With the other film Farewell Performance about to be screened, as well as his solo debut on disc, TV and stage all timed to coincide in the first week of May, some showbiz folk, claimed the music press, reckoned Heinz was on the brink of the big time and were rating him as “the hottest property to erupt onto Britain’s pop scene since Cliff in 1958”. Four fan clubs had sprouted up, with one in Wolverhampton mustering 1,000 members already; the London branch was being manned by a certain Dave Adams of 304 Holloway Road, N7; telephone NORth 4074. For Joe and the one who fans called ‘The White Tornado’ the countdown began.
With the ‘Telstar’ thousands now pouring in, no expense was to be spared in launching the blond bombshell to the highest height in the pop galaxy. The beginning of May saw the release of ‘Dreams’. Adverts were splashed all over the music papers whilst colour photos and a Heinz biography were sent out to teenage magazines, disc jockeys, record reviewers and Uncle Tom Cobley and all.
Joe held his breath for the screening of Heinz’s first TV spot on Thank Your Lucky Stars. Though a little wooden his performance was not too bad, thanks to the fact that on pop programmes singers always mimed to their songs. Now with that show in the bag he felt that Heinz had more than enough going for him, with his girl-grabbing looks, flashy pop star outfits, well rehearsed act, widespread publicity plus all the fan mail and Tornados success to give him added confidence. Two extra venues, which had been booked in small halls elsewhere to warm him up, did not come off as well as hoped, though that was hardly surprising since barely a dozen people bothered to turn up. Joe needed no reassuring now; his faith in Heinz had been supported thousands of times over by sackloads of letters, and the first full house was bound to prove him and them right.
But it didn’t. The week of one-night-stands started a disaster and ended up a nightmare! Even with the Outlaws to back him, sticking Heinz on a bill with two giants of rock’n’roll made as much sense as sandwiching Screaming Lord Sutch between the Wombles and Donny Osmond. The main trouble was that he was conceived as an attraction for the girls, and audiences for Jerry Lee Lewis and Gene Vincent were predominantly male. After all that publicity hailing him as a great new rock star he had quite a tag to live up to. Others on the bill fared much better – the Saints, Andy Cavell, Mickie Most – though they had less to prove. Making his entrance dolled up in the fancy black suit with white piping that Joe had chosen for him in front of a sea of leather jackets and looking, as one reporter described him, like “a searchlight on a foggy night”, he stood as much chance as a pig in a pork pie factory. And when they heard his voice, so cramped by nerves that it sounded like a blow-lamp, even that chance went. Nor did his embarrassed bassist, Chas Hodges, help by making teasing comments onstage about his hair and the fact Heinz’s guitar was only a prop.
Heinz says that sometimes the audience were chanting “OFF” before he even got onto the stage and from there on things got worse: “I was playing Birmingham and getting blokes running down the aisle wanting to jump onstage to thump my head in, throwing cans of beans and covering the group in beans. On that same tour we played Colston Hall, Bristol and my mother came down from Southampton. She was sat upstairs. She came backstage in tears. She could hear the blokes behind her: ‘We’re gonna ’ave ’im now, the bastard, we’re gonna ’ave ’im. Wait round the back.’ My mother’s sitting there listening to it! Imagine how she felt with Teds running up, grabbing the microphone stand off the stage, trying to pull it off me and hit me with it. And Gene Vincent came up to me before that tour ended and said, ‘You’ve got some bloody guts, I would have walked off after one number.’ He used to stand in the wings every night watching.” And Joe was watching too.
He went to the show at Birmingham and when he saw this disgusting reception he burst into tears, putting half the blame on the Outlaws’ attitude. But though he was deeply hurt he was angry too and as determined as ever. At another venue he attended at Croydon’s Fairfield Halls the first few front rows stood up and turned their backs on Heinz throughout his act. Joe was there waiting in the wings when he left the stage to push him back on for an encore.
After the week of one-nighters was blessedly over, he was afraid it had done Heinz’s career a lot of harm. In no way though did he see himself responsible; for that fiasco he quite justifiably blamed the promoter, saying he should have known who was suitable for the bill. But by rights Heinz should not have been playing anywhere at all at that time, let alone on the Jerry Lee Lewis tour. Clocking in for filming each day at Pinewood Studios from 6.30 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. was quite enough for a day’s work, without the pressures of performing onstage around the country every evening – a routine which had forced the nurse at Pinewood to put him on pills to keep him awake. And there was only one person to blame for this clash of commitments because as Heinz’s personal manager Joe knew all the schedules well in advance. But he was in a hurry to make him a star, and as he himself was ready to move Heaven and earth he expected Heinz to be the same.
Although most of his attention was now centred on Heinz, there were still plenty of other irons in the fire to keep him busy. On the Tornados front things had not been faring well either. Their latest disc, ‘Robot’, had made the Top Twenty but No.17 was nothing to dance a jig over. Heinz’s departure after their rendezvous in Paris had brought mixed blessings. On the plus side it gave the band a chance to pull themselves together and start afresh. A lot of jealousy and frustration had been brewing as they saw themselves playing second fiddle to a bass player they didn’t even rate. As their drummer, Clem Cattini, puts it, “He didn’t know a crotchet from a hatchet.” But it had been Heinz getting most of the attention while they were left sitting on the sidelines getting less and less of it.
Little things had niggled them like arriving at photo sessions to find that they were all to be dressed alike except Heinz, who was to wear something special. Of course Heinz as the group’s focal point had made good business sense but that decision had not been reached till after their first record. Then as the weeks had passed, the more interested in him Joe became, the more agitated they became. First they had seen it as favouritism, then later concluded they had become a vehicle for Heinz’s career; and Joe, never the most tactful of people and never seeing any reason why he should explain his actions to anyone, had not improved the situation. He knew of the antagonism towards Heinz and wrongly sensed it as being indirectly aimed at himself; he thought it was due entirely to their opinion of Heinz’s singing and playing, so because he was the one who had discovered him, they must be against him as well. The Tornados for their part had done their best not to make their feelings felt in case he blew up and disowned them. Now hopefully they could start again.
On the negative side, when Heinz left the band he took what little glamour they possessed with him. From here on it was going to be a hard haul. And there was something else far more threatening that the Tornados as well as Heinz and all of Joe’s other artistes were now having to contend with: Merseybeat.
Merseybeat had actually been around since ’60 but confined to Liverpool and Hamburg, so hardly anyone else had heard of it. Many of the bands playing it had sprung up as skifflers in the wake of Lonnie Donegan, and had then absorbed other musical styles. With the benefit of Liverpool’s position as a West Coast seaport they were able to assimilate the latest country’n’western, rhythm’n’blues and rock’n’roll sounds brought in by seamen from America, and by ’61 it was all the rage, with about 300 groups floating around the Liverpool area. Elsewhere no one was interested, except in Hamburg where German audiences lapped it up, responding especially well when it was given a hearty beat. All these influences had merged to create a new earthy force in music which Liverpudlians and Hamburgers could proudly call their own.
By far the most popular exponents were the Beatles who regularly topped the Merseybeat polls. But even though they were being idolized in their own city, when their manager Brian Epstein had brought them down to London at the beginning of January ’62 he had had difficulty getting them a recording contract. Decca’s Dick Rowe and Mike Smith became famous as the first men to turn them down, and the oft-quoted remark Epstein received at the time – “Guitar groups are on the way out, Mr. Epstein” – draws a smile nowadays. But Decca were not the only ones to blunder, and had it not been for Epstein’s resilience his group would have taken rather longer to crack the market. Decca, Pye, Philips, Columbia and HMV all turned down the chance of signing themselves a goldmine. And so did Joe.
According to Joe, Epstein wined and dined him all over London but they could not agree on terms. Epstein, he said, wanted too large a percentage for doing too little work. This seems unlikely since by this time Epstein was growing desperate. Joe meanwhile was no more impressed with their audition tape than anyone else, seeing the Beatles as just another noisy group covering other people’s songs. It seems far more likely that Joe was the one asking for the extra high percentage and that desperate though Epstein was, he was not that desperate!
