POPULARITY
2 episodes with Please Stay
2 episodes with Please Stay
2 episodes with Please Stay
2 episodes with Please Stay
2 episodes with Please Stay
2 episodes with Please Stay
In this episode, Taylor (@TaylorAWelch) reminds us that the point of the whole thing is to play well, and sometimes playing well means you have to figure out how to put a smile on and enjoy the game even when you are down. You've got to STAY IN THE GAME.www.DailyMindMedicine.com See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Sasha and Fi discussed the footy news, Caro sticks to her guns about the Clarko and Mitchell dynamic, Buddy is suspended (and then not) and Covid is still determined to... LEARN MORE The post Girls please stay in the kitchen! appeared first on Chicks Talking Footy.
Jude --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
Light Years is the seventh studio album by Australian singer Kylie Minogue. It was released on 22 September 2000 in Australia by Mushroom Records, and later on 25 September 2000 in the United Kingdom by Parlophone. Following the commercial failure of Impossible Princess (1997), Minogue departed with Deconstruction and took a hiatus from recording music. She signed with Parlophone in June 1999, and decided to go back to her pop roots. She worked with various writers and producers, including Steve Anderson, Johnny Douglas, Robbie Williams, Guy Chambers, and Mark Picchiotti. Light Years is a dance-pop, disco, and Europop album that made references to music from the 1970s. Lyrically, the album touches upon themes of women's empowerment, celebration, and sex in a cheeky and campy approach. It received favourable reviews from music critics, many of whom complimented Minogue's return to pop and considered the album to be one of Minogue's strongest releases. The album won the ARIA Award for Best Female Artist and Best Pop Release at the 2001 ceremony. The album peaked at the top position on the Australian Albums Chart, making it Minogue's first number-one album in her native Australia. It also reached the top 10 in Scotland and New Zealand. Five singles were released from Light Years, including the Australia number-one singles "Spinning Around" and "On a Night Like This", as well as the top 20 entries "Kids" and "Please Stay". All four peaked inside the top 10 in the UK. The final single, "Your Disco Needs You" was limitedly released in Australia and Germany. It was further promoted with the On a Night Like This Tour, which visited Europe and Australia from March to May 2001. The tour was once the biggest by a solo artist in Australia, grossing U.S. $5 million. The album was re-issued in Europe in 2018 and returned to the UK Albums Chart and the Scottish Albums Chart.
Light Years is the seventh studio album by Australian singer Kylie Minogue. It was released on 22 September 2000 in Australia by Mushroom Records, and later on 25 September 2000 in the United Kingdom by Parlophone. Following the commercial failure of Impossible Princess (1997), Minogue departed with Deconstruction and took a hiatus from recording music. She signed with Parlophone in June 1999, and decided to go back to her pop roots. She worked with various writers and producers, including Steve Anderson, Johnny Douglas, Robbie Williams, Guy Chambers, and Mark Picchiotti. Light Years is a dance-pop, disco, and Europop album that made references to music from the 1970s. Lyrically, the album touches upon themes of women's empowerment, celebration, and sex in a cheeky and campy approach. It received favourable reviews from music critics, many of whom complimented Minogue's return to pop and considered the album to be one of Minogue's strongest releases. The album won the ARIA Award for Best Female Artist and Best Pop Release at the 2001 ceremony. The album peaked at the top position on the Australian Albums Chart, making it Minogue's first number-one album in her native Australia. It also reached the top 10 in Scotland and New Zealand. Five singles were released from Light Years, including the Australia number-one singles "Spinning Around" and "On a Night Like This", as well as the top 20 entries "Kids" and "Please Stay". All four peaked inside the top 10 in the UK. The final single, "Your Disco Needs You" was limitedly released in Australia and Germany. It was further promoted with the On a Night Like This Tour, which visited Europe and Australia from March to May 2001. The tour was once the biggest by a solo artist in Australia, grossing U.S. $5 million. The album was re-issued in Europe in 2018 and returned to the UK Albums Chart and the Scottish Albums Chart.
Tonight's edition features new tunes from Sarah Davachi, Christina Galisatus, The Grid + Robert Fripp and plenty more! Enjoying the show? Please support BFF.FM with a donation. Playlist 0′00″ Empire by The Grid + Fripp on Leviathan (The Grid and Robert Fripp)
On this episode, Melanie Mosberg, an alumnus of One Voice Chorus, and psychologist Dr. Holly Savoy discuss how Melanie found a refuge in the chorus, and how being part of a group like One Voice can be good for mental health. Music: "Please Stay" by Jake Runestad. Caitlin O'Handley & Jarret Ward, soloists. Performed on December 2, 2017. Charlotte Transgender Healthcare Group https://cthcg.org/ Trans Lifeline 1-877-565-8860 http://www.translifeline.org Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender National Hotline (888) 843-4564 www.glbthotline.org/hotline.html National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 24 hours a day by people of all ages and identities. 1-800-273-8255 http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org Trevor Project Lifeline LGBT youth (ages 24 and younger) 1-866-488-7386 http://www.thetrevorproject.org Text START to 678-678
Just because it rains doesn't mean your day is lost. Finding new ways to have fun or accomplish a goal is a way to spend more time with loved ones. Life is to short enjoy all weather especially rain. I believe rain is another way the Angel's from Heaven shower down Love, Peace, and Joy to each and everyone of us.You are invited to be apart of a Zoom Celebration for Have Faith Let it Begin Primetime Special episode as we celebrate 3 years on the air! Please email us and we will send you a direct link to the Zoom episode with a password. We hope you will participate! Have Faith Let it Begin.... any prayer request email me: angel@havefaithletitbegin.comWebsite: https://havefaithletitbegin.com/Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7QziAoxWccLMOezEFS8XlgTwitter: https://twitter.com/HaveFaithlibFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/HFLIB1978Mailing address P.O.Box 147 Walden NY 12586Special Thanks to all those who support Have Faith Let it BeginPodcast Nothing to Something, The CROC Podcast Special Thanks to Music Radio Creative: Voice Andrew Special Thanks to https://musicradiocreative.com/ for voice over Great place to get bakery items...I order all my birthday cakes here! https://www.calculatedconfections.com
Negative brainwashing destroy your whole life so please stay away from negative brainwashing.
We discuss the dramatic win over Spurs. We look at the goals, Solskjaer v Mourinho VAR and finish with a look forward to the 2nd leg against Granada.
![Dil Hai Cricket [Hindi Cricket Podcast] - by Subrata Biswas](https://ivyfm.s3.amazonaws.com/i320/928766.jpg)
Username - @dilhaicricket. Is instagram account/facebook page par mujhe DM karke bataiye ki aap konse topic par podcast episode chahte hai. Mai jitni Jaldi ho sake, us topic par ek podcast episode, apke is channel - Dil Hai Cricket, par launga. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/subrata-biswas01/message
Please Stay Away From The Slaughterhouse in Middle Tennessee ✔️ Make sure you like, comment & subscribe.
Come hug. Was feeling a little bit sappy, so.. one of my favorite love songs from one of my fave underrated English rock bands, Nothing But Thieves. Enjoy!
We are in this together. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
There was a horrible traffic accident near me today. It was a multi car pile up involving 100 cars and numerous deaths.Please, please be safe, drive carefully, and live to drive another day
On this Official Weed and Cliff Podcast: 3. How can you swallow one of those things without choking. 2. A colonoscopy bullseye. 1. Lower the age to get the virus. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/weed-and-cliff-dot-com/support
What if your old house still gives you creepy memories, vibes and a loop nightmare? or you see a nightmare but...Goose VPN: Lifetime Plan is available for limited time. If you click and don't take you there it means that Ended.Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/creepypasta)Goose VPN: Lifetime Subscription Goose VPN. Unlimited Devices, Encrypted Data, Secure Connection, No Geo-Restrictions. Safe Internet.Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched! Start for FREEDisclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
"Please Stay at Home" a top emergency doctor says it's vital to follow public health instructions, a Mum keeping a secret from her boy -, he desperately wants to go back to school .. a great job - in the middle of nowhere & lots more (NB owing to a technical issue, todays podcast is slightly shorter than usual. Our apologies!) See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
International recording artist Jonathan Butler joins Tim to talk about Christmas and how despite all of the adversity he's faced in his life, his story is one of hope, of inspiration, and of happiness. Jonathan is an accomplished jazz creator and performer who gained fame in pop music, R&B, jazz and worship music. In this episode, Jonathan recalls his own holiday memories and how he taps spirituality in his own music. https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/shapingopinion/Jonathan_Butler_auphonic.mp3 Jonathan Butler is a singer-songwriter. He's a guitarist, and while he's known well in jazz circles, his influence doesn't stop there. He's now 59 years old, and was born in South Africa in an atmosphere dictated by apartheid. He was raised in poverty, a kind of poverty that few places in the world see. But he had one thing that would lift him from that poverty and help him make a difference in the world. He had a love and a talent for music. And thanks to that, he would become the first non-white artist to be played on South African radio. He would appear on national television and become a celebrity, but more than a celebrity, a role model. He was a young boy when his father gave him a homemade, one-string guitar. From there, Jonathan Butler started to flourish. As a young teen, he won a local talent contest. This led to an opportunity to perform with a touring musical company throughout South Africa. Every now and then, he would perform at lavish concert halls for whites only, places where he would not be allowed to use the bathroom. Over the course of a week, he'd play in these concert halls, and alternately at some rundown facility before a local community. Jonathan was 13 years old when he was discovered by British record producer Clive Caulder. Clive signed Jonathan to a record contract with his Jive Records label. Jonathan's first single was the first song by a black artist played by white radio stations in South Africa and it won the South African equivalent to a Grammy®. That was the first major barrier he was able to break down. Eventually, he'd be nominated for Gammy awards and take his place in popular music. As impressive as all of that may be, the reason we're talking to Jonathan today centers on a different level. In 2020, the world has been met with unprecedented challenges, and yet here we are in the midst of the holiday season. This is a spiritual time. A time for positivity. A time to be uplifted and inspired. And that's why we're talking to Jonathan Butler. Gratitude Our thanks to Jonathan Butler for his permission to use tracks of his music in this production. Links Jonathan Butler (official website) Jonathan Butler, AllMusic.com Nelson Mandela Foundation (official website) About this Episode's Guest Jonathan Butler The youngest of 12 children, Butler grew up in Cape Town, South Africa, ruled by Apartheid and segregation. Butler began his singing career at age 7, releasing his first album in 1973. He made history by being the first black artist played on white South African radio while earning three gold records (“Please Stay” went double gold and “I Love How You Love Me” went gold) in 1975 as he became a teenager. More than a decade later, Jonathan moved to London after signing with Jive Records and released his first album internationally. The self-titled set went gold in 1987 in the United Kingdom and in the USA. He received Grammy nominations for Best R&B Song for his R&B-pop vocal hit “Lies” and for Best Jazz Song for the instrumental “Going Home.” His work earned songwriter's awards and received attention across multiple radio formats: pop, urban, contemporary jazz, adult contemporary and gospel. His 2004 album, Surrender, went gold in South Africa where he remains a superstar, while at the same time beloved to audiences and fans around the world.
