Telstar: The Joe Meek Story

Telstar is the satellite that inspired British music producer and his in house band The Tornadoes to launch the instrumental record which became the first US number 1 hit by a British group.

Meek who operated out of the top of of a leather good shop was a maverick like Phil Spector, and just like Spector with a fondness of guns.

The film starts and feels like a stage play very much in keeping with its origins as a stage play and low budget adaptation as a film. Con O'Neill (reprising the part from the play) plays Meek, harried, frazzled, on the edge with drugs keeping him going. Kevin Spacey makes a cameo as Major Banks his business backer who keeps the whole enterprise in even keel as we find that Meek is certainly no businessman.

Somewhere within the chaos of the upstairs apartment cum music studio Meek who could not read or write music and was ridiculed for being tone deaf managed to produced a string of heats and had major musician working under him such as Ritchie Blackmore, Chas Hodges. I shall omit Screaming Lord Sutch as a major musician though.

However the pill popping, plagiarism accusations, arrest for importuning in a public toilet, his falling out with the Major lead to deepening financial turmoil and the falling out with friends and musicians. The hits dried up and in a tragic demise he ended up shooting his landlady and himself.

The film by actor turned director Nick Moran is rather messy. Moran does well with a low budget to evoke a sixties atmosphere which is away from the swinging which was so beloved by past filmmakers.

Its nice to see support from Spacey, James Corden as well as some of the real life people who associated with Meek turn up such as Jess Conrad.

However the film feels overlong and as Moran tries to imbue Meek with some psychological character traits based on his upbringing and his past family life it feels like a failure as it adds little. Many people of his generation had family affected by The Great War or trauma in childhood.

I found this a middling film whose kinetic energy runs out midway through and the film starts to drag until the tragic ending.

I do know something about the mad genius that was Joe Meek. Enough to know that putting his turbulent life into one film is not easy, others have questioned why other formative elements of his life was missed out, if a film is good enough though, surely it will engage those who have seen and enjoyed it to look into it further, using the medium we are now, the internet?

Con O'Neill is excellent as the troubled Meek, he has to dominate the film and this he does. While it's true that others in the story were sometimes rather younger than the actors playing them, remember back in this period, the 'teenager' as we now understand it, was only starting to emerge, young people then still often looked, acted, dressed older.

They usually left school at 14-15, at around 18 (like Meek) many had to do military service, hand me down clothes from parents were common. All this was changing, as part of the social changes sign posted by the music, which Meek played a part in but, as shown by his dismissal of The Beatles he was doomed not to recognise fully and play a further part in.

Meek was the British Phil Spector. But he, as the film well shows, did not enjoy the financial rewards of hits, but both were innovative, reclusive, obsessive and dangerous around firearms. (Given just how many times Spector drew guns on some of the most famous music stars, as well as lovers, business associates, was anyone really surprised at the tragic events at Spector's home in 2003, I certainly thought 'he's finally done it'.)

Most music or music based biopics fail as films, while 'Telstar' is not up there with the stunning exception that is Ian Curtis biopic 'Control', it's way better than 'Great Balls Of Fire'.

I was certainly kept engaged by this film.

(65%) At fifteen or so minutes in this pushed very few buttons for me, and as I had no idea who Joe Meek actually was, the temptation to give the remaining three quarters a skip and move on passed my mind, but I'm glad that I didn't because this heats up very nicely. Con O'Neill is sublime in the lead role as the hugely hyped-up, at times very angry, yet unquestionably passionate hit music creator during the swinging days of London in the 60's. The backing cast is made up of a host of UK talent, with Kevin Spacey adding even more quality to the production. This may be a bit to clumsily written at times with a script that feels a bit too much like a stageplay rather than a screenplay, but this is still an important piece of well told pop music history.

To be honest I only popped into see this at the LFF screening because it had Kevin Spacey in it and that bloke from Gavin and Stacey. I had no idea who Joe Meek was and couldn't sing one of his songs if you paid me. My expectations were low but I thought what the hell and settled into my seat. The first thing that struck me was the style of the piece, Nick Moran has captured the era beautifully, it looks incredible. The performances, to a man, are wonderfully heightened and there is an incredible energy to the piece. I laughed a lot and totally bought into the madness of the Holloway Road studio and its inhabitants. The second half of the film punches you right in the gut. Meeks descent from manic,comedic,volatile, music genius, to heart broken, paranoid, physco is painfully moving. Con O'Neill is amazing, it's one of those performances that just haunts you. Staying with you long after the credits role. I sat in the cinema with the rest of the spellbound audience and watched gobsmaked as Morans film launched into its final heart wrenching act. This is a British film to be proud of. Unlike anything we have seen for many, many years. A truly remarkable debut from Moran. Great stuff.

I'm a little too young to appreciate Joe Meek's music and it seems to my ears that his music does seem nowadays as if it's from a museum, it sounds so fossilised....and yet, there's no denying the popularity of his rinky-dink pop music from the pre-Beatles era, even achieving the almost unique feat for a British "artist" (he'd have loved that soubriquet, no doubt) of having a number one in America with the irritatingly catchy "Telstar". I some time ago watched the BBC-TV "Arena" documentary on his life and times and my interest was piqued then at this most unusual man.

Even if you didn't know Meek's life story, we pretty much get to know from the outset that Joe's final breakdown is going to end in tragedy, with the narrative frequently inserting scenes from his last day leading up to the tragic shooting of firstly his landlady (pretty much an accident, as it appears here), this giving him the final spur to almost immediately afterwards take his own life in equally violent fashion.

The film unfolds from this downbeat start into a most entertaining first half as the story charts his rise to mini-Spector status, producing memorable number one hits for John Leyton, The Tornadoes and The Honeycombs. Into Joe's (no pun intended) orbit drift a motley selection of eccentric beat group personnel, with much bawdy humour to the fore. I especially enjoyed Kevin Spacey's spot-on upper-class English accent as Joe's eccentric business manager, military "crusty" Major Banks and there's also a fine turn by Tom Burke as Meek's nervous, sensitive indeed spiritualist in-house songwriter Geoff Goddard. I wasn't quite convinced that Con O'Neill really gave us Meek as he was, although there's no denying his conviction playing.

As for the narrative structure, I felt that the the film failed to truly give Meek his due when he finally reached the top and believe his achievements deserved a bit more highlighting, before the round-the-corner Beatles-era of grittier bands with in-built songwriting teams with the flair and talent to display their own writing ingenuity and studio inventiveness, effectively consigned Meek to, quoting Chris Andrews' 1965 hit, a "yesterday man".

The second half of the film I think, follows a little too much the fortunes of Meek's fellow-travellers, particularly the ridiculously one-dimensional "little-voice" that was Heinz Burt. Indeed Meek's character disappears from the screen it seems for some time before we're jolted back to the closing scenes and his final demise. His story is undoubtedly a tragic one (suppressed homosexual, thwarted talent, moody artist) but I didn't think the film quite got behind his character enough and thus failed to catch the full parabola of his eventful life.

The recreation of the period is great though - from the swinging, jigsaw-style opening credits to the chaotic scenes in Meek's makeshift studio above his landlady's leather goods shop and good acting by almost all on board (helped by the main characters' physical similarity to their real life counterparts) and of course the reproduction of that so distinctive "Joe Meek sound" replete with plinky-plonk organ jungle-drums and loads of re-verb, often married to "death-disc" lyrics.

An entertaining step-back-in-time then, if ultimately falling short in its attempt to do justice to the memory of a haunted but very talented and singularly individual pop maverick. To paraphrase Brian Wilson from a little later in the decade, I guess Joe just wasn't made for those times.