Quizzed about pop by the teen music magazine Smash Hits in 1987, the year of her third consecutive electoral victory, Margaret Thatcher singled out ‘Telstar’, a chart-topper from a quarter of a century earlier, for special praise. She pronounced it ‘a lovely song… I absolutely loved that. The Tornados, yes.’
As a whizzily futuristic sounding instrumental ode to a transatlantic communications satellite, and only the second British recording to top the American Billboard charts, its charm for Thatcher was perhaps as much political as musical. That it was the work of an independent producer might also have appealed to her love of freewheeling, self-reliant private enterprise. Roger George ‘Joe’ Meek largely eschewed major label studios to record in a makeshift set-up in his flat above a leather goods shop at 304 Holloway Road.
Rather less on message for the espouser of family values, however, was that Meek, in 1963, was fined for ‘importuning for an immoral purpose’ at the public lavatories at Madras Place. This was a notorious ‘cottage’ not far from his home, frequented by gay men seeking casual sex. And just four years later, on 3 February 1967, Meek would murder his landlady, Mrs Violet Shenton, blasting her with a double-barrelled shotgun following a row over the rent book, before turning the weapon on himself.
Darryl W. Bullock, who died in December, profiled Meek in his 2021 book The Velvet Mafia: The Gay Men Who Ran the Swinging Sixties, alongside such contemporaries as Larry Parnes, Robert Stigwood, Joseph Lockwood and Brian Epstein – all of whom reappear here. But this book is the first standalone biography of Meek for more than 30 years.
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