International recording artist Jonathan Butler joins Tim to talk about Christmas and how despite all of the adversity he’s faced in his life, his story is one of hope, of inspiration, and of happiness. Jonathan is an accomplished jazz creator and performer who gained fame in pop music, R&B, jazz and worship music. In this episode, Jonathan recalls his own holiday memories and how he taps spirituality in his own music. https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/shapingopinion/Jonathan_Butler_auphonic.mp3 Jonathan Butler is a singer-songwriter. He’s a guitarist, and while he’s known well in jazz circles, his influence doesn’t stop there. He’s now 59 years old, and was born in South Africa in an atmosphere dictated by apartheid. He was raised in poverty, a kind of poverty that few places in the world see. But he had one thing that would lift him from that poverty and help him make a difference in the world. He had a love and a talent for music. And thanks to that, he would become the first non-white artist to be played on South African radio. He would appear on national television and become a celebrity, but more than a celebrity, a role model. He was a young boy when his father gave him a homemade, one-string guitar. From there, Jonathan Butler started to flourish. As a young teen, he won a local talent contest. This led to an opportunity to perform with a touring musical company throughout South Africa. Every now and then, he would perform at lavish concert halls for whites only, places where he would not be allowed to use the bathroom. Over the course of a week, he’d play in these concert halls, and alternately at some rundown facility before a local community. Jonathan was 13 years old when he was discovered by British record producer Clive Caulder. Clive signed Jonathan to a record contract with his Jive Records label. Jonathan’s first single was the first song by a black artist played by white radio stations in South Africa and it won the South African equivalent to a Grammy®. That was the first major barrier he was able to break down. Eventually, he’d be nominated for Gammy awards and take his place in popular music. As impressive as all of that may be, the reason we’re talking to Jonathan today centers on a different level. In 2020, the world has been met with unprecedented challenges, and yet here we are in the midst of the holiday season. This is a spiritual time. A time for positivity. A time to be uplifted and inspired. And that’s why we’re talking to Jonathan Butler. Gratitude Our thanks to Jonathan Butler for his permission to use tracks of his music in this production. Links Jonathan Butler (official website) Jonathan Butler, AllMusic.com Nelson Mandela Foundation (official website) About this Episode’s Guest Jonathan Butler The youngest of 12 children, Butler grew up in Cape Town, South Africa, ruled by Apartheid and segregation. Butler began his singing career at age 7, releasing his first album in 1973. He made history by being the first black artist played on white South African radio while earning three gold records (“Please Stay” went double gold and “I Love How You Love Me” went gold) in 1975 as he became a teenager. More than a decade later, Jonathan moved to London after signing with Jive Records and released his first album internationally. The self-titled set went gold in 1987 in the United Kingdom and in the USA. He received Grammy nominations for Best R&B Song for his R&B-pop vocal hit “Lies” and for Best Jazz Song for the instrumental “Going Home.” His work earned songwriter’s awards and received attention across multiple radio formats: pop, urban, contemporary jazz, adult contemporary and gospel. His 2004 album, Surrender, went gold in South Africa where he remains a superstar, while at the same time beloved to audiences and fans around the world.
WWE is actually teasing Bill Goldberg and Roman Reigns again for next year, with it happening at Wrestlemania. This will destroy everything they have done with Roman Reigns if this happens, and WWE needs to quit right now while they are ahead. WWE SmackDown full show review, results and highlights for Friday December 11, 2020. Featuring: - WHY Roman Reigns and Bill Goldberg CAN NOT HAPPEN AFTER THE TEASE THIS WEEK- Sasha Banks & Carmella contract signing- Sami Zayn vs Big (Non-Title)- Dolph Ziggler vs Montez Ford- Sasha Banks vs Carmella- Otis and Chad Gable vs Cesaro & Shinsuke Nakamura GET THE NEW OTS CyberPunk 2077 T SHIRT!► https://www.bonfire.com/jd-punk-2077 BLACK FACE MASKS IN STOCK! Get your Off The Script FACE MASKS! ► http://www.mouthmasker.com/ots Subscribe!
Doctors from Intermountain Healthcare held a news conference today, saying their hospital staff members are stretched thin and very tired. They’re asking people not to gather with people from outside their homes for Thanksgiving to prevent an even higher spike of COVID-19 cases. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
On this episode, I open with the history of how Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1918 during the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic. I talk about the exacerbating situation here in the United States from the coronavirus pandemic, and explore the situation in multiple states. After that, I interview Dr. Anna Stratis on the ravaging coronavirus crisis and dire situation here, and what we should be doing now and for the holidays. Finally, The Last Note is about Alexi Navalny and how he said that he was poisoned by Russian President Vladimir Putin, and his plans for the future. Michigan Live Article- https://www.mlive.com/coronavirus/2020/11/exhausted-in-a-nightmare-a-look-inside-a-michigan-hospital-covid-unit.html The Atlantic- https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/11/coronavirus-death-rate-third-surge/617150/ The New Yorker Article- https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/alexey-navalny-has-the-proof-of-his-poisoning?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_101820&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&bxid=5e9426500564ce1c9c1eb47e&cndid=60626241&hasha=6e8db86aa8785a459d7b13ffb843e810&hashb=6c618aac75a1eeed722d0d9bbbae4723705685be&hashc=dfab92081790f01e7d39f180444ea4b26bf61c72258cac3952e7b5c5f966129f&esrc=bounceX&mbid=mbid%3DCRMNYR012019&utm_term=TNY_Daily TJPS Podcast Information: TJPS Website- futurepres101.wixsite.com/mysite DISGRACE- anchor.fm/disgrace U.S Presidents- anchor.fm/uspresidents --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thejeremiahpattersonshow/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/thejeremiahpattersonshow/support
No matter who you are — even, say, a New York Times columnist — it’s so important that you stay safe at home this Thanksgiving, because your bubble is likely bigger than you think. Also, the hospitals are already straining ahead of a long winter. We’ll talk about it, plus our favorite Thanksgiving sides in another round of “Half-Full or Half-Empty.” Here’s a list of everything we talked about today: Some background info on Kimberly’s cocktail today “I Traced My Covid-19 Bubble and It’s Enormous” from The New York Times Opinion “One in Five U.S. Hospitals Face Staffing Crises Within a Week” from Bloomberg “Dolly Parton & Friends Set for Live Holiday Special With Pandora” from Billboard Thanks to everyone who joined us live on YouTube today! We’re off next Friday, and planning to be back in December. Subscribe so you don’t miss it!
No matter who you are — even, say, a New York Times columnist — it’s so important that you stay safe at home this Thanksgiving, because your bubble is likely bigger than you think. Also, the hospitals are already straining ahead of a long winter. We’ll talk about it, plus our favorite Thanksgiving sides in another round of “Half-Full or Half-Empty.” Here’s a list of everything we talked about today: Some background info on Kimberly’s cocktail today “I Traced My Covid-19 Bubble and It’s Enormous” from The New York Times Opinion “One in Five U.S. Hospitals Face Staffing Crises Within a Week” from Bloomberg “Dolly Parton & Friends Set for Live Holiday Special With Pandora” from Billboard Thanks to everyone who joined us live on YouTube today! We’re off next Friday, and planning to be back in December. Subscribe so you don’t miss it!
