Recording - October 2014 - 80

Discovering Joe Meek

Guest editorial by Barry Cleveland
When I began looking into the life of
British recording iconoclast Joe Meek 15
years ago, I imagined that he was merely
a wacky chap who had made a bunch of
quirky recordings, the best-known being
1962's global sensation "Telstar," and that
he had a reputation as an innovator. I was
working at Mix Magazine at the time, and
the publisher of MixBooks had asked me to
write a book on "working outside the box"
in the studio, using anecdotal incidents
from Meek's career to illustrate my points.
Once my research got fully underway,
however, it became apparent that the original concept for the book would have to be
abandoned. Robert George "Joe" Meek
wasn't simply a curious footnote in British
recording history. He was a towering figure
whose approach to recording and recording technology was years-in some cases
decades-ahead of his time, and his work
had profoundly affected the entire British
recording community, and by extension the
world. Meek was the story, and that story
had never been fully told.
Joe Meek's Bold Techniques (an updated
and expanded Second Edition is now available in print and eBook versions) focuses primarily on the twelve years of Meek's professional career, from 1955 until 1967. It details
his engineering and production techniques,
the equipment he used (and in some cases
invented), and how his work affected the
world around him. The perspective presented
in the book comes from a massive amount of
written and recorded material, fresh interviews with people who had worked with or
were otherwise knowledgeable about Meek,
and analyzing more than 1000 recordings.
One of the first things I became aware
of was that Meek wasn't exactly the DIY
industry outsider that he is often portrayed
as. In fact, the first several years of Meek's
career were spent as an employee of IBC,
the largest and most advanced studio in
London. Between 1955 and 1957 Meek
engineered dozens of hit records for major
pop and jazz artists, and it was there that
he first implemented many of his most significant innovations, frequently resulting in
unusual sonic touches that distinguished his
work from the recordings of his peers.
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RECORDING October 2014

One of the things that makes it difficult to
put Meek's contributions into perspective,
however, is that nowadays many of his
"radical" innovations have been so thoroughly assimilated that we take them for
granted, if we notice them at all. It's hard
to comprehend how they could have provoked such a violent backlash from the
majority of his contemporaries.
In the mid-'50s British engineers were
essentially scientists that wore white lab
coats and were expected to record "by the
book," following strict procedures as to
microphone selection and placement, mixer
settings, recording levels, etc. Meek almost
singlehandedly led the revolution that ultimately toppled that regime, implementing
many "firsts" (at least in the UK) along the
way. He experimented with the "wrong"
types of microphones, placed them directly
in front of and sometimes inside sound
sources rather than at the officially prescribed distances. He used compressors

and limiters to create effects like pumping
and breathing rather than purely as corrective devices. He overloaded preamplifier
inputs and tweaked tape machines to get
the hottest possible levels on tape, and
"direct injected" electric basses.
Meek was also big on artificial ambience, which he obtained via acoustic echo
chambers and tape delay. He was quite
possibly the first person in England to delay
signals before routing them to an echo
chamber, effectively inventing predelay.
Meek also built the first of his legendary
"black box" spring reverb devices out of a
broken heater in 1957 (three years before
the Accutronics Type 4 reverb was introduced), thus likely inventing spring reverb.
Given that mid- to late-'50s British pop
recordings were typically made by placing microphones well away from sources
and separation was achieved by keeping

musicians far apart from each other, there
was inevitably lots of room sound. By
largely eliminating room sound through
close miking, using compressors and limiters to pump up sounds and add punch,
and then compensating for lost ambience
using echo, delay, and reverb, Meek instituted a major paradigm shift in recording
that has now become almost universal.
Meek was also already "flanging" sounds
using two synchronized tape recorders in
1958, and he was the first British engineer
to experiment professionally with sound-onsound overdubbing, which eventually
became one of his core techniques.
Towards the end of his time at IBC, and
later while working at Lansdowne (which he
helped design), Meek was also making
impressive recordings at his Arundel
Gardens flat, most notably his "Outer Space
Music Fantasy" called I Hear a New World,
a full-length LP that was recorded in stereo.
How Meek managed to work in stereo
remains a mystery, as nobody who was
there recalls seeing any stereo equipment.
The recording provides fascinating insights
into how an engineer working at the dawn
of stereo dealt with issues such as phase relationships, imaging, and the juxtaposition of
dry and processed sounds. Beyond that,
Meek's use of signal processing, tape manipulation, and tape loops puts the record in a
class by itself. An entire chapter of my book
is devoted to this recording, and a restored
version is included as an audio stream.
Despite his many accomplishments in the
'50s, most people who have heard of Joe
Meek associate him with the records he
made during the '60s in his legendary studio located on the third floor at 304
Holloway Road. That's where he recorded
hits such as John Leyton's "Johnny,
Remember Me" (arguably Meek's greatest
production), the Tornados' "Telstar," and the
Honeycombs' "Have I the Right?" Hundreds
of records in a vast range of styles were
made there, many featuring session luminaries such as Ritchie Blackmore, Steve
Howe, and Jimmy Page-who credits Meek
as a major influence on his own production.
On February 3, 1967, Joe Meek murdered his landlady with a shotgun and
then turned the weapon on himself. The
circumstances surrounding his horrific end
remain unclear-but what is clear is that
Meek's contributions to the art of recording are undeniable, and everyone reading this likely owes something to him,
whether they realize it or not.
Barry Cleveland (cleveland@recording
mag.com) is a San Francisco Bay Areabased journalist, audio engineer, composer, guitarist, and recording artist.
Learn more at barrycleveland.com.

http://www.barrycleveland.com

Recording - October 2014

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