What fruit a Meek/Beatles union might have borne is fascinating to ponder. At this point in his career Joe would have made few concessions to the Merseybeat sound. Epstein was pretty anxious, so it would have been Joe calling the shots, and no way would he have avoided making his own presence felt on their discs. Had he allowed them to record their own songs, no doubt ‘Love Me Do’ and the other hits would have had a fair touch of echo and compression added plus the slightly muffled quality that results from overdubbing. Overall, their natural rawness would have been replaced by a more ‘produced’ sound. If everyone concerned had managed to stay the course the Beatles/Meek sound would have been imitated throughout the land, whilst that of Merseybeat would probably have been shorter-lived. Considering producer George Martin’s huge influence on the Beatles’ product it is highly likely that Joe’s contribution would have been just as great if not greater. However, given the contrasting personalities of Joe and John Lennon it is doubtful their association would have taken in more than the first two or three records, and the Epstein camp saved themselves a lot of bother when they found George Martin.
Be that as it may, none of this new music was doing his efforts with the Tornados any good at all. Much to his annoyance the Liverpool invasion was attracting immense teenage attention, with record companies snapping up beat groups like there was no tomorrow. It seemed that no sooner had the Tornados’ futuristic prototype sound been unveiled than it was obsolete, as shown by the relatively poor placing of their latest disc, ‘Robot’. Of course, that was not the way he saw it. That kind of opinion he would have described as the burblings of an imbecile, for to his mind the sound of the Tornados would still be sweeping all before it long after Merseybeat was dead and buried; Merseybeat was nothing but another craze like skiffle, trad jazz and the Twist that would just as quickly burn itself out. Furthermore he felt that its simplistic see-through style was regressive, harking back to the rock’n’roll era and doing nothing whatever to advance electronic techniques; he called it “matchbox music”. Nevertheless he could not ignore the fact that, however temporarily, it was biting into his own record sales and, given for example the obvious commerciality of ‘Robot’, it was hard to imagine missing the Top Ten had there been no Liverpool opposition. After all, the band were still doing a roaring trade on the Continent and Australia, pulling in No.1’s in countries yet to hear of Merseybeat.
Besides grappling with Merseybeat and the other million music matters, he was also digging deeper into business. Top of the agenda was the forming of no less than four new companies! The first was simply a joint publishing company with Southern Music. Called Bluebell Music it gave him a bigger share in the profits of songs he placed with them.
The next one, Joe Meek Associates, was much grander. Before it went into action in March he told the Gloucester Journal he was going into the personal management field soon: “I have the backing of a multi-millionaire and he is prepared to sink quite a lot of cash into the venture.” The multi-millionaire was not the well-feathered Major Banks but the managing director of a noted oil and gas heating company called Valor, whose name was Michael Montague. Joe had been friendly with him for a while and through his visits to Holloway Road, Montague had started paying close attention to Joe’s Greek singer, Andy Cavell. So far Cavell’s recording career consisted of two flop singles, and with Joe fast losing interest in him his future had offered all the blossoming promise of an old wreath. But Montague was entranced and felt that with enough money behind him, Cavell’s tide was sure to turn. Joe was also getting him to inject funds into Heinz’s career, and if dreams came true the company would soon be budding out further putting it on a par with RGM Sound.
Following right behind came Heinz Burt Ltd. This one was set up to cope exclusively with Heinz and his band and would depend upon their concert, film, TV and radio appearances for its existence. Joe was going to take a leaf out of Larry Parnes’s book by putting Heinz and his men on a salary; this, working out at £27.10s.0d. for Heinz along with expenses, would be deducted from the company’s income. Partnering him this time and dealing with all the paperwork was an accountant he had found in the Strand, by the name of Tom Shanks. White haired, elderly looking and walking with a stick, he was the other man Joe hoped would eventually take over with Montague all Banks’s work. With his clear, deep voice and totally soothing and fatherly manner heightened by an appearance that reminded one of Pinocchio’s father, he at once inspired trust. Qualities such as friendliness, a sense of humour and the ability to talk at length on the music business, none of which Joe had ever found in Major Banks, were quick to win him over. Mr. Shanks was already a director of some showbiz companies whose affairs he was also accounting, including that of Petula Clark Ltd., so he was well experienced.
The last company was called Joe Meek Enterprises. Again with Shanks partnering, it would be taking his songwriting royalties and other bits and pieces.
The first week of May was to deal him mixed fortunes. On May 1 came a bolt out of the blue. The fear that every prolific songwriter has that a tune of his might accidentally resemble someone else’s and get him sued for breach of copyright suddenly became an awful reality for Joe. Ivy Music’s Roy Berry had been worried when ‘Globetrotter’ was brought in to him: the one tune of Joe’s stock that smacked of plagiarism. To be sued by the writers of ‘Venus In Blue Jeans’ would have been vexing but no staggering surprise. The staggering surprise was that it was not over ‘Globetrotter’ that he was being sued – but ‘Telstar’!
The trouble stemmed from an obscure piece of French film music called ‘Le Marche d’Austerlitz’ written in 1960 by composer Jean Ledrut. The film, The Battle Of Austerlitz, starred Pierre Mondy and described Napoleon’s European campaigns. According to the Frenchman it was on his march that ‘Telstar’s’ tune was based. Joe was horrified that anyone could possibly think him capable of doing such a thing, declaring that he had quite enough music of his own in his head without stealing someone else’s. He had never heard of ‘Le Marche d’Austerlitz’ and had hardly had much opportunity since the film was yet to be shown in this country – and he had never been to France before 1963 – while the music itself had only had one performance in the UK anyway, and that was in Northern Ireland.
When comparing the two pieces it is clear that ‘Telstar’ is unquestionably the better music by far, and though there is a similarity between the opening notes of each composition, it is hard when listening to them to see how anyone who wrote ‘Telstar’ could copy such an undistinguished piece of music as ‘Austerlitz’.
At once all further ‘Telstar’ royalties were frozen. So far he had banked a nice fat £29,000 as RGM Sound’s 5 percent of disc sales but nothing had yet come through in the way of composer’s royalties; that would all have to wait. Nor could he expect much joy from Ivy Music. Like all music publishing contracts, the one he had signed with them indemnified the publisher of all responsibility in case of copyright infringement. So although Joe and Ivy had a common enemy their grounds for contesting the case were different; Ivy had their own lawyers and recommended another firm to Joe. Then it was a matter of sitting back and waiting for the Frenchman to make his next move.
Although the action-packed first week of May belonged to Heinz as far as effort was concerned, it was to Joe that all the glory went. Receiving the Ivor Novello Award on television at the BBC on May 4 had to be the proudest moment of his life. The bronze statuette was the latest and best of the bumper crop of credits ‘Telstar’ had dropped into his lap, and was worth its weight in gold. It was the supreme accolade from the British music industry to a composer. Nothing could have hammered home better his unparalleled success as an independent. To all the scoffers who had sniggered at the mention of his do-it-yourself, dust-laden studio; to all the smart-arses who had dismissed his music as over-produced trash; to all those carping critics who had derided his unsophisticated singlemindedness: here was his reply. And to make the occasion even more deliciously satisfying, when the big moment arrived and he walked up to collect his trophy, there waiting to present it to him was none other than David Jacobs! Perhaps those insults had been worth it after all.
If there were three words to sum up his current lifestyle, they were either ‘Music, music, music’ or ‘Pressure, pressure, pressure’. By anyone else’s standards the recording of Heinz and the Tornados plus the managing of their careers was more or less a full time job in itself. But there were at least another twenty acts on his books to be catered for, as well as prospective pop stars knocking at the front door day and night. He had now become Britain’s best known producer. His name was the only one consistently mentioned in the music press and to get an audition at Holloway Road was considered as great a feat as getting one at EMI or Decca. It meant a lot to groups that he was the one rated the best at capturing the American sound with good, thick, thudding bass instead of the usual thin clickety-click. Over the past few months communications with 304 had increased dramatically and it sometimes seemed like the whole of the music industry was descending on the man they were saying had the Midas touch: publishers, songwriters, singers, groups, managers, session men, record company men, reporters, booking agents, sponsors for musical equipment and so on. Of course, most of what he touched did not turn to gold and this was even more apparent with record companies scrambling for just about any scraps he threw their way. Because of this and the fact he could no longer spare much time on each recording, there was a sharp rise in mediocre material.