This world needs you in it. Things are tough, but they WILL GET BETTER. In the meantime, you can cry it out with me. If you like what you hear, please remember to subscribe or leave a review. I’d love to hear from you. How We Get By is hosted and produced by Monica Noelle, an artist and writer from Scranton, Pa. https://www.instagram.com/howwegetby_/ Music by Joe Burke - please check out his beautiful music! https://www.facebook.com/Joe-Burke-Music-2038094623130662/ https://music.apple.com/us/album/mystic-immediately/1444227138?fbclid=IwAR3pWh7TXaUp0MpwUd6zRusRHDaJgD3jlOmnCAWPeOyf_4NF72hwC7dhse8 --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/monicanoelle/support
It wasn't pretty, but they all count the same - the Steelers are 6-0! Tim Benz, Gerry Dulac, and Stan Savran break down a dramatic 27-24 victory off the foot of Stephen Gostkowski and a dominating 1st half performance by the Black and Gold. Many questions still persist, most notably around the fill-in situation for Devin Bush between Ulysses Gilbert and Robert NightTrain Spillane, and an offense that seemed to vanish in the second half, as well as some questionable play calling come crunch time. Nevertheless, it's Ravens week - Here We Go
Episode 101 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is the first one of the podcast's third year. This one looks at "Telstar" by the Tornados, and the tragic life of Joe Meek, Britain's first great pop auteur. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Apologies for the lateness of this one -- my two-week break got extended when my computer broke down. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Wipe Out" by the Surfaris. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of the information here comes from The Legendary Joe Meek: The Telstar Man by John Repsch. Some bits come from Clem Cattini: My Life Through the Eye of a Tornado. This compilation contains most of the important singles Meek produced, with the notable exceptions of the Tornados' singles. This, meanwhile, contains the early records he engineered before going into production. This is probably the best compilation of the Tornados' music available. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Welcome to the third year of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, and welcome to the future! Although for this particular future we're actually going backwards a couple of months. This episode and the next one are both about records that were released a little before "Love Me Do", which the most recent episode covered, and that's something I should point out -- the podcast is never going to be absolutely chronological, and in this case it made sense to tell that story before these ones. Before we start this episode, I need to give warnings for a whole lot of different things, because we're looking at one of the most tragic stories we'll see during the course of this podcast. This story contains discussion of occultism, severe mental illness, legalised homophobia, an unsolved probably homophobic murder, and a murder-suicide. I am going to try to deal with all those subjects as sensitively as possible, but if you might become distressed by hearing about those things, you might want to skip this episode, or at least read the transcript before listening. I also want to make something very clear right now -- this episode deals with a mentally ill man who commits a murder. He did not commit that murder *because* he was mentally ill. Mental illness is far more likely to make someone the victim of a crime than the perpetrator, and I have known many, many people who have had the same symptoms but who have not committed such awful acts. It is impossible to talk about the events in this episode without the risk of increasing stigma for mentally ill people, but I hope by saying this I can reduce that risk at least somewhat. Today we're going to look at the first British rock and roll record to make number one in the USA, and at the career of the first independent record producer and engineer in Britain. We're going to look at the sad life and tragic end of Joe Meek, and at "Telstar" by the Tornadoes: [Excerpt: The Tornadoes, "Telstar"] Joe Meek is someone who has become something of a legend among music lovers, and he's someone whose music is more talked about than listened to. People talk about him as a genius, but rather fewer of them explain what it was that he did that was so impressive. This is partly because, more than much of the music of the era, it requires context to appreciate. Meek was a producer above all else -- he had no real knowledge of music, and had no ear for singers. What Meek did know was sounds, and how to achieve sounds in the recording studio that could not be achieved anywhere else. Meek had, from a very young age, been fascinated by the possibilities of both sound and electronics. He had experimented with both as a child, and when he'd moved to London he'd quickly found himself jobs where he could make use of that -- he'd started out as a TV repairman, but quickly moved on to working at IBC, one of the few independent studios in existence. There he was given the job of assistant engineer on a Radio Luxembourg show that was recorded live in theatres up and down the country -- he had to plug in all the mics and so on. He soon moved on to editing the tape recordings, and then to working the controls himself. As well as being main engineer on the radio show, though, he was also still an assistant engineer in the studio for music sessions, and for a long time that was all he was doing. However, he kept trying to get more involved in recording the music, and eventually to shut him up the studio boss gave him the chance to be the main engineer at a session -- for a twenty-piece string section. The boss assumed that Meek wouldn't be able to handle such a complicated assignment as his first engineering job, and that he'd be kept quiet if he knew how hard the job was. Instead, he did such a good job balancing the sound that the musicians in the studio applauded the playback, and he was quickly promoted to senior balance engineer. The world got its first small inkling of what Meek could do in 1956, when he created the unique sound of "Bad Penny Blues", a record by the trad jazz trumpet player Humphrey Lyttleton. "Bad Penny Blues" actually happened more or less by accident, at least as far as the musicians were concerned. There was a five-piece band in the studio, but the saxophone player had to leave early, and so they were stuck for what to record once he was gone. Denis Preston, the producer in charge of the session, suggested that they just play a blues, and so they improvised a boogie woogie piece, based around something they played in the clubs -- Johnny Parker, the piano player, played somewhat in the style of Dan Burley, the man who had coined the term "skiffle". But what made the track wasn't the group or the producer, but the engineering: [Excerpt: Humphrey Lyttleton, "Bad Penny Blues"] These days, that doesn't sound all that revolutionary, but when they heard it back the group were furious at what Meek had done to the sound, because it just didn't sound like what they were used to. There were several innovative things about it, at least for a British record, but one of the most important was that Meek had actually bothered to mic the drum kit separately -- at this point in British studios, which were several years behind American ones, it was considered unnecessary to mic the drums properly, as their sound would get into the other microphones anyway, because the musicians were all playing together in the same room. If you really wanted a good drum sound, you'd hang a single mic over the drummer's head. Meek was using separate mics for each drum on the kit. Because of this, Meek had managed to get a drum sound which was unlike anything that had been heard in a British record before. You can actually *hear* the kick drum. It sounds normal now, but that's because everyone who followed Meek realised that actually bothering to record the drums was something worth doing. There was another thing Meek did, which again you will almost certainly not have noticed when listening to that recording -- he had added a lot of compression. Compression is a standard part of the sound engineer's toolkit, and a simple one to understand. All it does is make quiet sounds louder and loud sounds quieter. Used sparingly, it gives a recording a little more punch, and also evens out the sound a bit. So for example, when you're listening to a playlist on Spotify, that playlist applies a little compression to everything, so when you go from a Bach piece for solo piano to a Slayer track, you can hear the Bach piece but your earbuds don't make your eardrums bleed when the Slayer record comes on. By the way, this is one of those words that gets used confusingly, because the word "compression", when referring to Internet sound files such as MP3s, has a totally different meaning, so you might well see someone talking about compression of a recording in ways that seem to contradict this. But when I refer to compression in this episode, and in any of the episodes in the foreseeable future, I mean what I've talked about here. Generally speaking, recordings have had steadily more compression applied to them over the decades, and so the moderate use of compression on "Bad Penny Blues" might not sound like much to modern ears -- especially since when older recordings have been reissued, they almost always have additional compression on them, so even when I've excerpted things in these episodes, they've sounded more compressed than the original recordings did. But Meek would soon start using a *lot* more compression, even than is used these days, and that drastically changed the character of the sound. To show what I mean, here's me playing a few bars on the guitar, recorded with no compression whatsoever: [guitar] Here's the same recording with a touch of compression: [guitar with compression] And the same recording with a *lot* of compression: [guitar with steadily more compression added] This was one of the things that Meek would do over the course of his career, and which very few other people were doing at the time in the UK. "Bad Penny Blues" became one of the most important British jazz records ever -- probably *the* most important British jazz record ever -- and it made the top twenty, which never happened with jazz records at the time. Meek's reputation as an innovative engineer was set. Shortly after "Bad Penny Blues", Meek was given his first opportunity to indulge his love of sound effects, on what became one of the biggest-selling British records of the year. Anne Shelton was recording a military-themed song, and the producer suggested that they needed the sound of marching feet. Rather than play in something from a sound-effects album, which was what the producer expected but which wouldn't have been in time with the music, Meek got a box of gravel and had someone shake it in time with the music. The result did sound exactly like marching feet, though the dust from the gravel apparently made Shelton's new suit into a mess, and the record went to number one for a month: [Excerpt: Anne Shelton, "Lay Down Your Arms"] Another hit Meek engineered in the mid-fifties has led to an urban myth that's been repeated unquestioningly even in the Guardian, even though a second's thought proves that it's nonsense. Frankie Vaughan's "Green Door" went to number two in 1957: [Excerpt: Frankie Vaughan, "Green Door"] That line, "When I said 'Joe sent me' someone laughed out loud" has been taken to be referring to Meek himself, and a whole elaborate mythology has been spun around this. As Meek was gay, and as there was a lesbian club called The Gateways in London which happened to have a green door, people have stated as fact that the song is about that club, and that the people in there were laughing because a man was trying to get into a lesbian club. There's only one slight problem with this, which is that it's complete nonsense. For a start, while Meek was gay, he saw being gay as an affliction, something to be ashamed of, and was hardly likely to make a whole jokey record about that — at least at this time. He did some things later on. Then there's the fact that Meek was at the time only a moderately-known engineer, not the famous producer and songwriter he became later. But more important than either of those things -- the song was a cover of an American hit record by Jim Lowe, written by songwriters who had almost certainly never even been to Britain. And the line about "Joe"? That was in the original, and was a reference to a 1954 hit on the same lines, "Hernando's Hideaway": [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald, "Hernando's Hideaway"] During this early period of his career, Meek was recording all sorts of music. While the bread-and-butter work of a recording engineer at the time was orchestral pop covers of American records, he also engineered skiffle records by Lonnie Donegan, with a stinging guitar sound he would later use on many other records: [Excerpt: Lonnie Donegan, "Cumberland Gap"] Calypso records by people like Lord Invader or the Mighty Terror: [Excerpt: Mighty Terror, "T.V. Calypso"] And jazz records by Chris Barber, Acker Bilk, and Humphrey Lyttleton, usually produced by Denis Preston, who after "Bad Penny Blues" insisted on using Meek for all of his sessions. Because of this connection, Meek also got to engineer some of the very first blues records cut in Britain. Barber would bring over American folk-blues artists to tour with him -- and we'll be looking at the consequences of that for much of the next three years -- and Preston arranged sessions, engineered by Meek, for Big Bill Broonzy: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "When Do I Get To Be Called A Man?"] And Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee -- who wouldn't seem a natural fit with Meek's very artificial style, but the echo he applies to Terry's harmonica, in particular, gives it a haunting feel that really works, to my ears at least: [Excerpt: Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, "Key to the Highway"] But while Meek was becoming the best engineer in Britain, he was not getting on at all well with his boss. In large part this was because of the boss in question being extremely homophobic, so when Meek refused to work with assistants he perceived as incompetent and insisted on other ones, the boss assumed he wanted to work with people he fancied. In fact, Meek was just being a perfectionist -- but he was also very prone to mood swings and stubbornness, and