13. Joe MeekI Hear A New World
This album has some very strong resonances with me. For a start I was born and grew up literally across the road from Joe’s studio in Holloway Road. I suppose he was a local celebrity, even before the incident. Our family knew all sorts of gossip about him, then he murdered his landlady and shot himself. I didn’t know much about his music until I heard this amazing obscure album on a ropey mono bootleg cassette in the late 1960s. It blew me away. It just sounded so fresh and unusual, strange and just plain odd. Like nothing I’d heard before, well not in the sixties, or since then come to think of it. The guy was a studio genius, very underrated and much more innovative and experimental than say George Martin was. It was this album that inspired my early tape manipulation experiments. I pestered my parents endlessly to buy me a tape recorder until one birthday I got this incredibly cheap battery operated Japanese mono reel to reel, with tiny 3” reels… and one reel of tape. But it was mine and so began my experimental musical journey Thankfully you can now get this album pretty much anywhere and I highly recommend it.