And there was a sharp rise in broken sessions. Success always brings problems and he was finding it increasingly difficult coping with his. During these months particularly he was really taking on too much and letting his mushrooming responsibilities get the better of him. There had been times in the past when he had worked excessively hard, notably in the build-up to his first recording with Jimmy Miller & the Barbecues and the inaugural weeks of Lansdowne and Triumph. If his workrate then could be described as that of a Trojan, it now had to be that of a galley slave. Always he had been a great one for moods and depressions but Geoff Goddard says they were now getting frequent: “In 1963 I got the impression that Joe seemed to be coming under an increasing strain and more temperamental. If anybody said anything critical about for example the sound that he would try to create on his records he would suddenly blow up and become very aggressive and then calm down again. He wasn’t like that when I first met him; he was rather erratic, but not like that. At first he was likeable, very likeable, but then he changed about 1962. It seemed to be driving him into the ground: too bold with the music business. Joe used to get very on edge, very tense and was liable to start shouting but then he’d calm down again. I can remember once I arrived and I was a bit late, and when I got upstairs he didn’t say anything. Then I sat down in the studio with all the musicians round me. Joe came in and said, ‘When you came into the flat you slammed the door. Don’t slam the door again.’ He went marching out, I lost my temper and started swearing and we could all hear Joe shouting in the next room. He shouted, ‘Everything – it’s over, finished’, and ran off down the stairs. And then someone said, ‘Sit down and calm down and he’ll come back again’, which he did.”
Geoff’s opinion that he was getting bolder with the business was well-founded. His hard-line attitude was brought on partly by his growing mistrust of everyone, all of whom he was certain were out to fleece him, and partly by his feeling that he now had more weight to throw around with which to keep the predators in their place. His arrogant treatment of music people in general, be they bosses or backroom boys, which was characterized by his buccaneering catchphrase: “They need me, I don’t need them”, was not a wise one, but one he knew he could get away with as long as the hits kept coming. Heinz recalls witnessing, for example, one of his many crusty phone conversations: “I was in the office at the time when he had one hell of an argument with Sir Edward Lewis, the managing director of Decca. And Joe was speaking to him because Lewis had turned down one of his recordings and he told him to ‘f––– off. I’ll take my tapes somewhere else’, slammed the phone down, picked the typewriter up – straight against the wall. I remember that one because the typewriter hit that wall and there was a big hole in it.”
Earlier in the year when Geoff gave him a gold watch to commemorate their past twenty super-successful months together, his reaction to it was not one Geoff expected. He took it, looked at it and instead of giving the customary display of tears, hurled it on the table screaming that he didn’t want it because his name had not been engraved on it. So, that little gift turned out rather a waste of time.
One of his weaknesses was in believing good write-ups. Glowing reports of his achievements were swelling his head, making him bolshier than ever. True, he had always held his own abilities in the highest esteem but never before had his opinions been shared by so many.
Another example from his many broken sessions involved the Outlaws, and is graphically illustrated by their bass player, Chas Hodges: “You never knew how to handle Joe; you was always a bit on edge. You could never prophecy how he was going to react to anything. In this one instance he’d just bought this new mike. He was going, ‘That’s great, isn’t it?’ He was really knocked out with it. He said, ‘I think I’ll use it for Ken’ – Ken Lundgren, the guitar player. And for some reason Ken had a way of doing the wrong thing, as far as Joe went, and Joe would fly off at him. Joe put a box down, rested the mike stand on the box. He goes out and Ken, who was a bit clumsy, turns round, knocks the mike down: crash! Oh, what have we done now? We all sort of sat there. Ken picked it up. Joe’s bound to know because he’s heard the crash. And he come walking in and we all looked. And he had a slight smile on his face, so we all relaxed and smiled. And suddenly he screamed, ‘F––– off out of it!’ And he picked up these tape spools to throw at us and we run down the stairs. We’d just have to get out of it – you’d like flee for your life. We’d shoot off for a couple of hours and then ring him up or you’d just come back in and you’d say nothing, and you’d just gauge the situation by how he looked at you when he come in. When he used to get a mild attack of temper one of his favourite tricks was he would just run downstairs and put on a record at full blast: the whole building would shake. He was great, nice, quiet-spoken or when he lost his temper he had a tone of voice: it would go right through your head. He could really shout when he wanted to.”
He could also be quite abusive when he felt like it, as Don Charles noticed: “He used to speak to them like shit, some of them. There were always kids in the bloody passageway waiting – you never knew what they were waiting for. Any hour of any day they were stood there, just in a dingy old passage outside his lounge; hundreds of the bastards, stood all over just waiting – absolutely incredible. And when he rowed, everybody went, everything went up in the air, everybody got out. And he used to just clear off and he’d slam the doors until they almost fell off their hinges.”
Two newspaper interviews appeared at the time. Although yielding no startling revelations they did throw a little light on the high-flying Joe Meek of May ’63. When asked by the Gloucester Journal how he summed himself up he replied, “I’m a dreamer. Very temperamental and very ambitious. But lately people have been telling me I’ve been working too hard, that I’m ready to crack up. I’ll admit I do feel tired sometimes. Sixteen hours a day is some going but I enjoy work. I’m doing what I really want to do. Still, I’ll probably take a holiday in Spain next month.” The holiday though, he added, depended on whether or not he could find the time.
The interview with the Melody Maker concentrated on his musical activities:
What do you say to people who attack ‘Telstar’ as being banal?
I think it was a good tune. If it was played by the Hallé Orchestra it would be a great piece of music. What’s wrong with it? It has sold three million… Okay, so it was a cook-up and had gimmicks. So have the trad records in this country, haven’t they? I wrote ‘Telstar’ one midnight. I think it’s good – but I suppose it could nag on people a lot.
Which artistes do you supervise?
… The newest one is Heinz Burt. We’ve just cut his first solo disc since he left the Tornados to go solo – ‘Dreams Do Come True’. He will be the biggest star in the pop world within a year, rivalling Cliff Richard. This new disc is bound to top the charts.
Don’t you think you are unfair, inflicting your own musical notions on artistes and moulding them all into your style instead of letting them develop naturally?
No, that’s not really true at all. They all have different styles when they arrive – and they arrive in droves at the door. It’s a mad scene. There are so many singers wanting to work with me. But I don’t mould them into my ideas completely. I just try to cultivate any talent they have and make them sound commercial. I did it with John Leyton on his early discs, I think. I don’t foist my own plans down their throats, no.
The beat scene has many critics who say the music is trash. You are fostering it. What’s your answer?
The pop scene in Britain is getting better in quality all the time, in my opinion. It used to be everyone trying to sound and look like Cliff Richard. Now things are much more individual. I’d like to have a go back at the critics of the pop scene. Would Matt Monro’s discs be so marvellous without good orchestral backings? No. Instrumental parts mean everything. So why not bring them to the foregound more?
Who are your favourite artistes?
Judy Garland, Les Paul & Mary Ford, some of Ella’s work and modern jazz. I shall start recording jazz soon – trad, by the Dauphine Street Six. We’ll try something different.
What is your future?
I want to go into films and write a musical. As it stands, I’m quite happy with the way things are going. I have a lot of critics in the business. They are just damned jealous because one man has done so well. One thing they forget is this: my years as deejay helped me judge what the public wants. So few of the people in this business know that. Why are people so jealous at anybody who gets up and works?
He also seized his chance to lunge out at the infernal Merseybeat. While the Beatles were on top with their first No.1, ‘From Me To You’, having taken over from fellow Merseysiders Gerry & the Pacemakers’ ‘How Do You Do It’, and with scores more beat groups bubbling under, a little dampening of this dangerous ardour was called for: “There’s nothing new about their sound. Cliff Bennett & the Rebel Rousers have been doing the same thing for a year now and, up to a point, so has Joe Brown. I really don’t understand all this fuss about the Liverpool sound. I like it, but it’s not as new as everybody is trying to make out. I haven’t been to Liverpool but I might make a trip up there around the end of the summer, but that depends on how it fits in with my other plans. I had hundreds of groups down here from Liverpool before the Beatles made it big but none of them had anything very different. Some of them in fact were just rubbish.”
One of the Liverpool bands going into battle for him was a 20 year old Freddie Starr with the Midnighters. Joe’s singing friend, Dave Adams, had been doing some talent spotting when he saw them playing at Streatham Ice Rink. He rang Joe in the early hours to tell him of his find and an audition was fixed there and then. Later a jubilant Joe told the press of the outcome: “I couldn’t believe that nobody had snapped them up before. I was the first person ever to record Adam Faith, and Freddie is one of the most talented artistes I’ve ever worked with since then. The session was tremendous fun and Freddie was entertaining all the time. I remember Adam had this quality and I’m pretty confident that Freddie can become as big a star. He’s got that extra something”.