bursts of paranoia. He started to think that the people he was working with were stealing his ideas. And he was having a lot of ideas. As well as close-micing instruments, adding compression as a sound effect, and adding extra echo, all of which were almost unknown in British studios at the time, he was also the first person in Britain to deliberately add distortion to a sound, and he also came up with a primitive method of multi-tracking, at a time when everything in British studios was recorded straight to mono. He would record a backing track, then play it back into the studio for the musicians to play along with, rerecording the backing track into another microphone. This way of working round the limitations of the studio ended up giving some of the records a swimmy sound because of loss of fidelity, but Meek leaned into that, and it became a signature of his music even after he eventually gained access to multi-track recording. So Meek knew he would have to move on from just being an engineer, working for a homophobe who also didn't appreciate his talents. He needed to become a producer, and this is where Denis Preston came in. Preston was himself an independent record producer -- the only one in Europe at the time. He would make records and only after they were recorded would he make an agreement with a record label to release them. Meek wanted to go even further than Preston -- he wanted to become the first independent producer *and engineer* in the UK. Up to this point, in Britain, the jobs of producer and engineer were separate. Meek had recently built a tiny studio in his flat, for recording demos, and he had cowritten a song, "Sizzling Hot", that he thought had hit potential. He recruited a local skiffle band to record a demo of the song, and Preston agreed it had potential, and funded the recording of a proper version of the song: [Excerpt: Jimmy Miller, "Sizzling Hot"] Jimmy Miller, the singer of that song, was present at an event that shaped much of the rest of Joe Meek's life. Now, I need to emphasise that when he reported this, Miller was talking many years later, so he may have exaggerated what actually happened, and I have no reason to think that what I'm about to describe actually involved anything supernatural. But the way Miller told the story, he, Meek, and a friend of Meek's named Faud were conducting a seance in January 1958. Miller was shuffling and dealing tarot cards with one hand, while holding Meek's hand with the other. Meek in turn was holding one of Faud's hands, while Faud held a pen in the other hand and was performing automatic writing. As Miller told it, at one point he felt strange and gripped Meek's hand so hard it drew blood, and at the same moment Faud wrote down the words "Feb 3, Buddy Holly dies", in what looked to Miller like Miller's own handwriting rather than Faud's. Meek tried to get the record labels and publishers to warn Holly, but they didn't. February the third 1958 came and went with no problem, but Meek was still worried, and so when Holly and the Crickets toured Britain in March that year, Meek waited outside the stage door and slipped Holly a bit of paper warning him. Holly apparently treated him politely, but he was later heard to joke on the radio about some of the strange things that had happened to him on tour, including being slipped this note. And then, on February the third 1959, Buddy Holly did die. Now, again, we only have Miller's after the fact word that the seance predicted the exact date of Holly's death, but it's very clear that something happened that day that affected Meek deeply, and that he did make efforts to warn Holly. Meek was severely disturbed when Holly died, and while he had already been a fan of Holly's, he was now something more. He was convinced that Buddy Holly was *important* to him in some way, and that Holly's music, and Holly's personality, were something he needed to study. Later on, he would become convinced that Holly's ghost was talking to him. But for the moment, this, and Meek's mood swings, didn't affect things too much. He quit working at IBC and started his own studio, Landsdowne studio, which was funded and owned by Preston, but with equipment designed by Meek, who was to have the run of the place. His songwriting was starting to pay off, too. While "Sizzling Hot" hadn't been a hit, Meek had written another song, "Put a Ring on Her Finger", which had been recorded by Eddie Silver, and had been unsuccessful. But then Les Paul and Mary Ford had covered it in the US, and it had made the US top forty: [Excerpt: Les Paul and Mary Ford, "Put a Ring on My Finger"] And Tommy Steele had covered their version as the B-side of his top-ten UK hit cover of Richie Valens' "Come on Let's Go". But that success as a songwriter led to Meek leaving Lansdowne studios in November 1959. Denis Preston owned the publishing company that published Meek's songs, and Meek started pestering him to take more songs. He did this in a recording session, and Preston told him to concentrate on the session and leave pitching songs to afterwards. Meek stormed out, leaving his assistant to finish the session, and Preston told him not to bother coming back -- Meek was a great engineer and producer, but was just too difficult to work with. Luckily for Meek, his firing came at a time when he was in high demand in the industry. He'd just co-produced "What Do You Want to Make Those Eyes at Me For?" by Emile Ford and the Checkmates, which became both the first number one of the sixties and the first number one by a Black British artist: [Excerpt: Emile Ford and the Checkmates, "What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For?"] He had two more records in the top ten as well. But even so, he found it hard to get any more work, and so he spent his time working on an experimental album, I Hear a New World, which was inspired by the launch of the first Sputnik satellite and by his getting hold of a clavioline, the same kind of keyboard instrument that had been modified into the Musitron on "Runaway". I Hear A New World wasn't a success, but it was the first attempt at something that would later become very big for Meek: [Excerpt: The Blue Men, "Magnetic Field"] I Hear a New World was eventually released as a limited-pressing EP and an even more limited pressing album by a new label that Meek set up with William Barrington-Coupe, Triumph Records. Triumph lasted less than a year. While working at the label, Meek did produce three hit singles, including "Angela Jones" by Michael Cox, which made the top ten: [Excerpt: Michael Cox, "Angela Jones"] But Meek soon became paranoid about Barrington-Coupe, and for once he may have been right. Most of the businesses Barrington-Coupe was involved with collapsed, he spent some time in prison for tax fraud in the mid-sixties, and he would later become involved in one of the great scandals to hit the classical music world. Before linking up with Meek, he had married the minor concert pianist Joyce Hatto, who had a reputation as being moderately, but not exceptionally, talented, and who recorded for Barrington-Coupe's Saga Records: [Excerpt: Joyce Hatto and the New York Pro Arte Symphony, "Rhapsody in Blue"] While Hatto's career continued into the seventies, both she and Barrington-Coupe then disappeared from public view. Then, in 2002, Hatto started releasing what was the most extraordinary outpouring of music from any classical musician. She released over a hundred CDs in the next four years on a label owned by Barrington-Coupe, performing almost the entire major classical piano repertoire. She was only working in the studio -- she was very ill -- but she became a legend among lovers of classical music: [Excerpt: "Joyce Hatto" (Vladimir Ashkenazy), Brahms Piano Concerto #2] It was only after her death in 2006 that the truth came out -- none of the recordings from her late golden period were actually of her. Barrington-Coupe had simply been taking other people's recordings of these pieces -- often recordings by relatively obscure musicians -- and reissuing them under her name, with made-up conductors and orchestras. That's the kind of person that Barrington-Coupe was, and it suggests that Meek was correct in his suspicions of his business partner. But for a short time, Meek was happy at Triumph, and he set up a fruitful working partnership with Charles Blackwell, his young co-writer on "Sizzling Hot", who worked as his arranger and would translate Meek's ideas into music that other musicians could understand -- Meek couldn't play an instrument, or read music, or sing in tune. To write songs, Meek would often take an old rhythm track he happened to have lying around and record a new vocal on it, la-laing his way through a melody even if the chords didn't go with it. Blackwell would take these demos and turn them into finished songs, and write string arrangements. So he was creatively happy, but he needed to move on. And while he quickly decided that Barrington-Coupe was a chancer who he shouldn't be having any dealings with, he didn't feel the same about Major Banks, who had provided the funding for Barrington-Coupe's investment in Triumph. Banks came to Meek with a new idea -- rather than have a record company, they would do like Denis Preston did and make records which they would then lease to the major labels. Meek would deal with all the music, and Banks with the money, and Banks would pay for Joe to move into a bigger flat, where he could have his own professional recording studio, which would be cheaper than recording in other studios, as he had been since he'd left Lansdowne. RGM Sound was born. Meek's new studio was something utterly unheard of in Britain, and almost unheard of in the world. It was a three-storey flat above a shop on a residential street. He was recording in a normal home. The live room he used was a bedroom, and sometimes musicians would play in the hallway or the bathroom. Other than odd amateur disc-cutting places, there was no such thing as a home studio in the Britain of the 1950s and sixties. Studios were large, purpose-built facilities run by very serious pipe-smoking men employed by major multinational firms, who wore lab coats if they were doing technical work or a suit and tie if they were on the creative side. The idea of making a record in someone's bedroom was just nonsensical. Meek started making records with a new young songwriter named Geoff Goddard, who took on the stage name Anton Hollywood, and found a lucrative opportunity in a young Australian manager and agent named Robert Stigwood. Stigwood had a lot of actors on his books who had TV careers, and he wanted to promote them as all-round entertainers. He started sending them to Meek, who was good enough in the studio that he could make even the worst singer sound competent, and then one of them, John Leyton, got a part in a soap opera as a pop singer. Whatever his next record was, it would get the kind of TV exposure most acts could only dream of. Goddard wrote a song called "Johnny Remember Me", Blackwell came up with the arrangement, and Meek produced it and managed to get Leyton sounding like a singer: [Excerpt: John Leyton, "Johnny Remember Me"] It went to number one and sold half a million copies. But those lyrics about hearing a dead person's voice were a sign of something that was eventually going to lead to tragedy. Goddard shared many of Meek's obsessions. Goddard, like Meek, was a spiritualist, and he thought he could talk to the dead. The two started to hold regular seances, in which they would try to contact Buddy Holly, who Goddard believed had sent him "Johnny Remember Me" from the spirit world. Meek's obsession with the undead also showed in some of the other records he was making, like the instrumental "Night of the Vampire" by the Moontrekkers: [Excerpt: The Moontrekkers, "Night of the Vampire"] The Moontrekkers did have a singer, but after hearing him audition, Meek came running into the room flapping his arms and blowing raspberries, because he thought he was too awful to record. Rod Stewart would have to wait a while longer for his recording career. In 1961, Meek put together a group for studio work. The group started because the lead guitarist of the Outlaws, one of the bands Meek produced, got sacked. Their bass player, Chas Hodges, later more famous as half of Chas & Dave, switched to guitar, and Meek had tried to replace him with a new bass player, one Heinz Burt. Heinz was someone who Meek was very attracted to -- reports differ on whether they were lovers or not, but if not then Meek definitely wanted them to be -- and Meek was moulding Heinz to be a future star, despite his lack of musical ability. While he was being groomed for stardom, he was made the bass player in the group -- until Hodges decided he was going to switch back to bass, because Heinz couldn't play. Alan Caddy, formerly of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, became the new guitarist for the Outlaws, and then the group lost their drummer, who was replaced with Clem Cattini, Caddy's old Pirates bandmate. By this point Chas Hodges was the only Outlaw left, and Meek really wanted to give Heinz a job, and so he took Caddy and Cattini and made them into a new group, for studio work, who were to be known as the Tornados, with Heinz on bass. Soon they added a rhythm guitarist, George Bellamy, and a keyboard player, Norman Hale. Larry Parnes was, as we saw in the last episode, always on the lookout for bands to back his stars, and so in 1962 the Tornados became Billy Fury's backing band -- something that was to cause problems for them more quickly than they imagined. At the time, it seemed like a great opportunity. They were going to record for Meek -- both their own records and as the backing musicians for anyone else that Meek thought they'd work with -- and they were going to tour with Fury, so they'd have regular work. And Meek saw it as an opportunity for him to possibly get involved with Fury's recording career, which would have been a great opportunity for him had it worked out. The Tornados' first single, "Love and Fury", seems to have been named with this new association in mind: [Excerpt: The Tornados, "Love and Fury"] Unfortunately for the group, it wasn't a hit. But then Meek got inspired. In July 1962, the first ever communications satellite, Telstar, was launched. For the first time in history, people could see events on the other side of the world broadcast live, and so Europeans got to see, in real time, a speech by President Kennedy and part of a baseball game. It's hard now to imagine how revolutionary this was at the time, but this was a time when things like the