The Joe Meek story

Friday 26th June 2009

In 1995, Nick Moran and his best mate James Hicks were two unemployed actors, staggering drunk along London's Holloway Road.
When they stopped to hail a taxi, a plaque outside an old shop caught their attention. It read: 'Joe Meek Lived Worked and Died Here'.
Twelve years later, Nick's curiosity about musician Meek has led to an award-winning play - and his directorial debut, named after Meek's No 1 hit Telstar.
"I'm one of these people who gets things finished eventually," says Nick, his East End accent clearly audible.
"The Joe Meek story is something I stumbled upon and was very interested in, then probably got obsessed with the human aspect."
It's a wonder more isn't known about Joe Meek. Considered by those in the know as a maverick musical genius, Joe was responsible for writing and recording a string of number one hits in the early 1960s.
A pioneer in the recording industry, he created weird and wonderful sounds, particularly in the smash hit Telstar - and all from a flat above a handbag shop at number 304 Holloway Road.
"The key thing about Telstar is that it's not so much the song, it's the achievement," says the 39-year-old, who made his name in Guy Ritchie's Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels.
"It was the biggest selling record ever. Probably everyone who had a record player bought that record."
Named after the first communication satellite, Telstar struck a chord with a generation when it was released in 1962 and became a number one hit on both sides of the Atlantic, produced by Meek and performed by The Tornados.
"I do really appreciate the production of the record, the way it was mixed and engineered and the fact it was recorded in someone's kitchen and it was years ahead of its time," Nick says.
"Joe was always in his bedroom, banging pots and pans and slowing the recording down and speeding it up."
Ultimately, though, this is a story of a man whose success would also be his downfall.
"The drive and compulsion and the energy and vigour became the pigheadedness and the arrogance," explains Nick.
A downward spiral of depression, drug dependency and paranoia, resulted in Joe murdering his landlady before turning the gun on himself in 1967.
"Joe Meek's story is like a Greek tragedy," says Nick. "Whether you think the stuff is sordid or whether you think it's justified, it's a story of a man's journey into loneliness and despair. It's something that everybody can identify with."
Looking dapper in a sharp grey suit and pink shirt (he jokingly references his GQ Best Dressed Man Award), Nick may now have a few more lines around his face since the Lock Stock days, but his demeanor suggests a man who's found his stride. And so he might, as he must feel this day has been a long time in coming.
Following the discovery of the plaque, Nick embarked on a year of research and writing. The first read-through of the play Telstar was staged at a disused pub in Stockwell with the likes of Jude Law and Kathy Burke playing parts.
Nick's subsequent filming commitments pushed the project onto the back burner until 2000 when a West End reading directed by Nick was staged for theatre producers. This in turn led to a tour that culminated in rave reviews in the West End.
While Nick says it was always in his mind that it would eventually become a film, it took his good friend Simon Jordan, the chairman of Crystal Palace Football Club, to see it through to fruition.
Simon decided to independently finance a movie version of Telstar and flew Nick, who says he was about to "cover [himself] in latex and pratt about as an alien in an American TV sci-fi thing", to his home in Spain.
It was here that talk about how to bring the story of Joe Meek to the big screen began.
"Normally it takes about five years to get a film financed, because there is all this jumping through hoops," says Nick.
"What was great about Simon is that he literally phoned me up in LA in February 2007 and by the beginning of August that year we were in production.
"Someone foolishly asked Simon, 'How did you raise the money for the film?' and Simon said 'I wrote a cheque!' It's so rare to find someone with the balls to do that."
For Nick there was never any doubt that Con O'Neill should play Joe.
He and Con go way back to when Nick was his understudy in the role of Mickey in Blood Brothers, for which Con became the youngest recipient of the prestigious Olivier Award.
And it's no surprise that Nick looked to someone of such stature in the acting world to meet the immense demands of the role. Con himself describes Joe as "an innovative soul who had the capabilities of a psychopath".
But despite the dark issues, Joe's story is not without humour.
"The thing about tragedy is that when something goes wrong there tends to be a funny side to it as well," says Nick.
"One of the best examples in this story is the fact that this guy turned down the Beatles four times because he thought they were rubbish!"
While exterior shots of the shop were filmed on location in Holloway Road the majority of the film was shot at Twickenham Studios.
"The days were fun but long and intense, so I made time for my shot lists and storyboarding by living in my camper van in the studio's car park," recalls Nick.
"This gave me the whole place to myself for four or five hours at the end of the day to run about the sets and plan the next day."
Nick also acknowledges the benefit of having 18-years experience as an actor to call upon while directing the eclectic cast that included Kevin Spacey, James Corden, Ralf Little, Justin Hawkins and Carl Barat.
"The advantage is that I have a fast-track communication with the actors," says Nick.
"You can say things to an actor that he needs to hear and you know it's going to make his performance rock."
With so few opportunities for truly British stories to take centre stage at the cinema, Nick hopes all their hard work pays off.
"People in the film industry here in the UK need to work twice as hard, for half as much, to make something that is five times better than something that would come out of the States. That's what everyone has done on this."
Telstar is released across the UK on Friday June 19.