“YOU can’t tell me what to do. I can do what I like.” A man in the stalls was having a brief altercation with someone for all to hear on the opening night of Telstar, about the maverick record producer Joe Meek. The actors gamely played on but, funnily enough, it was the kind of statement that Meek himself might well have made.
This touring play by the actor Nick Moran (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) and James Hicks, now berthed in London, takes us back to the early Sixties and Meek’s makeshift studio squeezed into a flat above a handbag shop on the Holloway Road in North London. The kitchen acted as the control room, the toilet as an echo chamber, and the string section could end up on the stairs.
In these unlikely surroundings, the tone-deaf Meek conjured up a musical cauldron of otherworldly sounds, funfair flash and catchy tunes, producing such hits as the Tornados’ spacey instrumental Telstar and John Leyton’s Johnny, Remember Me, whose lush audacity rivalled Phil Spector’s fabled Wall of Sound. And like Spector, Meek had a volcanic personality.
In Con O’Neill’s superb central performance we see the Gloucester-born, gay Meek bullying his musicians, obsessing about song arrangements and his misguided crush in promoting Joseph Morgan’s untalented singer Heinz Burt (pictured, left, with O’Neill). From 1961 to 1967 we see O’Neill’s Meek descend from cocky visionary — he passes on the Beatles and dismisses the Rolling Stones as a “little warm-up act” — into someone hemmed in by debt, scandal and amphetamine-fuelled paranoia. It ends with him fatally shooting his land-lady and then himself.
Paul Jepson’s production captures a sense of Britain on the verge of casting off its postwar drabness — the electric guitars interfere with the landlady’s enjoyment of The Navy Lark on radio — and a time when former Army officers were still addressed by their rank. Even tortured souls could be soothed by putting the kettle on. But the play, a sometimes uneasy mix of farce and tragedy, too often seems like a series of footnotes and incidental details rather than a well-rounded portrait.
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Meek’s relationships with Burt and the spiritualist songwriter Geoff Goddard (a suitably oddball Gareth Corke) are sketchy while Linda Robson as the doomed landlady is simply left to occasionally bustle around and offer a tart comment or some motherly advice. And the build-up to the set-trashing, double-death climax is as long-winded as a Seventies concept album when it needs the tautness of one of Meek’s Sixties novelty hits.