Olympics were shown on twelve-hour delays or longer, as to show them the TV companies had to film them on actual film, and then fly the film over to the UK. Telstar was the future, and Meek, with his interest in space, was going to commemorate that. He took a song he'd recorded with Geoff Goddard, “Try Once More”: [Excerpt: Geoff Goddard, “Try Once More”] As was always his way with writing, he took that backing track, and sang a new melody over it: [Excerpt: Joe Meek, “Telstar (demo)”] He then got the keyboard player Dave Adams to work out the melody based on that demo, and recorded Adams playing that melody over a different pre-recorded backing track: [Excerpt: Dave Adams, “Telstar demo”] He then used that as the demo to show the Tornados what to play. They spent twelve hours in the studio recording the backing track, between Billy Fury shows, and then Meek got Goddard in to play piano and clavioline, and do some wordless vocals, as the Tornados didn't have enough time between shows to finish the track by themselves. Meek then overdubbed the track with various backwards-recorded and echoed sound effects: [Excerpt: The Tornados, "Telstar"] "Telstar" entered the charts on the fifth of September, and reached number one on the tenth of October, the week after "Love Me Do" came out. It stayed there for five weeks, and as well as that it went to number one in America -- the first British rock and roll record ever to do so. The follow-up, "Globetrotter", also charted -- and got into the top ten while "Telstar" was still there: [Excerpt: The Tornados, "Globetrotter"] Unfortunately, that was to be the high point for the Tornados. Larry Parnes, who was managing them, didn't want them to take the spotlight away from Billy Fury, who they were backing -- he let them play "Telstar" on stage, but that was it, and when they got offers to tour America, he insisted that Fury had to be on the bill, which caused the American promoters to back out. Not only that, but the other Tornados were getting sick of Meek putting all his attention into Heinz, who he was still trying to make into a solo star, recording songs like the Eddie Cochran tribute "Just Like Eddie", written by Geoff Goddard and with a new young guitarist called Ritchie Blackmore, who was the guitarist in Chas Hodges' latest lineup of Outlaws, playing lead: [Excerpt: Heinz, "Just Like Eddie"] And then in March 1963, the composer of a piece of French film music, "Le Marche d’Austerlitz", sued Meek over "Telstar"s similarity to that tune: [Excerpt: Jean Ledrut, "Le Marche d’Austerlitz"] It was a frivolous suit -- Meek had no way of having heard that piece, which was from a film which hadn't been released in Britain -- but it tied up all Meek's royalties from “Telstar” for the next four years. Meek was still having hits -- "Just Like Eddie" eventually made number five – for example, but in 1963 with the rise of Merseybeat he was having fewer and fewer. Not only that, but his mental health was getting worse and worse, especially after he was arrested for soliciting. He started getting more and more paranoid that people were stealing his ideas, and one by one he cut ties with business associates like Larry Parnes and Robert Stigwood. Heinz got a girlfriend, and everyone was in Meek's bad books. But he was still turning out the hits, like "Have I The Right" by the Honeycombs: [Excerpt: The Honeycombs, "Have I the Right"] That went to number one, but meant the end of Meek's association with Goddard -- Goddard claimed that he had written the song, which was credited to the Honeycombs' managers, and Meek thought he was just claiming this so he could avoid being associated with Meek now that his homosexuality was public knowledge after his arrest. Goddard ended up suing over the song. Meek was also just producing too much music in an attempt to remain on top. He's often compared to Phil Spector, but in a three-year period Spector had twenty-one hit singles out of twenty-four releases. Meek, in the same period, had twenty-five hit singles -- but released 141 singles, almost one a week. His failure rate in turn made record labels more and more wary of buying his tapes. By the mid-sixties, the hits were well and truly drying up. Meek was still producing a group called the Tornados, but it had none of the original members in and now featured guitarist Ritchie Blackmore and drummer Mitch Mitchell . This lineup of Tornados split up shortly after Meek pulled out a shotgun in the studio and aimed it at Mitchell's head, saying he'd shoot him if he didn't get the drum part right. Meek's final important record was in mid 1966, when he finally jumped on the Merseybeat bandwagon two years late, with "Please Stay" by the Cryin' Shames, the most popular band in Liverpool at the time: [Excerpt: The Cryin' Shames, "Please Stay"] Unfortunately, that only made the lower reaches of the top thirty. Meek was getting deeper and deeper in debt, and his mental health was getting worse. He was seriously considering quitting as an independent producer and taking a steady job with EMI instead. And then, a tragic event happened which eventually led to the unravelling of Meek's entire life. Meek was already in a very low place when he learned of the murder of sixteen-year-old Bernard Oliver, a young gay teenager who Meek had known (reports vary on how well they knew each other, with some saying that Oliver had done some work for Meek at his studio, while others say they just vaguely knew each other). The murder, which has still never been solved, was a major news story at the time, and it led to a massive increase in police harassment of anyone who was known to be gay, especially if they knew Oliver -- and Meek had a conviction. Meek already believed he was being spied on and that his phone was being tapped, and now the world started giving him reason to think that -- strange cars parked outside his house, almost certainly undercover police spying on him. On February the second, 1967, the PRS received a letter from the French performing rights society, saying that Meek's problems with the Telstar lawsuit would soon be over -- the court had determined that no matter what had happened, the composer of “Le Marche d'Austerlitz” would only be entitled to a small percentage of the royalties from "Telstar" at most. Frederick Woods, the assistant general manager of the PRS and a friend of Meek's, put the letter aside intending to call Meek and tell him the good news -- all he had to do was to write to the PRS and they'd be able to give him an advance on the money, and soon almost all of it would be coming through. He'd soon be getting the bulk of the £150,000 he was owed -- nearly three million pounds in today's money. But Woods got distracted and didn't make the phone call, and Meek never found out that his money troubles were nearly over. Ritchie Blackmore's wife Margaret called round to see Joe, as she sometimes did. He was apparently not in his right mind, talking a lot about black magic and comparing Margaret to Frieda Harris, one of Aleister Crowley's associates. He was convinced people were stealing his ideas from his mind, and asked her to leave. While she was there, she saw him destroying correspondence and paintings he owned. The next morning, February the third, Meek asked his assistant to get his landlady, Violet Shenton, up to Meek's office. There was some shouting from Meek, and then he turned a gun he had, which was owned by Heinz, on Mrs. Shenton and killed her. Meek's assistant ran into the room, but before he could get to Meek, Meek shot himself, dying instantly. It was the eighth anniversary of Buddy Holly's death. The lawsuit over "Telstar" was finally resolved just three weeks later, in Meek's favour. There's a plaque now at the building where Meek's studio was. It says that Joe Meek, "the Telstar man", "Lived, worked, and died here". It doesn't mention Violet Shenton. After all, she wasn't a great male genius, just the male genius' female victim.
Episode 101 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is the first one of the podcast’s third year. This one looks at “Telstar” by the Tornados, and the tragic life of Joe Meek, Britain’s first great pop auteur. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Apologies for the lateness of this one — my two-week break got extended when my computer broke down. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Wipe Out” by the Surfaris. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of the information here comes from The Legendary Joe Meek: The Telstar Man by John Repsch. Some bits come from Clem Cattini: My Life Through the Eye of a Tornado. This compilation contains most of the important singles Meek produced, with the notable exceptions of the Tornados’ singles. This, meanwhile, contains the early records he engineered before going into production. This is probably the best compilation of the Tornados’ music available. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Welcome to the third year of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, and welcome to the future! Although for this particular future we’re actually going backwards a couple of months. This episode and the next one are both about records that were released a little before “Love Me Do”, which the most recent episode covered, and that’s something I should point out — the podcast is never going to be absolutely chronological, and in this case it made sense to tell that story before these ones. Before we start this episode, I need to give warnings for a whole lot of different things, because we’re looking at one of the most tragic stories we’ll see during the course of this podcast. This story contains discussion of occultism, severe mental illness, legalised homophobia, an unsolved probably homophobic murder, and a murder-suicide. I am going to try to deal with all those subjects as sensitively as possible, but if you might become distressed by hearing about those things, you might want to skip this episode, or at least read the transcript before listening. I also want to make something very clear right now — this episode deals with a mentally ill man who commits a murder. He did not commit that murder *because* he was mentally ill. Mental illness is far more likely to make someone the victim of a crime than the perpetrator, and I have known many, many people who have had the same symptoms but who have not committed such awful acts. It is impossible to talk about the events in this episode without the risk of increasing stigma for mentally ill people, but I hope by saying this I can reduce that risk at least somewhat. Today we’re going to look at the first British rock and roll record to make number one in the USA, and at the career of the first independent record producer and engineer in Britain. We’re going to look at the sad life and tragic end of Joe Meek, and at “Telstar” by the Tornadoes: [Excerpt: The Tornadoes, “Telstar”] Joe Meek is someone who has become something of a legend among music lovers, and he’s someone whose music is more talked about than listened to. People talk about him as a genius, but rather fewer of them explain what it was that he did that was so impressive. This is partly because, more than much of the music of the era, it requires context to appreciate. Meek was a producer above all else — he had no real knowledge of music, and had no ear for singers. What Meek did know was sounds, and how to achieve sounds in the recording studio that could not be achieved anywhere else. Meek had, from a very young age, been fascinated by the possibilities of both sound and electronics. He had experimented with both as a child, and when he’d moved to London he’d quickly found himself jobs where he could make use of that — he’d started out as a TV repairman, but quickly moved on to working at IBC, one of the few independent studios in existence. There he was given the job of assistant engineer on a Radio Luxembourg show that was recorded live in theatres up and down the country — he had to plug in all the mics and so on. He soon moved on to editing the tape recordings, and then to working the controls himself. As well as being main engineer on the radio show, though, he was also still an assistant engineer in the studio for music sessions, and for a long time that was all he was doing. However, he kept trying to get more involved in recording the music, and eventually to shut him up the studio boss gave him the chance to be the main engineer at a session — for a twenty-piece string section. The boss assumed that Meek wouldn’t be able to handle such a complicated assignment as his first engineering job, and that he’d be kept quiet if he knew how hard the job was. Instead, he did such a good job balancing the sound that the musicians in the studio applauded the playback, and he was quickly promoted to senior balance engineer. The world got its first small inkling of what Meek could do in 1956, when he created the unique sound of “Bad Penny Blues”, a record by the trad jazz trumpet player Humphrey Lyttleton. “Bad Penny Blues” actually happened more or less by accident, at least as far as the musicians were concerned. There was a five-piece band in the studio, but the saxophone player had to leave early, and so they were stuck for what to record once he was gone. Denis Preston, the producer in charge of the session, suggested that they just play a blues, and so they improvised a boogie woogie piece, based around something they played in the clubs — Johnny Parker, the piano player, played somewhat in the style of Dan Burley, the man who had coined the term “skiffle”. But what made the track wasn’t the group or the producer, but the engineering: [Excerpt: Humphrey Lyttleton, “Bad Penny Blues”] These days, that doesn’t sound all that revolutionary, but when they heard it back the group were furious at what Meek had done to the sound, because it just didn’t sound like what they were used to. There were several innovative things about it, at least for a British record, but one of the most important was that Meek had actually bothered to mic the drum kit separately — at this point in British studios, which were several years behind American ones, it was considered unnecessary to mic the drums properly, as their sound would get into the other microphones anyway, because the musicians were all playing together in the same room. If you really wanted a good drum sound, you’d hang a single mic over the drummer’s head. Meek was using separate mics for each drum on the kit. Because of this, Meek had managed to get a drum sound which was unlike anything that had been heard in a British record before. You can actually *hear* the