That extra something may have referred to Freddie’s irreverent sense of humour, which was not entirely to Joe’s taste. Once during a session he walked in to find the singer strutting about with his trousers round his ankles; nor did he find it funny the day he asked Freddie to go into the studio to test the microphones. The sound Joe heard as he checked his levels was Freddie’s singing interspersed with short silent gaps; half an hour was spent searching for the fault before he realized that the silent gaps came when Freddie shut his mouth. Then he nearly smashed the microphone and ran downstairs screaming. Practical jokes at his expense were not appreciated.
However, jokes at other people’s expense were another matter. For example, there was the case of the terrible saxophone player. Again and again Joe was having him play his solo, full of rude blasts of wind and bum notes; meanwhile the backing band were concentrating their deepest, fearing for their lives should Joe hear them burst out laughing, and over and over the sax player played getting worse and worse with every take. Then the bass player suddenly noticed Joe around the corner looking at him doubled up, trying his best to suppress his giggles! Another day while he was watching a rehearsal of Houston Wells & the Marksmen, someone’s guitar finger-pick accidentally flew off like an arrow into the bass player’s nostril. The sight of the poor chap desperately trying to play on regardless had him in stitches. And often when he stopped a session to crack a joke or tell a funny anecdote he would end it staggering around with laughter. One of his own favourite stories concerned his rubber soundproofing. In earlier days when he found himself losing drum sounds through the studio floor, he had had the floorboards prized up under the drums and had tipped in a tin of liquid rubber. He would recall with wicked mirth the sight of his horror-stricken landlady, Mrs. Shenton, as she watched it seeping through the ceiling below and running down the walls. The butt of much Outlaws mickey-taking was Geoff Goddard. His weird, unsettling way of gazing at a person as if in a trance, together with the thick country accent and short, sharp bursts of laughter all put him four-square in the firing line. Even Joe thought he was a bit odd and loved to explain how a certain record was destined to be a smash hit because Geoff had said he had been talking to a cow that morning, and the cow had told him so.
When he was back in his control room, though, he generally preferred the Outlaws not laughing at Geoff or anyone else because automatically he thought he himself was their target. At those times he was pleased to find ways of getting his own back. One of the many musicians who often did not see eye to eye with him was the Tornados’ drummer, Clem Cattini. During one session Joe came rushing into the studio to clip him round the ear, and when the astonished Clem asked him what it was for, since he had done nothing, he told him it was for when he did. Then there were the auditionees who would sometimes find themselves utterly castigated for their lack of talent, only to be startled on their way out by a broad grin and the news that really they were very good indeed and could record right away.
As usual despite the importance of honing Heinz into shape he was still making time for other sessions. Groups were in and out like clockwork mice. Non-stop names like the Cameos, the Beat Boys and the Puppets, all of whom mean less than nothing nowadays, were each seeking their bit of glory as they lugged their equipment up and down the narrow stairs. Amongst the many rejected were the Kon-Rads, the first group to feature saxophonist David Jones, later to find more favour as David Bowie.
His workrate was phenomenal, as was his rate of record releases: the May-July average amounted to an astounding one release per week. As always he was spreading his options wide in a bid to please everyone, and on offer he had old style pop, rock-’n’roll, country’n’western, folk, Merseybeat and instrumentals.
Of his solo singers he was pushing four girls. One of them was an attractive 19 year old Glenda Collins, for whom he had written a song called ‘I Lost My Heart At The Fairground’. It turned into what one might describe as a typical Joe Meek record with everything being thrown in: sad lyrics, sound effects from a fairground, galloping beat, organ, echo, choir and heavy, solid bass.
Glenda had a good voice and was to complement several of his records over the next few years. Before meeting him she had already been contracted to Decca for three years as their ‘answer’ to Helen Shapiro, but she says it was not until the contract expired and her father brought her to Holloway Road that she found her potential: “It was very nice recording for Decca but it was much more exciting recording for Joe. It was his personality: he sort of inspired you. When I recorded for Decca I was only 16 at the beginning. I remember it was for Mike Smith. He was very good and he told me more or less how to sing because I was a real novice at it completely then, but he couldn’t have brought out in me what Joe did. It was a different thing altogether; there was a certain something in the way Joe would get you to sing and get you to feel the music and the record. I think I possibly needed someone like Joe to bring out something a little bit more, because just merely singing the songs like I was at Decca, I don’t think would have clicked with anybody… I thoroughly enjoyed working with Joe because he was a very alive and a very conscientious sort of person and he had new ideas. He was a very unusual sort of person and consequently he had unique ideas of his own. I think possibly he was a genius; it may be an overworked word but one tended to get the feeling that he was.”
He was also paid a visit by the black-clad rocker Gene Vincent. As one of the original rock’n’roll greats Vincent’s career in the US had faded, but when he had later arrived in Britain he found himself hotly acclaimed by fans starved of the real thing. His career had then taken off all over again and he was still headlining tours. Thanks to the new film, Live It Up, he was to sing a rock’n’roll number of Joe’s called ‘Temptation Baby’ and went round with his band for an afternoon session. The finished song rocked along well, though Vincent was a bit taken aback to find himself recording in someone’s house and seeing the producer setting microphones and messing with wires.
As soon as Heinz was back from his stint at Pinewood Studios Joe started preparing him for the first of his Joe Meek package tours. Going round seaside resorts Heinz was scheduled to top a bill including Andy Cavell & the Saints, the Outlaws and Freddie Starr & the Midnighters. Naturally the project depended on ‘Dreams’ bagging a place somewhere in the charts but he had no worries on that score. Already he was bluffing the press with news of Heinz singing a French version for quick release in France, and giving them more nonsense about flying to Paris the following week for negotiations on a French film part and concert dates.
Reviews of ‘Dreams’ were on the whole good. The record was being fairly well played on the radio and getting stacks of publicity, and he braced himself for a reasonably big hit. And nothing happened. ‘Dreams Do Come True’ was one that didn’t and was to be the biggest turkey of his career. The next few weeks passed it by without a sound and after a month on release ‘Dreams’ was showing no sign whatever of breaking into any chart, and it was abundantly clear he was backing a bum steer. Nor was the Heinz-Tornados film, Farewell Performance, anywhere to be seen – so much for the mid-May release date. Subsequently his package tour crumbled. So all that was left was to send out a few fan club photos to those who had asked for them.
He had no hesitation in apportioning the blame and laid it fair and square at the feet of Decca and Ivy Music for not pushing the record hard enough. Regrettably, if they were at fault they were no more so than the song itself: the words were adequate but frankly the melody was feeble, while the overall sound was by now old hat. There were already more than enough ballads to go round from a list of singers as long as your arm and this one just did not have enough going for it. After an investment of around £10,000 on the Heinz build-up the record went on to global sales of 398 copies, bringing in to RGM the grand sum of £15.19s.5d.
To add to his troubles Major Banks was fuming at the sight of all the bills for Heinz’s newspaper adverts which kept landing on his doormat. And with nothing to show for those full front-page splashes he had something to fume about. All along, the Major had said Joe was spending too much on Heinz, and each new bill that dropped in was confirming it.
Joe was used to lesser disappointments and was bound to have a fair share of them since he expected every record he put out to be a hit. This one hurt like no other one had ever done and brought him right down, but he was not down and out. His hatred of depressions had long since taught him that their remedy lay in hard work, and seeing Heinz losing interest spurred him on all the more. From Heinz’s point of view the Jerry Lee Lewis tour had been a washout and along with the failure of ‘Dreams’ plus the cancellation of his latest tour, things seemed to be going from bad to worse. He told Joe how people were saying he had been crazy to leave the Tornados and that perhaps they were right; that perhaps he would never make the grade as a singer and that he would probably be better off as a bacon-slicer.
That kind of talk brought Joe down on him like a ton of bricks. It made him angry that he should even give a moment’s thought to abandoning a career almost before it had started, and no way was he about to let all that time and effort go to waste. But the cardinal factor behind his supporting Heinz went further than that.
The young man now meant a great deal more to him than a mere recording artiste. Of all his friends and all those he had signed up, there was only one who was really important: Heinz. His life revolved round him. Nor were his feelings towards him unrequited. In spite of Heinz’s taking full advantage of the female fans who regularly laid themselves on a plate for him, he did not deny Joe similar opportunities. Sharing the same bed and occasionally being caught together in a compromising position, clearly the relationship was not a platonic one.
