Telstar is all the better if you are interested in the 60s music scene and are looking for a pretty faithful rendering of what it was like being a pop pioneer back in them days.
It stars Con O’Neill as maverick song writer, flamboyant homosexual, paranoid and drug addicted Joe Meek, the writer and creator of Telstar, among 600 other songs.
Meek's homosexuality – illegal in the UK at the time – put him under even more pressure than he put himself, and Telstar shows him afflicted with many things, from drug addiction, depression to his own personal past demons.
The worst of it however was that French composer Jean Ledrut accused Joe Meek of plagiarism, claiming that the tune of Telstar had been copied from a piece from a score Ledrut had written for the 1960 film Austerlitz.
This lawsuit meant Meek never received royalties from the record during his lifetime, although after he died the case was resolved in Meek’s favour, tragically only three weeks after his death. It was extremely unlikely that Meek was aware of the film of Austerlitz, as it had been released only in France at the time.
For music buffs, it’s staggering the amount of known acts and artists that appear as characters in Telstar, simply by dint of Joe Meek’s skill and influence in his day. In Telstar, we see Billy Fury, Clem Cattini (a man who has drummed on more Number One records than anybody else in history), Chas Hodges, Ritchie Blackmore, Gene Vincent, Screaming Lord Sutch, and John Peel — it’s a spotter’s dream
The pressures of Meek’s homosexuality find themselves in Telstar wound up in the character of Heinz Burt, a singer some will know from the era. The scenes between the two are complex and ambiguous as was homosexuality at the time, and like so many other things, must have been a disappointment to Meek.
The main issue with the movie, as is often the issue with mad geniuses, is that there is so much to tell that so much will always be left out — but I think Telstar does well to fit in what it does.
I’ve always thought of Joe Meek as the British Phil Spector, even though Meek, who dismissed The Beatles and continued to believe they were just a flash in the pan, never enjoyed any financial reward for his many hits.
Like Spector, Meek was innovative, reclusive, obsessive and dangerous around firearms — indeed, the more you hear about how many times Spector drew guns on his famous music stars, lovers and business associates, the more I think of Joe Meek, who’s story is tragic and yet filled with such hope, aiming as he did for the stars.
