Joe Meek first tasted success as a record producer when he created the eerie backdrop for John Leyton’s gothic teen melodrama, Johnny Remember Me, which reached No 1 in the British pop charts in the summer of 1961. A mere six years later, on 3 February 1967, Meek’s name entered the mainstream consciousness in the most darkly dramatic way imaginable, when the news broke that he had killed his landlady, the elderly Violet Shenton, before turning the shotgun on himself.
In the time between, as Darryl Bullock notes with characteristic understatement in his richly detailed biography Love and Fury, the producer’s chaotic, but hugely creative, life was “directed by his passions and obsessions”.