And not only had Joe grown deeply fond of him but he had a lot of faith in his ability to win over the record-buying public. So what if there had been a dreadful tour and a flop first single? There would be other tours and the next single was bound to be a winner. After all, the Tornados had flopped with their first disc, and look what had happened with their second! And if they could do it, why not Heinz? He knew he could sell Heinz if he found the right song; if he could only dig out one from all those they had tried, then a hit was sure to come of it. Heinz would be a star and everyone would live happily ever after.
That was his attitude when he took Heinz and the Saints’ bass guitarist Tab Martin with him up to Newent for a weekend in June. Visits by Newent’s most famous son were always common knowledge, but when he brought pop personalities along too, the queues outside his house rivalled those once outside his father’s fish and chip shop. His niece, Sandra, who was 10 years old at the time describes the scene at No.1 High Street: “To me it was like a carnival without the flags when Tab and Heinz come down. That was the time that the house was open and all autographs were being signed. They sat at the table – Joe at one end, Heinz at the other, and Tab. And they just come in through the kitchen at the back and they just filed around the table and then went out again.”
Then after the weekend it was back to business, and finding the right song for Heinz was top priority. But already they had sifted through dozens of demos without any luck, so where was the winner? One thing was vital: it had to get well away from the sweet, outdated pap of the first and offer something more gutsy, more on the lines of Merseybeat.
He was still keen on the tribute Geoff Goddard had written to the late rock singer, Eddie Cochran. Called ‘Just Like Eddie’, Geoff’s demo had been knocking around for a year but as Heinz had disliked it he had not forced it on him. Now though he felt positive that if given the right treatment, it would sell well and he was determined Heinz should give it a go. Like Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran’s name had also become revered since his tragic death in a 1960 car accident, so a song dedicated to him was bound to be listened to with interest. Unlike the memorial service lyrics of its Buddy Holly predecessor the ones of this song were light-hearted, calling upon anyone feeling a bit under the weather to go out, where ‘beneath the stars you can play your guitars, just like Eddie.’ Geoff had made it all very subtle, not mentioning the name Cochran but with any luck saying just enough to brew up some controversy and get Heinz talked about. Joe also saw in it a chance of taking a fresh initiative with him; when the song struck oil it could make him a kind of ‘answer’ to Cochran, presenting him with a ready-made image and musical direction.
When Joe recorded him singing along to the Outlaws’ rhythm track the voice sounded so much improved that he sang on his own with nobody ghosting. The lead guitarist, Richie Blackmore, later to become famous for his work with heavy rock groups Deep Purple and Rainbow, also came in to fire up the melody, whilst the piano accompaniment and very effective oo-ing were courtesy of Geoff. In deference to the Merseybeat sound the recording ended up very clean for an RGM production, dispensing with the usual heavily laden echo.
If one could say that Heinz’s debut disc had been amongst the most crucial of Joe’s career then this follow-up was even more so. His reputation was at stake, so the sooner the record became a hit and erased the memory of that first king-sized catrastrophe the better. The trouble was that ‘Dreams’ had not only failed but had failed for all to see, and with the news of another Heinz release reaching the press, snide stories began seeping back to him of people in the business laughing up their sleeves about Heinz: “the pretty boy, Joe’s favourite and he can’t even play the bass properly.” It hurt but he was used to it. All his life he had had people sneering at him, so what was new?
While he again started looking forward to a Heinz harvest he piled on the pressure. Hiring a local Co-op Hall he made him buckle down to work, rehearsing the act over and over, criticizing and encouraging him all the time. What he had to give him above all was confidence. Those stage and TV appearances with the Tornados were not nearly enough, no matter how much faith Joe invested in him; it was one thing to be strumming innocently along within the security of a five-piece band, but quite something else to suddenly find oneself thrust out centrestage with TV cameras focused up your nose and a thousand pairs of eyes ogling you.
And there was Merseybeat to make his Heinz assignment harder. The Liverpool sound was the one getting the attention, and precious few solo singers were evolving from it. Of his current artistes like Andy Cavell, Don Charles and Geoff Goddard, none was selling well. British soloists of the pre-Beatles era were fast going out of fashion, and anyone whose name was not Cliff Richard was in for a bumpy ride. Stuck in the middle of his latest lean spell, with his groups looking poorly too, he would just have to keep on hammering away till one eventually clicked. And three did!
The first week of August was a smasher. To give him a treble chart treat were three new entries: Houston Wells & the Marksmen in one chart at No.47 with ‘Only The Heartaches’, while into another came the Saints at No.30 with ‘Wipeout’ and at last Heinz at No.29 with ‘Just Like Eddie’. He was elated. For him the appearance of the Heinz record was nothing short of triumph. He felt the thrill of the marathon runner who has not only finished the race but beaten all his rivals. At last he had been proved right, whilst once again his critics’ noses were being pushed out of joint. All his effort had been rewarded and he had put onto the music scene a brand new star who he intended making shine every bit as brightly as Cliff Richard himself.
Now it was action stations. First of all he had to phone Heinz’s mother in Southampton because Heinz was sunning himself with one of the Saints on board a motor launch somewhere off the Isle of Wight. The boat, a twenty-four foot, six-berth sloop, was jointly owned by Joe and Heinz through Heinz Burt Ltd. Costing £2,000 it was originally called ‘The Golden Heinz’, till Heinz insisted on changing that to the less camp ‘Globetrotter’. With pressure of work on the increase again it was anyone’s guess when Joe would get the chance to sail it. Anyway, Heinz was not to spend long on it for after four days of his planned fortnight’s holiday he rang home, picked up Joe’s message and returned to London to receive his long-awaited adulation.
And it was also back to the rehearsal grindstone, for there could be no mistakes this time. Heinz had fallen out with his previous backing group, the Outlaws, who from here on would only agree to back his records. Rather conveniently Andy Cavell had also fallen out with his group, so Heinz inherited his Saints and was back in business. As well as rehearsing him, Joe had to give him plenty of briefing on what to say and what not to say to the press. The image he wanted to foster was that of a happy but tough, ambitious rebel. Some of it was there already, though not the tough, rebellious aspects. However much Joe had him talk motorbikes in interviews he never really came across other than as what he was: an ordinary boy-next-door. Certainly there was never to be the gristly Cochran quality about him which Joe was hoping for.
Still, things were going well again, and Joe’s newspaper statements showed a distinct air of confidence born of victory in the field and the promise of more laurels to come: “I’m very proud that Heinz has made the charts so early in his career – I’ve had this feeling of certainty all the way that he’s destined for very big things in the world of showbusiness. You can’t keep an enthusiast like him in the background… Naturally I get a lot of people wanting a break on discs. But so many of them are just copying and they’re conceited as well. I find that the biggest stars are really the humblest of people.” Why he should suddenly start accusing people of copying seems ludicrous when there for all to see was Heinz – the latest in his squad of unoriginal artistes. Fortunately in Heinz’s case Joe had decided that onstage he was not to try and take over where Eddie Cochran had left off but merely to play on the name by sporting the same enthusiasm and performing a medley of Cochran’s hits. It was a wise decision since not only had Cochran been a highly rated stage performer and musician, but along with the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly had been an innovator of the blending of rock’n’roll into pop and was one of the greatest rock’n’rollers of the lot. Yes, Heinz would have needed more than three steps into his shoes.
He was soon booked onto a September tour with Billy J. Kramer and Tommy Roe and another one in October with Johnny Kidd & the Pirates, Dee Dee Sharp, the Caravelles and Houston Wells.
As the weeks passed, Joe had much to be pleased about. ‘Eddie’s’ chart position rose briskly, as did the standard of Heinz’s performance. The act was automatically more appealing now that there was a hit to latch it onto, and as Heinz’s self-assurance grew, so too did his pluck, and he was soon putting together quite a snappy show. Even his singing improved! Each show brought new confidence; the jeers turned to cheers and he was shortly getting the full screaming mob treatment, with souvenir hunters helping themselves to parts of his Ford Zephyr, covering the car in lipstick kisses and letting down the tyres to stop him leaving. But it was not until he played in Wolverhampton where fans presented him with a gift of two dozen cans of Heinz baked beans that he really knew he had arrived.
