ON 3 February 1967 Robert George 'Joe' Meek ended one of the most extraordinary stories in popular music with a shotgun - killing Violet Shenton, landlady of the world's most unlikely hit factory, at the same time.
Forty years on, Meek's extraordinary life and undoubted sonic achievements will come under the spotlight as never before with a biopic and documentary feature focusing on the troubled life of 'The Telstar man'.
As part of a series of programs commemorating the 40th anniversary of The Wolfenden Report - which legalized homosexuality in the United Kingdom - BBC Four kicked off the Meek inheritance with a reshowing of the excellent Arena documentary based on John Repsch's definitive biography The Legendary Joe Meek.
The Arena show was my own accidental introduction to Meek and a genuine piece of serendipity.
At home on study leave I was watching test match cricket on telly, or would have been had the rain not intervened. As I flicked between the channels I did a double-take when BBC2, forced to fill a weather wrecked schedule with repeats, showed a lingering shot of a signpost to my home town, Newent. Naturally I stayed tuned and had my first introduction to our most fabled son, his enormous unprecedented talent and his tragic and equally out-of-control personal life.
Watching the show again was sad. A parade of disappointed people, most, at the very least eccentric and brought up short on the fringes of real success. Spiritualist and co-writer Geoff Goddard is a lively and open contributor illuminating the Holloway Road recording process and Joe's obsession with Buddy Holly, whose death he believes he predicted and, indeed, tried to warn Holly of danger.
Goddard's finest achievement (and my Meek favorite) must be the extraordinary Johnny Remember Me, the perfect conjunction of a hugely melodramatic lyric, voices from beyond the grave and a perfectly pitched production.
Joe's brothers Eric and Arthur are the stars, however, mourning a brother who they seem to have had trouble understanding.
Joe was gay; that is a possibility Eric and Arthur, almost certainly reflecting the standards of rural little Newent in the 1940s and 1950s, are unable to entertain.
He was 'an indoor boy' they explain, and Arthur insists he had girlfriends and his arrest for importuning was a terrible shock.
Eric goes further in clips from the new documentary, Something I've Got To Tell You: A Life In The Death Of Joe Meek, saying "He was a weirdo to us, he was doing something we didn't understand."
But there is no feeling they felt anything other than love for him and sadness for the end he came to, there's a shake of the head when they say that London is another world - one where there brother was free to live his 'other' life, which he kept assiduously hidden from his family.
Article comments
1 - JC Mosquito
Meek was an unknown pioneer of r'n'roll - perhaps the movie will change that.
2 - Colin Ricketts
I must apologise. Daily Show satirist Jon Stewart will NOT appear in the Meek movie, it's an actor of the same name and I repeated the error from the IMDB.