Customer Reviews

Creative Music Production: Joe Meek's Bold Techniques

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The British record producer Joe Meek has attained posthumous cult status and rightly so: his innovative work broke the highly conservative mould of studios where engineers sported white coats as though they were in a science laboratory and everything was done "by the book".
In Meek's case the circumstances of his life - and more to the point his death - have created a lot of urban myth. After all, Spector may have discharged revolvers at ceilings, but Meek ended his own life - and that of his landlady - with a large shotgun and all on the anniversary of Buddy Holly's death!
With those factors in mind, it's refreshing to discover a book which traces Joe Meek's life, not for the sake of cheap scandal, but through the music he made through his innovative recordings and equipment creations/modifications. Barry Cleveland has achieved the near impossible by delivering a book which is both an enjoyable work for the non-technical reader and highly satisfying for the studio "anorak" who wants to know the fine details of Meek's home studio in London's Holloway Road. Cleveland has tracked down the closest surviving sources who bring to life a picture of the cluttered apartment where Joe Meek took on the mighty forces of EMI, Decca and the like and won - for a while at least - with hits like Telstar, Johnny Remember Me and Have I The Right.
If the words are top class, the layout is every bit the match for them, with many photos I've never seen before (and believe me, I've seen a lot of Meek-related photos!) and a full discography. I can't reccomend this book enough... how about 6 stars out of 5?!

Extremely interesting book about Joe Meek, the innovative English recording engineer and producer who made hit records in his flat. Has lots of detail and pictures of Joe's recording gear and recording techniques. Discusses how Joe Meek pushed the recording gear to it's limits while creating new sounds. Highly recommended.

I am very impressed by Barry Cleveland's book. He provides a great deal of specific information about Joe Meek's recording techniques and equipment. However, be not afraid, this is not done in a pedantic technical manner; it's very readable for the non-technical.

Being well familiar with most of Meek's recorded output, I especially enjoyed Cleveland's detailed commentaries on certain of Meek's recordings. For my taste, Cleveland could have gone on for many more pages on the same subject with different tracks.

I perceive Cleveland to be outside of the intense (mostly English) Meek cult which brings some fresh perspective on his work.

What more can I say? This was a good read that I raced through and will no doubt revisit frequently. The CD of "I Hear a New World" is a great bonus. It's surprisingly different from the RPM release. It makes me appreciate the work Roger Dopson and his associates did to bring out the RPM version.

This book shares some of the tricks and techniques of this legendary producer and shows how all pop recording and record production since has been influenced by them. The included recording and notes are especially helpful.

To anyone who is old enough to remember hearing the original 'Telstar' on the radio, this is a wonderfully researched bio on the life and work of a vastly underappreciated godfather of audio engineering. Also being a huge Deep Purple fan, I was surprised to learn that the great Ritchie Blackmore, was a first call session player for Joe (as a member of the Outlaws) and that there are some enticing recordings he made that I now have to spend the rest of my life searching for!

Great stuff. The equipment & discography are very well researched, in addition to the personal stuff. And you just can't beat the included disc of studio experiments, on the bizarre factor.

Any book on any subject is necessarily a finite work; you can only cover so much in a given volume, and you've got typically between 150 and 300 pages to make your point and to cover the material you promised in your outline (whether that outline appears in the book as the foreword, introduction, entire first chapter or merely the table of contents). That said, when a book actually DOES this...adequately covers its stated objective without wandering off topic too much...it is a great book, and probably more rare than it should be. This is one such great rare book.

Barry Cleveland gives us an overview that is as comprehensive as possible of exactly what the subtitle of the book states: Joe Meek's Bold Techniques. As a recording engineer, I'm primarily interested in knowing how he ran a session in the studio, how he handled (mishandled, in some cases?) equipment for a desired result, what equipment he chose, how he might have achieved a certain sound, and such related questions. It is widely written that Joe Meek was eccentric, opinionated and stubborn, parts of his personality that probably would have been present even had he not been mentally ill. He was homosexual in London in an era where this could get you not only persecuted, but prosecuted in the legal sense, and this gave him another strata of anxiety on top of his depression and schizophrenic paranoia. Some of these problems led to financial difficulties, which in turn brought yet another layer of stress. All these things are known and well documented in other places, and Cleveland mercifully spares us most of those details in his book, leaving the bulk of his space for actual recording tools and procedures, just as he promises.

Obviously, who Meek was in toto as a person did have an effect on how he approached his work (this is true of all of us), but the temptation could have been to bog down in those aspects because of their tabloid nature...Joe Meek didn't live a quiet, boring, peaceable life like some of us. But this is a biography of Joe Meek's work, and Cleveland strikes the right balance, talking about Meek's more outrageous personal nuances enough that we get a sense of the man so we can understand where he was coming from as he did his work, then talking about the work itself, which is why we chose this volume and not a biography on Joe Meek's life.

Were Meek's production techniques bold? For their time, certainly. I believe that some ideas are just a product of their time--for example, others were working on the telephone at the same time as Bell; on the phonograph at the same time as Edison. Those men got the credit because they got to the patent office first, perhaps, but it was just the right time in history for those inventions to be realized. Joe Meek's techniques are not unheard of today, but they were bold for their time because he came upon the ideas early...in the decade before the rest of the recording community caught up. In my early career (mid-1980's) I used some of the exact same equipment Meek did, according to the descriptions in this book, and I have to say it is somewhat astonishing he got the results he did with the technology of 50 years ago--so primitive by today's standards. It makes me wonder what he'd be doing now with our computer-based digital editing tools had he lived to see them.

I knew very little about Joe Meek in any sense before picking up this book; mainly I wanted to know who was behind his namesake line of Joemeek processing equipment that is so widely available today. This was exactly the book I needed, it told me exactly what I wanted to know, and was a very satisfying read. I finished it with all my questions answered (all my reasonable questions; there were some things no author could answer, there isn't the raw data, but I didn't leave the book frustrated, wondering "why didn't the author discuss this?"). If you want to know about Joe Meek the man, this may not be enough for you. If you want to know about Joe Meek the record producer, this is definitely your book too. (By the way, the included discography is quite comprehensive as well.)

I've been waiting for a book like this one for a long time. Joe Meek made major contributions to the recording industry, and this book brings them all together into one place for the first time. There's more information here than I ever imagined could be gathered about this visionary producer and his gear and recording techniques. The included CD is also a great bonus, as it presents Meek's seminal stereo recording in its original unedited and unaltered form for the first time since the LP was "released" (there were 20 copies) in 1960. Check it out!