Of every performance Joe expected pure, unblemished super-excellence. He got round to seeing very few but one that he did not miss and which fell somewhat short of expectations is well remembered by PR man Keith Goodwin: “Heinz used to have this thing in the act where at one point he’d leap onto an amplifier, then onto a speaker and then onto the piano, and the guitarist would hurl the bass across and Heinz would catch it and go twang, twang, twang. Well, Joe was getting a lot of stick because Heinz was jumping on the lids of grand pianos all over the place and they were getting scratched. It was not in the days when we all wore plimsoles and that – he had these bloody boots on. So Joe told him: ‘You can’t keep doing this.’ One day on a show, I’d had a barney with Joe beforehand, and I went out and took the piano lid off and I had this big black cloth and put it on there instead. So Heinz in the show goes onto the amps, onto the speaker and he leaps on the piano and the first we heard was clang, cling, clang. Joe went f––– spare! He was going to sack every roadie, kill everybody. Absolutely bananas. He never found out who did it.”
In fact he withdrew Heinz from the tour completely, though it was not the prank that persuaded him. Curiously it was because the promoter of the tour, Brian Epstein, had invited Heinz to a party. His decision to pull him out came after watching a show at Chelmsford when, as usual, he was less than fully satisfied with Heinz’s performance and picked it to pieces. For the first time the criticism made Heinz bite back, a row ensued and Joe immediately thought Heinz was on his way to join Epstein. Joe’s assumption was rather less ridiculous when considering the number of artistes that had already been enticed away from him, and warning the younger man never to trust Epstein or anyone else, he was so concerned about it that he tried to put an end to his touring days altogether. Heinz by this time was pining to get onstage morning, noon and night but he says Joe wanted him safe at home around the flat and not hundreds of miles away being adored by hordes of screaming girls: “All he wanted was records and the people he cared about round him. Joe didn’t want me to go on tour – he was afraid that I’d meet somebody and drift away. He always said, ‘The longer you keep out of the limelight, the better it’ll be when you go back on the road.’ That was his attitude. There was an enormous ballroom tour. And I couldn’t go on tour. And he said, ‘You’ve got an interview with the papers,’ because the Mecca people started moaning and Joe said, ‘You tell them: ‘Ballrooms mean the kiss of death’.’ I was like in a prison: just sessions and a flat. So the pressure got on him and I had to go out.”
That next tour was to be with Bobby Rydell and Helen Shapiro, but before joining it Joe warned him against all the vultures that might be after him. And just in case that advice was not adhered to he put someone with him to make sure it was: Lional. Good old trusty Lional was the one person he could count on to make quite certain no undesirables laid hands on his precious protégé. And Lional was well aware of the responsibility invested in him: “Joe knew that I’d keep an eye on him. It was a big decision for Joe to make – he wouldn’t put anybody with him. He lived for nothing else, only Heinz. It was all him. I was offered good wages at the time [£20 per week] and I found it very interesting. It entailed doing everything for him: making sure he appeared at the theatres at the right time, possibly to drive him; always we had to spend hours in the dressing room bleaching his hair; I had to make sure he got all his clothes ready for when he went onstage and when he came off. He used to work very hard jumping all over the stage. I used to feel very proud in actual fact working with Heinz and Joe because the kids used to scream their heads off; he was a very popular boy. I’d keep him on the right tracks. Every day I had to phone Joe to let him know any news and how the show had gone down.” And he might well find himself telling Joe twice because, as Heinz recalls, even when the show was way outside London Joe would insist, “Oh that’s only 180 miles; you can come back tonight – Lional’s driving.”
Meanwhile away from all the Heinz fun and frolics the Tornados were busy at Great Yarmouth falling apart at the seams. Although for this season Billy Fury was not in sight, all was far from well. Their fourth single, a jolly little piece called ‘Ice Cream Man’, had only reached No.18.
Its poor placing was but one of many nails being driven into the Tornados’ coffin. His most successful act was withering away through lack of attention. Whilst any other independent producer would have thrilled to the Tornados’ fortunes and plunged all his efforts into maintaining them, Joe was now giving them little more time ration than to Peter Jay & the Jaywalkers, the Ramblers, the Packabeats or his string of other also-rans. Losing their Heinz appeal had indeed cost them dearly. Needling tempers more were the long, stressful months of stage and session work, and one by one they were leaving the sinking ship amidst various self accusations of greed, unprofessionalism and drunkenness plus reports of ill health. The rhythm guitarist had departed with his back in plaster after collapsing onstage, the organist followed soon afterwards suffering from an assortment of aches and pains, the bass player was sacked and the lead guitarist had just about had enough of everything. After an absurdly long delay their British album, ‘Away From
It All’, was eventually released at the end of September, having been on the go for nearly a year. Intended to show off the group’s versatility it was beautifully produced with some fairly good tunes, but by this time in their career it had to be exceptional to stand any chance and instead was just easy-listening.
The late arrival of the record was one more case of his mismanagement of the group, and but for his craving for more acts than were good for him it would have been on the market in the Spring while they were still at their peak. More than anything it was his hunger for fresh faces that denied them healthy sales. Had this been 1962 or earlier it would not have mattered so much; without the fearsome invasion from Liverpool to worry about, time would have been less pressing with just the Shadows to contend with. Instead they could only hope the ever-intensifying Beatlemania would hurry up and burn itself out; either that, or they should get down and pray that his latest front-page tongue-lashing in the NME would send all these new groups scampering back where they came from: “Don’t let’s kill the beat boom stone dead. At this rate the beat boom will be all over by Christmas. Liverpool characters come down here and ask for auditions and they think that just because they’re from up there they run the British music business. Let’s get it straight: only one or two Liverpool groups are worth bothering about. The rest are copying the Beatles or others. I appeal to the major record companies – don’t clutter the market and wreck the goose that lays the golden hit. At the moment there are so many copyist groups around that the fans will wise up to it and pack it all in. They’re not daft. Like everybody else in this country, I welcome the boom but managers, agents and everybody concerned have got to learn that to saturate the disc world with hundreds of tunes sounding the same is to invite disaster.” And in the Melody Maker: “I have always been a bit of a beat merchant but a lot of the records today sound like the B-sides of my recordings of a few years ago. I don’t think they deserve to be hits. The Beatles are in a class of their own but all the recording managers are trying to get a Beatle sound on other records. Sooner or later youngsters are going to realize new records all sound the same.”
He was right of course to an extent, but then again just as guilty as the rest of them. He had successfully captured the Merseybeat sound on discs by the Puppets and the Beat Boys but in so doing had made them sound the same as all the other beat groups. Likewise it would take a sharp ear to spot the difference between many of his other acts. If a band were not playing in a very distinctive style their identity on the recording could easily be spirited away in his magical bag of technical trickeries.
One artiste who had little fear of being spirited away anywhere was the ubiquitous Screaming Lord Sutch. No one else on Joe’s books sounded anything like him, nor indeed wanted to! Between them earlier in the year they had recorded some more first-class BBC blacklist material called ‘Jack The Ripper’. This was to be his Lordship’s most infamous and the nearest he would ever get to having a hit. It opens with the approach of hurried footsteps on cobblestones, followed by a woman’s breathless panting; suddenly the victim lets out a shriek, there is a dirty, ghoulish laugh and the chorus chants: ‘The Ripper… Jack the Ripper’, giving Sutch his cue to launch wickedly into Jack’s grisly tale.
The latest Sutch contribution was a meaty rendering of the Coasters’ ‘I’m A Hog For You’ backed by a spoof on ‘Venus In Blue Jeans’ called ‘Monster In Black Tights’. With ‘Monster’ Joe cocked a snook at all the knockers who had dared liken ‘Globetrotter’ to ‘Venus’; this time it was almost the same tune right through! Here, extracted from their music, the lyrics earn little credit, but writing them with Geoff during the session Joe laughed so much it gave him hiccups:
My monster in black tights,
You’ve got the kind of blood that I likes.
I remember the day you dragged me away
And left me on a barbed-wire fence.
My monster in black tights,
You’ve got the kind of eye that I likes,
With your wrinkled-up chin where the worms have been
You make me wanna hold you tight.
Oh I love to see you hopping along –
What else can you do with three legs? –
Though it may seem ever so wrong,
I like you best when you’re in your vest!
By happy chance its release just happened to coincide with Sutch standing for election to Parliament. Well, it made a change from tyrannizing shoppers as the Wild Man of Borneo or being driven by hearse in his coffin as he waved serenely to horrified passers-by.
