Stars: Con O’Neill, Pam Ferris, JJ Feild, James Corden, Tom Burke, Kevin Spacey, Ralf Little, Carl Barat, Justin Hawkins
Running time: 119 mins
Rating: ★★★★
OR The Joe Meek Story as the subtitle puts it. And one that you’d swear they were making up if you weren’t assured it’s based on fact.
The life of record producer Joe Meek involved sex, drugs, homosexuality, spiritualism, blackmail, crime, madness, paranoia, murder and suicide. Oh, and Screaming Lord Sutch too.
In the early Sixties, Meek was a pioneering if maverick record producer operating from rooms above a handbag shop in Holloway Road, London. It was an unlikely place for recording hits like Telstar (putting a British band on top of the US singles charts for the first time). Meek’s pill-popping lifestyle and efforts to promote the object of his desire – the peroxided singer Heinz – led to his downfall and, eventually, murder and suicide.
Lock Stock actor Nick Moran cowrites and directs this amazing tale first seen as a play. Meek turned down The Beatles and sent Tom Jones away when he came looking for someone to record him, but his contribution to pop history shouldn’t be underestimated.
Telstar offers a rewarding stroll down memory lane with some of the original studio stars – Jess Conrad, John Leyton Clem Cattini and Chas Hodges (of Chas and Dave fame) – putting in cameo performances. Ralf Little, James Corden and JJ Feild (as Heinz) impress as members of The Outlaws, the band that pre-empted The Tornados who recorded Telstar.
But the acting honours belong to Con O’Neill, reprising his awardwinning stage performance, who towers over the proceedings as Meek, once described as the world’s first tone deaf record producer.
Other key roles are played by Pam Ferris, fussing about as his understanding landlady, and Kevin Spacey, sporting a British accent as the major who bankrolls Meek’s recording activities (and went on to invent the wheelie bin – but that’s another story altogether).
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