Dir. Nick Moran, UK, 2008, 119 mins
Cast: Con O'Neill, Kevin Spacey, J.J. Feild
Review by Carol Allen
When Moran was born in December 1969 the sixties were effectively over. And like him, cinemagoers under fifty are too young to have experienced that "sex, drugs and rock and roll" era. But even though you may not have heard of Joe Meek, music fans may well be familiar with the Tornados' hit record Telstar, which Meek produced. Moran, who's always been fascinated by the decade of his own birth, first co-wrote Meek's story with James Hicks as a play, which was in the West End some four years ago and he has now reconceived it for the cinema.
Record producing Meek style was a very different ball game from the high tech business it is today. Meek was a gay, tone-deaf songwriter, who in addition to "Telstar" produced such hits as "Have I the Right", "Just Like Eddie" and "Johnny, Remember Me" from a grubby flat over his landlady's handbag shop in the Holloway Road on a cobbled together, improvised set up, doing all sorts of weird experiments to get the particular sound he was after, such as putting the backing group in the bathroom to do their "Wah Wah" stuff in order to get the right acoustic. The film gives O'Neill, who created the role on stage, an opportunity to expand and deepen his award winning characterisation of this volatile, self destructive and often cruel creative genius - a role he's now made very much his own.
Moran effectively captures the shabbiness and naïve trendiness of London in the early sixties and the film makes lavish use of the music of the period, both in archive footage of people like Adam Faith and Cliff Richard and in its portrayals of stars like John Leyton (Callum Dixon), Billy Fury (John Lee) and other real life characters doing their thing. They include the almost forgotten Heinz, recruited for his good looks by the Meek, who managed to create at least one hit for his not terribly talented young lover with "Just Like Eddie". Feild, who played the young version of Michael Caine's character in "Last Orders", is very good in the role and the film is brimming with other good and amusing performances too. Pam Ferris as Meek's supportive but ill fated landlady; Spacey, making like a cross between Kenneth More and Leslie Philips as Meek's business partner Major Banks, vainly trying to impose some military discipline onto the chaotic proceedings; James Cordern as Tornados drummer Clem Cattini and Tom Burke as the painfully shy songwriter Geoff Goddard. Pop fans of the period will also enjoy Moran's amusing little trick of casting real life characters from the story in other roles in the film. For example Jess Conrad, played in the film by Nigel Harman, has a cameo role himself as pop impresario Larry Parnes, while there are amusing little period jokes such as Joe's contempt for that upstart Brian Epstein and his "little beat combo".
The story of Meek is ultimately though a tragedy. Hit records or not, many of his "stable", some of whom were just hired as session musicians, never got properly paid for their efforts, with most of the money he did make being lavished on Heinz, and his life sunk into debt, depression and finally murder and suicide. As Joe himself deteriorates into confusion, the story telling to some extent does too, though the shocking climax still packs a punch. Moran also has a tendency to introduce some of his characters in a somewhat arbitrary way with no context, one example being Meek's loyal, dogsbody assistant Patrick (Sid Mitchell), who seems to come from nowhere half way through the film but then becomes very important in the last part of the story, while the information we're given at the end of the film as to what happened after Joe's death, while intriguing, is not very clear and a touch confusing. But still not enough to spoil what is otherwise a very entertaining movie.
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