The seat he was expecting to win, under his proper name of David Sutch, was the one at Stratford-upon-Avon vacated by disgraced War Minster Jack Profumo. Offering to take care of the constituents’ problems he set himself up on behalf of his newly formed National Teenage Party. “Vote for the ghoul: he’s no fool” – and he wasn’t. His campaigning was getting him front page coverage in all the national daily papers. However, voters were hardly likely to be impressed by such qualifications as the ability to sing ‘I’m A Hog For You’, so hopefully his manifesto would bring him support. The issues were not entirely preposterous. Apart from calling for more public lavatories in Stratford and the abolition of dog licences, his other proposals were for the introduction of commercial radio and for votes at 18: “You can fight for your country at 18 and you can be hung. But when it comes to voting you are still a child.” Though at the time people laughed, within a few years both proposals were to become reality. In the event he got all the publicity he needed for his touring horror show but not enough votes to give him a regular booking at the House of Commons. Tory candidate Angus Maude won with 15,000 odd while Sutch lost his deposit. His own total of 208 was actually quite heartening in view of the fact that the teenagers whom he was representing did not yet have the vote.
Joe was full of admiration. Publicity was a matter very dear to his heart for he was acutely aware of the power of the press, the importance of image and the need for promotion: that you don’t just stick out a piece of plastic saying, like many muttonheads still were, that records are sold through your ears not your eyes. Every record he had out he wanted someone working on, and if it was by an act he personally managed like the Tornados, then more often than not he was the one to foot the bill. Though record companies often placed adverts they were not always keen to prize open their wallets and give his discs the push he felt they deserved.
While enviously watching Lord Sutch’s masterful talents he could only console himself with the thought that the Sutch method of shouting his self-assertions from the rooftops was rather too wild for the image of his own artistes. At the same time he could not help comparing the effect of the other man’s homemade publicity with what he himself was getting from the professionals, and Sutch says he was not impressed: “He told me: ‘I spend hundreds of pounds hiring these bloody useless publicity agents and they do nothing. You do ten times more on your own.’ To advertise one of my records I suggested we get a vanload of sheep and go down Oxford Street and let them all out during the rush hour. He had the horrors: ‘Oh no, I can’t put my name to that! Say one of the sheep got killed: there’d be a stampede of animal lovers in here.’ I had a 22-foot lifelike alligator on top of a van going round the streets and would put it on the beach to frighten the bathers. He’d suggest more straightforward things. It was Joe’s idea for me to visit the streets of Whitechapel late at night dressed as Jack the Ripper; all the places frequented by Jack: pubs, clubs, back alleys. I did and it got local publicity. He did suggest that I did a whole review with this Jack the Ripper and make it into like a mini-opera and he’d have written some more music. He was saying I could make it into a big production for my stage show and stabbing women, running about with a big butcher’s knife. He liked that idea. He was intrigued by horror films like I was: the Draculas and the Frankensteins and all the classic horror films and he came and saw my act. That’s why I was an ideal artiste for him – we were both intrigued with horror. He loved it because it was a different approach and gave him something to get his teeth into. He was fed up with just the pretty-boy singers all the time and wanted to get away from all that.”
Another of Joe’s ideas was even more outrageous. At a time when the War Department were selling off old submarines at a few hundred pounds apiece, he suggested to Sutch that they buy one together and that Sutch sail it down the Thames and threaten to blow up the Houses of Parliament. “It’ll still get publicity,” he assured him, “even if it sinks!” Lack of funds scotched that one.
Those “bloody useless publicity agents” Joe referred to were during this period one Keith Goodwin. £10 a week was a fair old whack to be paying out in ’63, but it was buying the skills of someone who could convince journalists that a certain artiste or production had something worth hearing; and besides getting especially good coverage of Heinz, there were occasional stories on Andy Cavell and the Tornados plus useful mentions of various others.
Curiously those same skills that Keith used when foisting his information onto newsmen often came in handy when extracting that information from Joe. It was not that Joe was short of things to talk about but short of time to do it. Every week there was just one phone call in which Keith had to try and collect all the facts together to put out a news release: items of gossip, dates of tours, anecdotes – anything. Such a system of gathering information depended entirely on getting Joe away from whatever he was doing and into the right frame of mind to make his latest report. This was an art. Nobody could speak firmly to him and be sure of getting away with it, but Keith says his chances of success were better than most: “I had this knack. I could ring him up and he’d say, ‘I’m busy, I’m busy,’ and I’d say, ‘Well you’re f––– un-busy and you talk to me or you don’t get value for the money you’re paying me – suit yourself.’ ‘Oh, you’re getting me in a corner.’ ‘Yes, talk to me!’ I could do it with him and he’d actually go and turn a tape off or whatever and sit down and talk. We’d be on the phone sometimes half an hour, sometimes longer. Once he got going he’d come up with information for three or four good stories, snippets and so on and I’d have material for another week. Also he’d ring me up almost weekly and tell me he had a great new star; every one was the biggest thing since sliced bread – every one! And once a week: ‘I’ve got this record and you’ve got to listen to it.’ So maybe you’d trot over and listen to it. Sometimes you’d hear a three parts decent record, sometimes you’d hear one and think, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ A lot of them, I must admit, I liked. From then on, Joe was immediately into that one project until the next morning when he had another brilliant idea for somebody else. I think he treated his artistes well in the sense that he tried to do his very best for each and every one of them. His faith in them was genuine.
“Sometimes he’d ring up with some poxy story that he really believes is the front page of the Daily Mirror – absolute nonsense. I remember he rang up about how an artiste recorded a song and it turned out that all the musicians on the session were the same star sign, and so was he, and so was the artiste who sang on it and so was the lady who made the tea and so was the lady’s cat. This, according to him, was a good story. He’d made it up. This fellow Burr Bailey was David Adams and at one point with Joe he had a record coming out as Joy & Dave, one as the Saints, one as Burr Bailey and one as Silas Dooley Jnr: all set to come out within about three months. Joe told me we could make him the great mystery man, and when they all get in the charts we can explode the myth of who they all are. All four getting in the bloody charts! Two of them weren’t even released. Another time the Tornados had a new record out and were playing a big London gig. Joe said, ‘We’ve got to really publicize this gig. We’ve got to find a way.’ He rang me up quite late at night at the office. He said, ‘I’ve got a great idea. I’ll hire these kids. We’ll start at Piccadilly Circus and we’ll draw these big arrows in white paint on the road up every street, and eventually these arrows all meet and point to this venue. People are bound to see them, and their curiosity will get the better of them and they’ll have to follow the arrows.’ I said, ‘Brilliant. But where are you going to find all these kids to give them a fiver to do it and what compensation do you pay their parents when they’re all run down?’ He said, ‘We’ll do it in the early hours of the morning.’ He phoned the next day and didn’t even mention it. So I said, ‘What about this wondrous idea?’ He said, ‘Well I talked to a couple of youngsters and they were quite prepared to do it but their parents wouldn’t let them out in the early hours.”’
Keith’s flair for cornering him on the phone did not however stretch to his meetings with him at 304 during the day. Arriving there at the pre-arranged time of 3p.m., he would often find himself competing for Joe’s attention with a dozen or so other people: perhaps publishers with songs, artistes’ managers, musicians waiting to be paid, and by the time Joe got around to talking to him about what he had got him there to talk about, three hours might have elapsed. Keith soon learnt that the way round it was to avoid the ballyhoo and make sure that future meetings were in the evening. When they met, each man would suggest ideas for publicity and, as Keith continues, Joe was never stuck for things to say: “His ideas tumbled out one after the other. God knows how many went by the board because he hadn’t noted them down and had forgotten them the next day. He was always on the go; he very rarely sat in one place for long: up and down like a jack-in-the-box. He was always rabbiting about one thing and thinking about something else. You’re sitting there and suddenly he gets up and walks behind you, and you hear rustle, rustle, rustle; you turn round, he’s pulled out three cushions and he’s diving down the back of a settee. What he’s been thinking of is someone he started recording and didn’t know how to finish, and has now got the finish in his head and has gone to find the tape. But he hasn’t lost the thread of the conversation – he’s still talking! And he sits down again and ten minutes later suddenly pulls out a picture he’s been thinking of giving you: ‘Oh, and by the way…’ To keep track of him was the big adventure. He was jumps ahead of what he was saying.”
When Joe tried his own hand at salesmanship his style was full of sugar-coated sincerity. But though he realized artistes needed a boost to help them along, his mistake was to boost them too far for their own good. Thus when he phoned up some writer of a teenage magazine to tell him, for example, that Andy Cavell was “definitely going to be an international star next week and must be interviewed at once”, the writer would be bowled over by his enthusiasm. Unfortunately when the interview took place, Andy Cavell had no way of living up to the flattering introduction. So next time round, the writer would not be so easily duped by Joe’s sales pitch. Instead those huge dollops of sincerity had the writer wondering whether Joe had the mind of a child or whether Joe thought the writer had.