kick drum. It sounds normal now, but that’s because everyone who followed Meek realised that actually bothering to record the drums was something worth doing. There was another thing Meek did, which again you will almost certainly not have noticed when listening to that recording — he had added a lot of compression. Compression is a standard part of the sound engineer’s toolkit, and a simple one to understand. All it does is make quiet sounds louder and loud sounds quieter. Used sparingly, it gives a recording a little more punch, and also evens out the sound a bit. So for example, when you’re listening to a playlist on Spotify, that playlist applies a little compression to everything, so when you go from a Bach piece for solo piano to a Slayer track, you can hear the Bach piece but your earbuds don’t make your eardrums bleed when the Slayer record comes on. By the way, this is one of those words that gets used confusingly, because the word “compression”, when referring to Internet sound files such as MP3s, has a totally different meaning, so you might well see someone talking about compression of a recording in ways that seem to contradict this. But when I refer to compression in this episode, and in any of the episodes in the foreseeable future, I mean what I’ve talked about here. Generally speaking, recordings have had steadily more compression applied to them over the decades, and so the moderate use of compression on “Bad Penny Blues” might not sound like much to modern ears — especially since when older recordings have been reissued, they almost always have additional compression on them, so even when I’ve excerpted things in these episodes, they’ve sounded more compressed than the original recordings did. But Meek would soon start using a *lot* more compression, even than is used these days, and that drastically changed the character of the sound. To show what I mean, here’s me playing a few bars on the guitar, recorded with no compression whatsoever: [guitar] Here’s the same recording with a touch of compression: [guitar with compression] And the same recording with a *lot* of compression: [guitar with steadily more compression added] This was one of the things that Meek would do over the course of his career, and which very few other people were doing at the time in the UK. “Bad Penny Blues” became one of the most important British jazz records ever — probably *the* most important British jazz record ever — and it made the top twenty, which never happened with jazz records at the time. Meek’s reputation as an innovative engineer was set. Shortly after “Bad Penny Blues”, Meek was given his first opportunity to indulge his love of sound effects, on what became one of the biggest-selling British records of the year. Anne Shelton was recording a military-themed song, and the producer suggested that they needed the sound of marching feet. Rather than play in something from a sound-effects album, which was what the producer expected but which wouldn’t have been in time with the music, Meek got a box of gravel and had someone shake it in time with the music. The result did sound exactly like marching feet, though the dust from the gravel apparently made Shelton’s new suit into a mess, and the record went to number one for a month: [Excerpt: Anne Shelton, “Lay Down Your Arms”] Another hit Meek engineered in the mid-fifties has led to an urban myth that’s been repeated unquestioningly even in the Guardian, even though a second’s thought proves that it’s nonsense. Frankie Vaughan’s “Green Door” went to number two in 1957: [Excerpt: Frankie Vaughan, “Green Door”] That line, “When I said ‘Joe sent me’ someone laughed out loud” has been taken to be referring to Meek himself, and a whole elaborate mythology has been spun around this. As Meek was gay, and as there was a lesbian club called The Gateways in London which happened to have a green door, people have stated as fact that the song is about that club, and that the people in there were laughing because a man was trying to get into a lesbian club. There’s only one slight problem with this, which is that it’s complete nonsense. For a start, while Meek was gay, he saw being gay as an affliction, something to be ashamed of, and was hardly likely to make a whole jokey record about that — at least at this time. He did some things later on. Then there’s the fact that Meek was at the time only a moderately-known engineer, not the famous producer and songwriter he became later. But more important than either of those things — the song was a cover of an American hit record by Jim Lowe, written by songwriters who had almost certainly never even been to Britain. And the line about “Joe”? That was in the original, and was a reference to a 1954 hit on the same lines, “Hernando’s Hideaway”: [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald, “Hernando’s Hideaway”] During this early period of his career, Meek was recording all sorts of music. While the bread-and-butter work of a recording engineer at the time was orchestral pop covers of American records, he also engineered skiffle records by Lonnie Donegan, with a stinging guitar sound he would later use on many other records: [Excerpt: Lonnie Donegan, “Cumberland Gap”] Calypso records by people like Lord Invader or the Mighty Terror: [Excerpt: Mighty Terror, “T.V. Calypso”] And jazz records by Chris Barber, Acker Bilk, and Humphrey Lyttleton, usually produced by Denis Preston, who after “Bad Penny Blues” insisted on using Meek for all of his sessions. Because of this connection, Meek also got to engineer some of the very first blues records cut in Britain. Barber would bring over American folk-blues artists to tour with him — and we’ll be looking at the consequences of that for much of the next three years — and Preston arranged sessions, engineered by Meek, for Big Bill Broonzy: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, “When Do I Get To Be Called A Man?”] And Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee — who wouldn’t seem a natural fit with Meek’s very artificial style, but the echo he applies to Terry’s harmonica, in particular, gives it a haunting feel that really works, to my ears at least: [Excerpt: Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, “Key to the Highway”] But while Meek was becoming the best engineer in Britain, he was not getting on at all well with his boss. In large part this was because of the boss in question being extremely homophobic, so when Meek refused to work with assistants he perceived as incompetent and insisted on other ones, the boss assumed he wanted to work with people he fancied. In fact, Meek was just being a perfectionist — but he was also very prone to mood swings and stubbornness, and bursts of paranoia. He started to think that the people he was working with were stealing his ideas. And he was having a lot of ideas. As well as close-micing instruments, adding compression as a sound effect, and adding extra echo, all of which were almost unknown in British studios at the time, he was also the first person in Britain to deliberately add distortion to a sound, and he also came up with a primitive method of multi-tracking, at a time when everything in British studios was recorded straight to mono. He would record a backing track, then play it back into the studio for the musicians to play along with, rerecording the backing track into another microphone. This way of working round the limitations of the studio ended up giving some of the records a swimmy sound because of loss of fidelity, but Meek leaned into that, and it became a signature of his music even after he eventually gained access to multi-track recording. So Meek knew he would have to move on from just being an engineer, working for a homophobe who also didn’t appreciate his talents. He needed to become a producer, and this is where Denis Preston came in. Preston was himself an independent record producer — the only one in Europe at the time. He would make records and only after they were recorded would he make an agreement with a record label to release them. Meek wanted to go even further than Preston — he wanted to become the first independent producer *and engineer* in the UK. Up to this point, in Britain, the jobs of producer and engineer were separate. Meek had recently built a tiny studio in his flat, for recording demos, and he had cowritten a song, “Sizzling Hot”, that he thought had hit potential. He recruited a local skiffle band to record a demo of the song, and Preston agreed it had potential, and funded the recording of a proper version of the song: [Excerpt: Jimmy Miller, “Sizzling Hot”] Jimmy Miller, the singer of that song, was present at an event that shaped much of the rest of Joe Meek’s life. Now, I need to emphasise that when he reported this, Miller was talking many years later, so he may have exaggerated what actually happened, and I have no reason to think that what I’m about to describe actually involved anything supernatural. But the way Miller told the story, he, Meek, and a friend of Meek’s named Faud were conducting a seance in January 1958. Miller was shuffling and dealing tarot cards with one hand, while holding Meek’s hand with the other. Meek in turn was holding one of Faud’s hands, while Faud held a pen in the other hand and was performing automatic writing. As Miller told it, at one point he felt strange and gripped Meek’s hand so hard it drew blood, and at the same moment Faud wrote down the words “Feb 3, Buddy Holly dies”, in what looked to Miller like Miller’s own handwriting rather than Faud’s. Meek tried to get the record labels and publishers to warn Holly, but they didn’t. February the third 1958 came and went with no problem, but Meek was still worried, and so when Holly and the Crickets toured Britain in March that year, Meek waited outside the stage door and slipped Holly a bit of paper warning him. Holly apparently treated him politely, but he was later heard to joke on the radio about some of the strange things that had happened to him on tour, including being slipped this note. And then, on February the third 1959, Buddy Holly did die. Now, again, we only have Miller’s after the fact word that the seance predicted the exact date of Holly’s death, but it’s very clear that something happened that day that affected Meek deeply, and that he did make efforts to warn Holly. Meek was severely disturbed when Holly died, and while he had already been a fan of Holly’s, he was now something more. He was convinced that Buddy Holly was *important* to him in some way, and that Holly’s music, and Holly’s personality, were something he needed to study. Later on, he would become convinced that Holly’s ghost was talking to him. But for the moment, this, and Meek’s mood swings, didn’t affect things too much. He quit working at IBC and started his own studio, Landsdowne studio, which was funded and owned by Preston, but with equipment designed by Meek, who was to have the run of the place. His songwriting was starting to pay off, too. While “Sizzling Hot” hadn’t been a hit, Meek had written another song, “Put a Ring on Her Finger”, which had been recorded by Eddie Silver, and had been unsuccessful. But then Les Paul and Mary Ford had covered it in the US, and it had made the US top forty: [Excerpt: Les Paul and Mary Ford, “Put a Ring on My Finger”] And Tommy Steele had covered their version as the B-side of his top-ten UK hit cover of Richie Valens’ “Come on Let’s Go”. But that success as a songwriter led to Meek leaving Lansdowne studios in November 1959. Denis Preston owned the publishing company that published Meek’s songs, and Meek started pestering him to take more songs. He did this in a recording session, and Preston told him to concentrate on the session and leave pitching songs to afterwards. Meek stormed out, leaving his assistant to finish the session, and Preston told him not to bother coming back — Meek was a great engineer and producer, but was just too difficult to work with. Luckily for Meek, his firing came at a time when he was in high demand in the industry. He’d just co-produced “What Do You Want to Make Those Eyes at Me For?” by Emile Ford and the Checkmates, which became both the first number one of the sixties and the first number one by a Black British artist: [Excerpt: Emile Ford and the Checkmates, “What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For?”] He had two more records in the top ten as well. But even so, he found it hard to get any more work, and so he spent his time working on an experimental album, I Hear a New World, which was inspired by the launch of the first Sputnik satellite and by his getting hold of a clavioline, the same kind of keyboard instrument that had been modified into the Musitron on “Runaway”. I Hear A New World wasn’t a success, but it was the first attempt at something that would later become very big for Meek: [Excerpt: The Blue Men, “Magnetic Field”] I Hear a New World was eventually released as a limited-pressing EP and an even more limited pressing album by a new label that Meek set up with William Barrington-Coupe, Triumph Records. Triumph lasted less than a year. While working at the label, Meek did produce three hit singles, including “Angela Jones” by Michael Cox, which made the top ten: [Excerpt: Michael Cox, “Angela Jones”] But Meek soon became paranoid about Barrington-Coupe, and for once he may have been right. Most of the businesses Barrington-Coupe was involved with collapsed, he spent some time in prison for tax fraud in the mid-sixties, and he would later become involved in one of the great scandals to hit the classical music world. Before linking up with Meek, he had married the minor concert pianist Joyce Hatto, who had a reputation as being moderately, but not exceptionally, talented, and who recorded for Barrington-Coupe’s Saga Records: [Excerpt: Joyce Hatto and the New York Pro Arte Symphony, “Rhapsody in Blue”] While Hatto’s career continued into the seventies, both she and Barrington-Coupe then disappeared from public view. Then, in 2002, Hatto started releasing what was the most extraordinary outpouring of music from any classical musician. She released over a hundred CDs in the next four years on a label owned by Barrington-Coupe, performing almost the entire major classical piano repertoire. She was only working in the studio — she was very ill — but she became a legend among lovers of classical music: [Excerpt: “Joyce Hatto” (Vladimir Ashkenazy), Brahms Piano Concerto #2] It was only after her death in 2006 that the truth came out — none of the recordings from her late golden period were actually of her. Barrington-Coupe had simply been