Joe Meek is remembered the world over for creating one of Britain’s biggest pop hits, ‘Telstar’, above a handbag shop on London's Holloway Road. But his promising, if somewhat eccentric career was cut short due to a paranoia-inducing drug addiction and by the fact that he murdered his landlady with a shotgun and then turned the barrel on himself.

Telstar is the story of his frustrated genius; but it’s also a chronicle of the creative process at its most organic and of a gay man’s search for love.

Nick Moran’s entertaining new play captures the mood of the ‘60’s, the pioneering spirit of the independent music producer and the chaotic essence of Meek’s life, but its success is unquestionably down to a passionate and intense performance by Con O’Neill and the mesmerising final twenty minutes, that takes you on a disturbing descent into madness and sheer terror.

O’Neill inhabits the role, his gentle and affable exterior hiding a vicious streak that simmers below his effete personality. He continually touches his body and flicks his hair out of his face in a series of mannerisms that mask the caged demons and creative sparks.

But, behind the fascinating story of the music industry, Telstar is a play about homosexuality, doomed love and how blind infatuation can lead to desperate measures.

Meek becomes obsessed with the heterosexual Heinz, and takes it upon himself to turn the youngster into the next big thing. He bleaches his hair, dresses him in tight, glitzy suits and worships the ground he walks on. The trouble is he’s talentless. The crowds jeer at him and his band mates nickname him the light bulb. Heinz plays along, but his inevitable rejection leaves Meek’s riddled with self-loathing and mistrust.
 
The almost old-fashioned watchability of the first act is peppered with musical humour - Meek refers to the Beatles as the Merseyside beat combo, dismisses the Rolling Stones as “a warm-up act” and tells Tom Jones to go back to the valleys – but it leaves you quite unprepared for the second, where the tone darkens and the play edges towards hysteria, but thankfully never dips into melodrama.

So unforgettable is O’Neill’s performance here that I’d bet that the unnecessary opening scene, from where the story unfolds in flashback before it catches up on itself, was only added so that the audience could be forewarned of the outcome, and thus make it more bearable to watch. As it stands, a large proportion finds the tension too great and either looks away or watches through tensed fingers.

When bailiffs arrive at Meek’s flat and remove the soundproofing from one of its windows, the stage becomes his padded cell. Bizarrely the connection with the real world, as shown by the light pouring through the window, isolates his loneliness. He is out of his society-proofed room and is being forced to take stock of his failed business deals, his doomed love life, and his personal predicament. If only he could have stayed away from the light.

Telstar: The Joe Meek Story, by Nick Moran with James Hicks
West Street, off St Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9ND
0870 060 6627

24 June-10 September 2005

Find out more about Jow Meek by buying the book Joe Meek: The Legendary Joe Meek, the Telstar Man. Buy it online and svae some money to out towards the CD Joe Meek: The Alchemist of Pop - Home Made Hits and Rarities 1958-1966.