Moving into the autumn, things were going very well. He had lots of new acts on disc, including Gunilla Thorne, a Swedish model cum singer who understandably looked very nice indeed, and Pamela Blue, another cracker who made Christmas crackers and who had been given Joe’s phone number by Screaming Lord Sutch after meeting him at a show and singing for him. Now she was singing one of the catchiest melodies Geoff Goddard had written, another little death ditty, titled ‘My Friend Bobby’. In failing to reach the charts it was to turn out one of the most eligible contenders for the Joe Meek Top Twenty tracks of ‘those that got away’, and give the lie to the line that you can’t keep a good song down.
Another one that slipped the net, but which this time deserved to, was a trite sounding obscurity called ‘Sky Men’. Written and sung by Geoff it was surprisingly unimaginatively produced, and instead of Joe lavishing it with odd spacey sound effects the best he could manage was to give Geoff a Dalek-type voice, which sounded more strange than spacey going with his Berkshire accent. In the song Geoff describes a close encounter with alien beings: ‘Children of Earth, be not afraid, for we come in peace’. He says his inspiration for it was the sighting one night of a light travelling by with jerky movements. Running out into the garden he watched it pass overhead and as it drifted away he sent out all the right thoughts to bring it back again the following night. Of course, that is exactly what it did! Rumour has it that Geoff Goddard went to the Moon long before any astronaut; perhaps there is some truth in it.
In the meantime closer to home but still flying fairly high were the Tornados, for whom things were brightening up again. Thanks to the expiry of the Meek-Parnes contract, Joe was back in charge again, so now only had himself to argue with. From here on it would be him deciding when and where they played, and from that standpoint he was prepared to let them carry on backing Billy Fury.
In the midst of all this music-making, a little light relief was provided by the Outlaws. Long van rides to gigs around the country had sparked off a novel form of entertainment, which although giving Joe some worries, gave him twice as many laughs. In the thick of the action was Chas Hodges: “We was on tour with Heinz & the Saints. Anyway, we were in one van, they were in another. They were driving along in front. Suddenly Tab, he threw a cheese roll out at somebody, and it looked so funny ’cause it hit this bloke on the head. We chucked a few cheese rolls out too. I mean, it’s so boring when you’re on tour every day, going from somewhere like Birmingham to Glasgow. That night we was talking about it. We’d had such a good time we thought, ‘Tomorrow we’ll stop and get some flour bags – some little, tiny half pound ones.’ We stopped in this little village somewhere, we went in this shop and we said, ‘Can we have five quids’ worth of flour bags and have you got anything that squirts?’ And we got some eggs. One egg and flour assault raged all the way from Bournemouth to Newcastle. Our van and Heinz’s would race down the Al drawing up side by side, pelting each other with eggs and flour bags. We had about eight dozen eggs at the start and he had them all at the finish. His van arrived looking like an omelette!
“The eggs and squirter got a bit played out but the flour bags really did work good. We’d make a little slit in the side. It was so funny. Richie Blackmore was a particularly good shot. That flour bag thing wasn’t easy; when you’re going along you’ve got to throw it before you feel you should throw it. And Richie just had that knack, ’cause the van’s going at a certain speed. He was clever at that. I weren’t too bad at it but a lot of times I’d miss. I was quite impressed with Richie ’cause he’d get spot on each time. It was such fun – we was doing it all the time. It changed the whole thing: the longer the journey, the better it was. I remember we hit this bloke once when Gene Vincent was with us. We were going to Swansea. And Gene Vincent had never seen this. We had all the flour bags and was going along and there was this geyser had his head in his engine, doing the motor. Of course, as we went past him – wallop! He must have had the fan belt going. Like an H-bomb it was. He come out. He had a beard and he was white. And Gene Vincent was killing himself! And the geyser jumped in his car and he caught us up, come up beside us and he wound down his window and he was chucking these house bricks at the van – wallop! Anyway, he chased us all round Swansea. We got rid of him in the end. And there was all these dents in the side…
“We got nicked for it anyway. We’d chucked a flour bag at this teddy boy at this bus stop and a policeman took our number and they traced us. They found out in time that not only had we been chucking flour bags but we didn’t have any insurance for the van! Joe had bought us the van and he was supposed to have insured it. And we had to go up to the court in Shrewsbury, not for the flour bags, but every time we’d been pulled up we’d given Major Banks’s company. Of course, he was getting all these letters back. He got in touch with Joe saying he don’t know nothing about this van. Apparently Joe had bought the van for us and hadn’t informed Major Banks about it, so consequently we all had to go to court: Major Banks, Joe Meek, all us lot. When we got there we travelled overnight – we looked like a load of gypsies. We was all sitting there. It was basically ’cause of the insurance, really. Major Banks was saying, ‘I don’t know nothing about it,’ and Joe Meek was being really very vague. Ken had to go up into the box and say, ‘We thought we were insured,’ and Joe had to go up in the box. And I remember he looked sort of sheepish. We was all sitting at the back and he kept looking at us and sort of half smiling. The prosecutor was saying to him, ‘Joe Meek, did you ever sign an H.P. form for the van?’ And Joe said, ‘No’. And he said, ‘Well, look. This is the thing here with your signature.’ So Joe said, ‘Yes.’ The man said, ‘But you’ve just told me that you haven’t signed anything.’ Joe said, ‘Well, I haven’t.’ The man said, ‘But look. This is your signature here, and if it is…’ They couldn’t get any sense out of him and told him to sit down again. Then Major Banks got up and said, ‘Look, we run this company…’ and he went through all the bit. Joe was just so vague about the whole thing. It was genuine an’ all – he didn’t care.”
However, the band were not let off lightly. They were fined £100, banned from driving the van and the driver lost his licence. No doubt they had not helped their cause much by busking on the courthouse steps that morning as the judge and his entourage passed fully robed on their way to court.
They swapped their flour bags for catapults and gooseberries! Again their scores were high but again they were caught, and Joe and the lads were paid a visit at the studio by two friendly policemen who cautioned them for “discharging missiles”. And that was the end of that.
Meanwhile, away from flour and gooseberry matters it was back on the Heinz bandwagon where most of his attention was centred. The young man who was now his principal artiste was enjoying the distinction of being the only male solo singer in direct competition with Merseybeat who was actually gaining popularity. Whilst the Adam Faith’s, Marty Wilde’s and Billy Fury’s were on a downward spiral that would soon see them swept away like so many old leaves, Heinz was positively blooming. ‘Eddie’ had reached No.5 and in Sweden had topped the charts. With sales high in Norway and Denmark too, Decca were giving the record full European and US release, with views to making him an international star. Singer Michael Cox had also reached the top in Sweden with ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ and ‘Stand Up’ and was now well into a four-year star spree of concert tours plus his own TV and radio shows. For Heinz things looked just as promising because as well as new records that Joe had in the pipeline plus tours and TV spots lined up both here and in Scandinavia, there were the two film appearances set to catch the public’s eye. Reviews of the newly released ‘Heinz’ EP were excellent, as were those for the follow-up single, ‘Country Boy’, which was played for Heinz’s guest slot on Juke Box Jury, receiving the dubious honour of being voted a hit.
In order to jazz up his stage act, Joe was also toying with the idea of having Heinz’s hair dyed flaming red and getting him to make his entrance on a motorbike and actually looping the loop. Bearing in mind the width of most stages it was, as Keith Goodwin described it, “a typical Joe potty idea”.
And besides Heinz, Joe had more dreams a-plenty waiting to come true. Flushed with the glow of success he was getting ideas of building an organization big enough to rival Decca and EMI. Obviously it would take some while before he could seriously put plans into action but with a few more hits that should not be too long. ‘Eddie’ had done well, though not quite well enough to get the Major off his back – yet!
Happy days were here again. There was much to look forward to and certainly much to be pleased about with life in general. It was with a reasonable sense of well-being that he could now wake up in the morning and mull over the day’s prospects. It may not have been seventh heaven, for he knew difficulties still lay ahead but it was soothing to think that despite all the hurts and irritations life had its bright side. He was winning through and knew that with more hard graft and a helping hand from Lady Luck his skills would move yet more mountains. Yes, things were looking pretty hopeful; his star was indeed once again in the ascendant. But then disaster struck!
Something happened that was to have an earth-shattering effect on his life, leaving mental scars from which he would never fully recover.