taking other people’s recordings of these pieces — often recordings by relatively obscure musicians — and reissuing them under her name, with made-up conductors and orchestras. That’s the kind of person that Barrington-Coupe was, and it suggests that Meek was correct in his suspicions of his business partner. But for a short time, Meek was happy at Triumph, and he set up a fruitful working partnership with Charles Blackwell, his young co-writer on “Sizzling Hot”, who worked as his arranger and would translate Meek’s ideas into music that other musicians could understand — Meek couldn’t play an instrument, or read music, or sing in tune. To write songs, Meek would often take an old rhythm track he happened to have lying around and record a new vocal on it, la-laing his way through a melody even if the chords didn’t go with it. Blackwell would take these demos and turn them into finished songs, and write string arrangements. So he was creatively happy, but he needed to move on. And while he quickly decided that Barrington-Coupe was a chancer who he shouldn’t be having any dealings with, he didn’t feel the same about Major Banks, who had provided the funding for Barrington-Coupe’s investment in Triumph. Banks came to Meek with a new idea — rather than have a record company, they would do like Denis Preston did and make records which they would then lease to the major labels. Meek would deal with all the music, and Banks with the money, and Banks would pay for Joe to move into a bigger flat, where he could have his own professional recording studio, which would be cheaper than recording in other studios, as he had been since he’d left Lansdowne. RGM Sound was born. Meek’s new studio was something utterly unheard of in Britain, and almost unheard of in the world. It was a three-storey flat above a shop on a residential street. He was recording in a normal home. The live room he used was a bedroom, and sometimes musicians would play in the hallway or the bathroom. Other than odd amateur disc-cutting places, there was no such thing as a home studio in the Britain of the 1950s and sixties. Studios were large, purpose-built facilities run by very serious pipe-smoking men employed by major multinational firms, who wore lab coats if they were doing technical work or a suit and tie if they were on the creative side. The idea of making a record in someone’s bedroom was just nonsensical. Meek started making records with a new young songwriter named Geoff Goddard, who took on the stage name Anton Hollywood, and found a lucrative opportunity in a young Australian manager and agent named Robert Stigwood. Stigwood had a lot of actors on his books who had TV careers, and he wanted to promote them as all-round entertainers. He started sending them to Meek, who was good enough in the studio that he could make even the worst singer sound competent, and then one of them, John Leyton, got a part in a soap opera as a pop singer. Whatever his next record was, it would get the kind of TV exposure most acts could only dream of. Goddard wrote a song called “Johnny Remember Me”, Blackwell came up with the arrangement, and Meek produced it and managed to get Leyton sounding like a singer: [Excerpt: John Leyton, “Johnny Remember Me”] It went to number one and sold half a million copies. But those lyrics about hearing a dead person’s voice were a sign of something that was eventually going to lead to tragedy. Goddard shared many of Meek’s obsessions. Goddard, like Meek, was a spiritualist, and he thought he could talk to the dead. The two started to hold regular seances, in which they would try to contact Buddy Holly, who Goddard believed had sent him “Johnny Remember Me” from the spirit world. Meek’s obsession with the undead also showed in some of the other records he was making, like the instrumental “Night of the Vampire” by the Moontrekkers: [Excerpt: The Moontrekkers, “Night of the Vampire”] The Moontrekkers did have a singer, but after hearing him audition, Meek came running into the room flapping his arms and blowing raspberries, because he thought he was too awful to record. Rod Stewart would have to wait a while longer for his recording career. In 1961, Meek put together a group for studio work. The group started because the lead guitarist of the Outlaws, one of the bands Meek produced, got sacked. Their bass player, Chas Hodges, later more famous as half of Chas & Dave, switched to guitar, and Meek had tried to replace him with a new bass player, one Heinz Burt. Heinz was someone who Meek was very attracted to — reports differ on whether they were lovers or not, but if not then Meek definitely wanted them to be — and Meek was moulding Heinz to be a future star, despite his lack of musical ability. While he was being groomed for stardom, he was made the bass player in the group — until Hodges decided he was going to switch back to bass, because Heinz couldn’t play. Alan Caddy, formerly of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, became the new guitarist for the Outlaws, and then the group lost their drummer, who was replaced with Clem Cattini, Caddy’s old Pirates bandmate. By this point Chas Hodges was the only Outlaw left, and Meek really wanted to give Heinz a job, and so he took Caddy and Cattini and made them into a new group, for studio work, who were to be known as the Tornados, with Heinz on bass. Soon they added a rhythm guitarist, George Bellamy, and a keyboard player, Norman Hale. Larry Parnes was, as we saw in the last episode, always on the lookout for bands to back his stars, and so in 1962 the Tornados became Billy Fury’s backing band — something that was to cause problems for them more quickly than they imagined. At the time, it seemed like a great opportunity. They were going to record for Meek — both their own records and as the backing musicians for anyone else that Meek thought they’d work with — and they were going to tour with Fury, so they’d have regular work. And Meek saw it as an opportunity for him to possibly get involved with Fury’s recording career, which would have been a great opportunity for him had it worked out. The Tornados’ first single, “Love and Fury”, seems to have been named with this new association in mind: [Excerpt: The Tornados, “Love and Fury”] Unfortunately for the group, it wasn’t a hit. But then Meek got inspired. In July 1962, the first ever communications satellite, Telstar, was launched. For the first time in history, people could see events on the other side of the world broadcast live, and so Europeans got to see, in real time, a speech by President Kennedy and part of a baseball game. It’s hard now to imagine how revolutionary this was at the time, but this was a time when things like the Olympics were shown on twelve-hour delays or longer, as to show them the TV companies had to film them on actual film, and then fly the film over to the UK. Telstar was the future, and Meek, with his interest in space, was going to commemorate that. He took a song he’d recorded with Geoff Goddard, “Try Once More”: [Excerpt: Geoff Goddard, “Try Once More”] As was always his way with writing, he took that backing track, and sang a new melody over it: [Excerpt: Joe Meek, “Telstar (demo)”] He then got the keyboard player Dave Adams to work out the melody based on that demo, and recorded Adams playing that melody over a different pre-recorded backing track: [Excerpt: Dave Adams, “Telstar demo”] He then used that as the demo to show the Tornados what to play. They spent twelve hours in the studio recording the backing track, between Billy Fury shows, and then Meek got Goddard in to play piano and clavioline, and do some wordless vocals, as the Tornados didn’t have enough time between shows to finish the track by themselves. Meek then overdubbed the track with various backwards-recorded and echoed sound effects: [Excerpt: The Tornados, “Telstar”] “Telstar” entered the charts on the fifth of September, and reached number one on the tenth of October, the week after “Love Me Do” came out. It stayed there for five weeks, and as well as that it went to number one in America — the first British rock and roll record ever to do so. The follow-up, “Globetrotter”, also charted — and got into the top ten while “Telstar” was still there: [Excerpt: The Tornados, “Globetrotter”] Unfortunately, that was to be the high point for the Tornados. Larry Parnes, who was managing them, didn’t want them to take the spotlight away from Billy Fury, who they were backing — he let them play “Telstar” on stage, but that was it, and when they got offers to tour America, he insisted that Fury had to be on the bill, which caused the American promoters to back out. Not only that, but the other Tornados were getting sick of Meek putting all his attention into Heinz, who he was still trying to make into a solo star, recording songs like the Eddie Cochran tribute “Just Like Eddie”, written by Geoff Goddard and with a new young guitarist called Ritchie Blackmore, who was the guitarist in Chas Hodges’ latest lineup of Outlaws, playing lead: [Excerpt: Heinz, “Just Like Eddie”] And then in March 1963, the composer of a piece of French film music, “Le Marche d’Austerlitz”, sued Meek over “Telstar”s similarity to that tune: [Excerpt: Jean Ledrut, “Le Marche d’Austerlitz”] It was a frivolous suit — Meek had no way of having heard that piece, which was from a film which hadn’t been released in Britain — but it tied up all Meek’s royalties from “Telstar” for the next four years. Meek was still having hits — “Just Like Eddie” eventually made number five – for example, but in 1963 with the rise of Merseybeat he was having fewer and fewer. Not only that, but his mental health was getting worse and worse, especially after he was arrested for soliciting. He started getting more and more paranoid that people were stealing his ideas, and one by one he cut ties with business associates like Larry Parnes and Robert Stigwood. Heinz got a girlfriend, and everyone was in Meek’s bad books. But he was still turning out the hits, like “Have I The Right” by the Honeycombs: [Excerpt: The Honeycombs, “Have I the Right”] That went to number one, but meant the end of Meek’s association with Goddard — Goddard claimed that he had written the song, which was credited to the Honeycombs’ managers, and Meek thought he was just claiming this so he could avoid being associated with Meek now that his homosexuality was public knowledge after his arrest. Goddard ended up suing over the song. Meek was also just producing too much music in an attempt to remain on top. He’s often compared to Phil Spector, but in a three-year period Spector had twenty-one hit singles out of twenty-four releases. Meek, in the same period, had twenty-five hit singles — but released 141 singles, almost one a week. His failure rate in turn made record labels more and more wary of buying his tapes. By the mid-sixties, the hits were well and truly drying up. Meek was still producing a group called the Tornados, but it had none of the original members in and now featured guitarist Ritchie Blackmore and drummer Mitch Mitchell . This lineup of Tornados split up shortly after Meek pulled out a shotgun in the studio and aimed it at Mitchell’s head, saying he’d shoot him if he didn’t get the drum part right. Meek’s final important record was in mid 1966, when he finally jumped on the Merseybeat bandwagon two years late, with “Please Stay” by the Cryin’ Shames, the most popular band in Liverpool at the time: [Excerpt: The Cryin’ Shames, “Please Stay”] Unfortunately, that only made the lower reaches of the top thirty. Meek was getting deeper and deeper in debt, and his mental health was getting worse. He was seriously considering quitting as an independent producer and taking a steady job with EMI instead. And then, a tragic event happened which eventually led to the unravelling of Meek’s entire life. Meek was already in a very low place when he learned of the murder of sixteen-year-old Bernard Oliver, a young gay teenager who Meek had known (reports vary on how well they knew each other, with some saying that Oliver had done some work for Meek at his studio, while others say they just vaguely knew each other). The murder, which has still never been solved, was a major news story at the time, and it led to a massive increase in police harassment of anyone who was known to be gay, especially if they knew Oliver — and Meek had a conviction. Meek already believed he was being spied on and that his phone was being tapped, and now the world started giving him reason to think that — strange cars parked outside his house, almost certainly undercover police spying on him. On February the second, 1967, the PRS received a letter from the French performing rights society, saying that Meek’s problems with the Telstar lawsuit would soon be over — the court had determined that no matter what had happened, the composer of “Le Marche d’Austerlitz” would only be entitled to a small percentage of the royalties from “Telstar” at most. Frederick Woods, the assistant general manager of the PRS and a friend of Meek’s, put the letter aside intending to call Meek and tell him the good news — all he had to do was to write to the PRS and they’d be able to give him an advance on the money, and soon almost all of it would be coming through. He’d soon be getting the bulk of the £150,000 he was owed — nearly three million pounds in today’s money. But Woods got distracted and didn’t make the phone call, and Meek never found out that his money troubles were nearly over. Ritchie Blackmore’s wife Margaret called round to see Joe, as she sometimes did. He was apparently not in his right mind, talking a lot about black magic and comparing Margaret to Frieda Harris, one of Aleister Crowley’s associates. He was convinced people were stealing his ideas from his mind, and asked her to leave. While she was there, she saw him destroying correspondence and paintings he owned. The next morning, February the third, Meek asked his assistant to get his landlady, Violet Shenton, up to Meek’s office. There was some shouting from Meek, and then he turned a gun he had, which was owned by Heinz, on Mrs. Shenton and killed her. Meek’s assistant ran into the room, but before he could get to Meek, Meek shot himself, dying instantly. It was the eighth anniversary of Buddy Holly’s death. The lawsuit over “Telstar” was finally resolved just three weeks later, in Meek’s favour. There’s a plaque now at the building where Meek’s studio was. It says that Joe Meek, “the Telstar man”, “Lived, worked, and died here”. It doesn’t mention Violet Shenton. After all, she wasn’t a great male genius, just the male genius’ female victim.
