Joe Meek was alright. By that I mean that his heart was in the right place. He was a bit of a bum boy, as I found out later. At the time I met him, I’d heard these stories about blokes stickin’ their winkles up other blokes’ bums – but who could really believe that? I mean, I was told havin’ a Jodrell sent ya blind and – and, well, I could go on for ever! I was sixteen years of age. Old enough to realise that schoolboys told these fairy tales to each other while havin’ a crafty dog end round the back of the bike sheds. But I was in for a shock.
A mate of mine, Tony Ollard, played me a tape he’d got from somewhere, of some guitar playing. I’d never heard the like of it before. He told me he thought it was a bloke called Chet Atkins but he didn’t know who the other bloke was. I thought it could be one bloke double-tracked. Later on I found out it was Chet Atkins but it wasn’t double-tracked. The man just played like two guitar players! I begged Tony to lend me the tape and I’d get it copied and return it straight away. Who do I know who’s got two tape recorders? Joe Meek! Next time we did a session I asked Joe if he’d do a copy of this tape for me.
‘Bring it up tomorrow and I’ll do it.’ I was there. He’s done the tape, I was well pleased, caught the last bus home and played that tape ’till the sun came up. Next day I’m ravin’ about this tape to the boys.
‘Never mind the tape’, they said. ‘What about Joe? Did he give you one?’
‘Bollocks!’ I’ve gone, ‘he’s alright, how old are you?’ Christ, some people just don’t grow up, do they?
Now Joe wrote most of the instrumentals for the band. I say ‘wrote’, his method was more like ‘get an idea for a tune, find a record that was the right tempo and sing his tune to it’. The resulting demo (which I had to decipher) was a din; he sang out of tune too. I had to work out what I thought he was trying to get across. Most of it I figured out but I had to put my own bits in for the bits I couldn’t decipher. Joe always seemed pleased with the result, so all was well. Anyway he’d invite me up to listen to his latest creation and I’d take the acetate home and try to make it playable by the band.
This happened on many occasions. Not a move was made, bum-boy-wise. Ol’ Joe’s alright!
One Saturday afternoon I’ve gone up there to listen to another Joe Meek ‘composition’, heard it, worked it out with difficulty and worked out how we’re gonna do it. Got it! Great! Ready to go home.
‘Do you want a cup of coffee ’fore you go, Chas?’
‘Alright, Joe.’ I can remember feeling a bit uneasy but ‘He’s alright’, I told myself.
In his sitting room he had this sofa. No matter where you sat on it, you were sort of bounced towards the middle and ended up sittin’ next to whoever else was on it. Even if you both sat down at the extreme ends of the sofa. Which we did.
So there we were. Me and Joe. ‘I hope my mates are wrong,’ I’m thinking as we sat together in the middle of the sofa. Now in them days wrestling was just becoming popular, and Joe had it on the telly. It was popular in the Sixties and was always on of a Saturday afternoon. As I’m trying to knock back the cup of coffee he made me which had too much sugar in it – funny how you remember silly details – Joe said to me:
‘I love wrestling, do you?’
My whole life flashed before me. I thought, ‘Oh no! It’s the bums he likes! My mates were right.’ Too late! The next minute, there was a hand groping round my bollocks and I froze. Petrified. It must have been only a fraction of a second that I sat there rigid but it was enough to make Joe think, ‘He likes it,’ ’cos his hand started scrunching quicker and he started bobbing up and down. My eyes started watering. I looked at Joe. His eyeballs were bulging but he looked ever so happy. I leapt out of that seat like my arse was alight. It very nearly could have been. I found my voice, but the best I could come up with was:
‘I’ve got to be going now. I’ve got to go and meet my big brother.’
I had always mentioned my ‘big’ brother when I was threatened by anybody at school. It was the best I could think of. I was out of his flat like a shot. I kept running until I saw a bus that was heading in the general direction of home and I leapt on it. The conductor asked for me fare in a normal voice and I felt safe. I was back in the land of the un-bum boys.
Next day though, I thought, ‘I believe now there are blokes that stick their winkles up other blokes’ bums.’ I was growing up. I rang Mike Berry and told him of the episode.
‘The dirty bastard,’ was all he kept saying between the gaps of my story.
‘Yes,’ I said in the end. ‘Isn’t he?’
I never spoke to Joe for days afterwards but as I started to weigh it up I thought, ‘Well, it does go on; but at least I got away and didn’t get raped.’ I s’pose it’s the same as some geezer fancyin’ some bird. He weren’t to know I liked birds and not geezers. He fancied me so he had to find out. But now he’s found out he knows where he stands.
He rung up and apologised a few days later. ‘That’s OK, Joe,’ I said, ‘but let’s have no more of it.’ That was the end of that, but Charlie Hodges could now say when the subject of bum boys came up,
‘Oh yes, it goes on alright. You don’t believe it? Oh, come now. How naive can you get!’
Joe with all his eccentricities was well before his time in the recording field. DI-ing the bass, for instance, was a matter of course for Joe. DI-ing or ‘Direct Injection (nothing to do with bum boys!) meant the bass player didn’t use an amp. The bass was plugged more or less direct into the tape machine. No amp was used in the actual studio and this meant there were no stray notes or floatin’ around to be picked up by other microphones. This technique meant a much cleaner and purer sound for the electric bass. All studios do it now. Joe always had five or six mikes on the drum kit instead of one or two which was usual for the time. He loved a sound that had ‘presence’. He wanted the snare drum, hi-hat, bass drum, cymbals recorded close. It worked. They all do this now. Joe would have been in his element with a multi-track machine. He never got one as far as I know; they were still a novelty in England when Joe died not many years later.
Now The Outlaws were doing alright. We were out on the road with Mike Berry and started doing a few sessions up at Joe Meek’s. Joe was always recording somebody or the other. Most of ’em never came to anything but we did some sessions with an actor, John Leyton. ‘Johnny Remember Me’ was one of the songs we did, and suddenly I was on a Number One Hit. My friends and relations thought I was rich, but you got £7. 10s a session regardless of whether it was a hit or not. I earned far more off Joe’s flops. I thought this fair enough, still do, but they’d go, ‘What! He got all that money and all you got was £7. 10s?’ They probably thought I’d copped a fortune, and was keeping it dark.
We did a few other recordings with John Leyton. Among ’em was the follow-up, ‘Wild Wind’, on which I played fretless bass. It had frets on it at the beginning of the session, but I got this idea halfway through that a bass guitar without frets might sound a bit like a double bass. I couldn’t wait to try it so levered ’em out on the session. It didn’t sound too bad. As far as I knew it was the first fretless bass guitar. (I’ve still got this bass. My original Hofner. I got it fixed up recently and used it on my new album this year. 2008. It sounds great. The last time I recorded with it was on ‘Dontcha Think it’s Time’ in 1963. Forty-six years