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THE JOE MEEK CURSE
Independent, The (London), Jan 28, 2001 by Alan Clayson
One of the ways in which I earn my living is as an obituarist for Record Collector magazine, and an uncanny number of the obituaries I have written recently have concerned early deaths among entertainers whose recording careers began in the same place: 304 Holloway Road, London N7. This was where, in a second-floor flat, Joe Meek, the pioneering record producer and console boffin of the 1960s, ran his RGM studio - and where, on 3 February 1967, Meek brought his life to a bloody end.
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The past 18 months have seen the passing of at least five Meek proteges: Screaming Lord Sutch; Heinz Burt (former frontman of the Tornados); Geoff Goddard (RGM's in-house songwriter); Kim Roberts (who recorded "I'll Prove It" for RGM in 1963); and Alan Caddy, guitarist on the Tornados' million- selling "Telstar", the quintessential 1960s instrumental. Sutch, who combined leadership of the Monster Raving Loony party with an erratic career as a musician, committed suicide in June 1999, aged 58. Heinz Burt died in April 2000, after suffering a stroke, at the age of 57. Geoff Goddard suffered a fatal heart attack a month later, aged 62; Kim Roberts died a month after that, aged 55; and Alan Caddy died on 16 August 2000, aged 60.
Such a sequence of fatalities is not entirely inexplicable among a set of fast-living, emotionally turbulent rock stars who have reached middle age. Yet the fact that the link between them was Joe Meek - one of the darkest figures in rock mythology - has encouraged those close to them to seek a spookier explanation. And, strangely, they have found rather more to substantiate their fears than one might have expected.
The expression "the Joe Meek curse" was first coined at Caddy's wake by Tornados drummer Clem Cattini, in a conversation with another Meek protege, Tony Dangerfield. The previous year, two months before Sutch's death, an amateur photographer called Rocker Bill Musyk had sent Dangerfield a photograph he'd taken at a Meek memorial concert in Holloway Road's Lord Nelson pub on 3 February 1999. Dangerfield gave it little thought until Kim Roberts's fiance phoned with news of her death in June 2000. Tony began to wonder who else who had been at the Lord Nelson had died. Too spooked to look himself, he asked his girlfriend to examine the picture - and she confirmed that, as well as Sutch and Heinz, Kim, too, was in the picture. She didn't need to spell out the obvious question: who would be next?
Dangerfield, already distressed by the deaths of so many friends, felt deeply unsettled. "The first thing I did after Kim's funeral was to confirm what was in that photo and have it taken away and burnt. When I next saw the bloke who took it, I felt cold fingers running up and down my spine, and I had to move out of his vision in case he took another. It was as if he was a sort of Grim Reaper."
Now, he adds, "I can't stop myself reading omens in dates, numbers, you name it... things I'd always been sceptical about. All this might sound irrational, even humorous, but it's like I'm travelling under an endless black cloud, being pushed towards some horrible destiny."
To the detached outsider, there are obvious flaws in the thesis that a minor series of coincidences constitutes evidence of dark forces being at work. But those who knew and associated with Joe Meek find it hard to believe that dark forces can ever be entirely absent from his legacy.
Dangerfield is a case in point. Plucked from the obscurity of Lord Sutch's backing group in 1964, he was being groomed for stardom by Meek and had been renting a flat four doors down from No 304 on 3 February 1967. On that blood-splattered morning, 37-year-old Joe, tormented by financial and mental disintegration, chose to squeeze a fatal 12-bore trigger on both his complaining landlady and himself. The date was pointedly macabre. Meek, a conductor of twice-weekly seances, claimed to have warned Buddy Holly during his 1958 British tour that a Tarot reading pointed categorically to 3 February as the date of his death. Sure enough, Holly perished in a plane crash on 3 February 1959.
By the time Meek shot himself, exactly eight years later, he had become almost as big (and as tragic) a rock legend himself. He was a fallible talent spotter - Rod Stewart auditioned unsuccessfully for him in 1961, as did Tom Jones in 1964. Yet his will to succeed was greater than that of the salaried time-servers with EMI, Decca and other major record labels - from whom he'd declared independence as far as he was able in 1960.
What causes many still to rank him as the greatest record producer of his generation was his dogged artistic autonomy, and his skill as a sound engineer. A few years before his death, Geoff Goddard recalled Meek controlling tape speed by finger pressure on a revolving spool in the midst of a Heath Robinson-esque litter of electronic paraphernalia resembling "odds and ends he'd picked up from a junk shop, wired it all up and made something of it... He didn't have the capital for much else."