Pastor Julie leads us in our daily meditations for the day. Find a quiet place, and join us for a journey of faith and self-discovery! ********** Connect with us at bayhope.tv! E-mail us: theweekday@bayhope.com
On this episode Amy (@Amys22Cents) B-Mack (@MartezLVE) and B-Eazy (@preacher_bp) discuss a frivolous lawsuit, trouble at the Nash/Bett's home, a big a$$ afro pick, the presidential debate, and more. But you gotta stick around for a surprisingly entertaining ending. Visit unfilteredforever.com and enter promo code BLAZE for 10% off your entire purchase. Email djblazeshow@gmail.com Call us up 404-436-2370
On this episode Amy (@Amys22Cents) B-Mack (@MartezLVE) and B-Eazy (@preacher_bp) discuss a frivolous lawsuit, trouble at the Nash/Bett's home, a big a$$ afro pick, the presidential debate, and more. But you gotta stick around for a surprisingly entertaining ending. Visit unfilteredforever.com and enter promo code BLAZE for 10% off your entire purchase. Email djblazeshow@gmail.com Call us up 404-436-2370
On this episode, we go deeper into a conversation that is needed in our community. Our host, Tony Hernandez, shares a story that involves grief and a dark time in his life. He shares his story on what he went through when suicide was on his mind. Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the US for ALL ages, and he hopes that with his story, you will see some signs if a friend is in fact, in need of your friendship.
I had always been aware of the deep web. You hear the craziest, most fucked up stories from people who have the balls to explore it. Websites that involve human experimentation, hiring a hitman, and even watching people through their own security cameras. It’s fucked up.Source -https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/61j79u/please_stay_away_from_the_deep_web/ Social Media -Twitter @truecrimewitchInstagram @truecrimewitchpodcastFacebook The True Crime Witch PodcastFacebook Discussion Group Spooky Gang Discussion Website https://truecrimewitchpodcast.wordpress.com/Patreon www.patreon.com/truecrimewitchpodEmail truecrimewitch@outlook.comMusic https://www.purple-planet.com &https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiuESvEOlks
Help support the Dr. NoSleep podcast here: https://www.patreon.com/join/drnosleep Dr. NoSleep Animations: https://youtube.com/c/DrNoSleep Dr. NoSleep Merchandise: teespring.com/stores/dr-nosleep-merch #drnosleep #scarystories #horrorstories #truescarystories #horrorpodcast #horror --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/drnosleep/support
Trumps 200,000! Ludicrous Vigilantes please stay home!
Hey there my fellow entrepreneur! I am so excited to be on this journey with you! My mission is to help you live a life that is full while being an entrepreneur! Running a business can sometimes or most times be a source of pain, stress, worry, and anxiety! I used to be stuck in this roller coaster of highs and lows- some says I felt so powerful and some days I felt so incredibly powerless. Until I made the decision to SAYING YES to a life that is full- life that is not controlled by anxiety and stress. Entrepreneurship is a beautiful journey if we take the driving seat and lead our lives not the other way around. Our businesses is an area of our life where we can actually thrive and experience so much freedom from. Come join me on this journey of saying yes to a life that is full! Have any questions, testimonials, feedback, want to connect? I'd love to connect with you. I can easily be reached out via the gram https://www.instagram.com/jesscadreams/ Music by @helkimerofficial - Please Stay via @hellothematic Music by @mysmmusic - Fucked Up Today via @hellothematic
Chalene was asked by many to share this poem. Her hope is that, now, you will share it and that it may reach someone who needs it. Perhaps, it will even save a life. Poem was originally published in this episode: Surviving Suicide Links from today’s episode: Check out all the Discounts and some of Chalene’s favorite things at Chalene.com/Deals Leave Chalene a message at (619) 500-4819 Leave Chalene a Voicemail review or question HERE Join our awesome PodSquad on Facebook here! Go to Chalene.com/MyThing and see what your passion or hidden talents are!! Stop dieting & start living: PhaseItUp.com Get the 131 Book!!! Here’s The System I Use Every Day to be More Organized & Crazy Productive: www.pushjournal.com Sign Up For MY WEEKLY NEWSLETTER and you'll get FREE tips on how to live a ridiculously amazing fun-filled life! Be sure you are subscribed to this podcast to automatically receive your episodes!!! Subscribe to Build Your Tribe!!! Join our awesome PodSquad on Facebook here! Get episode show notes here: www.chalenejohnson.com/podcast Connect with me on your fav social platform: SnapChat: ChaleneOfficial Facebook: www.Facebook.com/Chalene Instagram: www.Instagram.com/ChaleneJohnson Twitter: www.Twitter.com/ChaleneJohnson TikTok: @chaleneOfficial Hey! Send me a tweet & tell me what you think about the show! (Use the Hashtag) #TheChaleneShow so I know you’re a homie! XOXO Chalene
Your Day just got a little more Grim. I did not write or claim to have written this creepypasta story. You can find the story here. https://www.creepypasta.com/please-stay-awake/ What is are creepypasta stories? "Creepypastas are horror-related legends or images that have been copied and pasted around the Internet. These Internet entries are often brief, user-generated, paranormal stories intended to scare readers. They include gruesome tales of murder, suicide, and otherworldly occurrences." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creepypasta Also available in podcast form! https://open.spotify.com/show/1OjwEP740ciWdCLYDU8VCG?si=Em1CKHNWQx-_waskowXSWA More Creepypasta Stories on the way!
Exploring how the Covid-19 pandemic could impact the 2020 elections. The United States' coronavirus response has been a total failure on every front. President Trump has delegated responsibility to governors of individual states, and while his approval rating went up temporarily, it has eventually climbed back down. Meanwhile, Joe Biden has been silent. Trump cannot cancel the election, so mail-in voting will become very important. Ultimately, we need to wait and see what will happen, and whether Trump's chances will be hurt or not—it's too early to predict. For more detail, check out the full episode, and please, stay home. Big thank you to all medical personnel and governors who are stepping up.
In this week's episode, we talk the latest seasons of Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Shrill.
In this special bonus episode COVID-19 seems to be interrupting everyone’s plans except Pastor Rodney Howard Browne. In this bonus episode, Taroy discusses the pastor’s arrest. Was he right or wrong? Was this an attack on religion? Or was this straight ignorance? Taroy discusses this and his thoughts on the people who are stuck on the cruise ship that can’t find a place to dock. Tune in and give your opinion on some of the questions Taroy poses. P.S. THANK YOU TO ALL THE PEOPLE ON THE FRONT LINE WORKING!!!! See you all in May ****IF YOU WANT TO REACH OUT TO ME ABOUT "AVERAGE JOE MEDIA" email me at admin@averagejt.com for your podcast needs Thoughts Of An Average Joe Podcast Info: Facebook Page: Thoughts Of An Average Joe Podcast Follow the twitter: toajpodcast Follow the Instagram: (@averagejtpc) &(@theoriginalplaymaker) Instagram hashtag: #toajpodcast #yafavaveragejoe Email: admin@averagejt.com --- This episode is sponsored by · Couple Things with Shawn and Andrew: Former Olympic Gymnast Shawn Johnson and NFL player Andrew East sit down to share their most vulnerable sides and open up like they never have before. https://open.spotify.com/show/7aGLm9HYn9mEyVr1FDzrpa?si=bgb4jh_nTyGiIabdk8BD8g · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/taroy-jackson/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/taroy-jackson/support
The one-hundred thirty-second episode, recorded on March 25, 2020. Now with even less focus and purpose. What are we even doing? Headlines: - Olympics Postponed Until 2021 - eSports Are Trying To Have A Moment - LA Rams Get A New Logo From The XFL - FBI Fitness App Does More Than Fitness Connect with us! FACEBOOK: www.facebook.com/sportssportssportspod/ INSTAGRAM: www.instagram.com/sportssportssportspod/ TWITTER: twitter.com/SportsX3Pod EMAIL: sportssportssportspod@gmail.com
On Monday's edition of The James Crepea Show on Fox Sports Eugene, James discusses the Governor's stay-at-home order and the mayor of Denver ordering liquor stores close only to reverse course in 3 hours. Oregon's Sabrina Ionescu, Ruthy Hebard, Satou Sabally and Payton Pritchard all earn recognition from the USBWA. NFL free agency rages on.
Jair Rodriguez joins to discuss the dangers of participating in Spring Break and partying regardless of all the warnings Couples Therapy: How to quarantine with your partner while staying sane
Ok, look, we get it. We were those people a week ago saying this Coronavirus wouldn’t really be a thing but it is a thing. Please take care of your health and the health of others by staying home. Sarah and AJ go live on youtube today to chat about how Sarah and Schman have been keeping their marriage spicy while quarantined, Idris Elba being diagnosed with Coronavirus and why was his wife was so close to him in the video!? WHY!? And a small business friend of ours wants to know if her landlord should keep charging rent?
© 2020-2025 Ivy Podcast Discovery LLC
