Music producers have tended to take a back seat in the movies. Cinema has preferred biopics of pop, rock, jazz and rap stars. When the film's eureka moment comes, when the maverick singer-songwriter at the mike stumbles across some famous hit-making lick, producers are found sitting behind the glass, nodding to the beat and wearing a grin that says: "I've struck oil."
But the recent Cadillac Records told the history of Chicago blues label Chess through its founder and producer, Leonard Chess. Now Nick Moran's Telstar unearths a gem of story that puts the gifted but volatile 1960s hitmaker Joe Meek in the spotlight. Meek created hits including "Johnny Remember Me" with John Leyton, "Just Like Eddie" with Heinz, and the titular tune, "Telstar", by the Tornados, named after the first communications satellite and which, in 1962, became the first British single to hit No 1 both here and in America. His misses include turning away a man called Brian Epstein and four mop-topped Scouse lads because "they're crap".
Hounded by bailiffs and arrested "importuning for an immoral purpose" on London's Hampstead Heath, Meek committed suicide in 1967.
Set mostly in a self-assembled studio-cum-bedsit above a leather goods shop on London's Holloway Road, the drama centres on Meek's addictions to weird sounds, hits, drugs, ouija boards and homosexual sex. The role is played with relish by Con O'Neill, who also starred in the stage version of Telstar, for which he received an Olivier nomination. He gives Meek both a pathetic vulnerability and a manic charisma that borders on the psychopathic.
Meek sets up business in conjunction with a plastics entrepreneur, Major Wilfred Banks, played rather bizarrely by a moustachioed Kevin Spacey, and they make an odd pair, eccentrically running a record factory with vinyl dripping through the floorboards into poor Pam Ferris's shop below.
The film's opening scene lasts for ages, with characters running around frenziedly while a soprano rehearses in the lavatory, a string quartet warms up in the bathroom, and Meek adjusts his levels in the kitchen. Screeching and shoving his talent around like a bossy hen, it's been a while since an actor has torn up the screen - and the furniture - quite like O'Neill. It's a performance that's impressive, comic and irritating all at once.
Into this frantic, unglamorous atmosphere wander various new recruits, such as composer Geoff Goddard, Ritchie Blackmore (later of Deep Purple), Mitch Mitchell (who went on to be part of Jimi Hendrix's band), Chas Hodges (later of Chas & Dave) and Clem Cattini, a session drummer who has since played on more No 1 records than any other musician. Hodges and Cattini are played by the familiar TV faces of Ralph Little and James Corden. Indeed, Corden contributes most of the film's more amusing gags, a one-man double act channelling both Sid James and Bernard Bresslaw. JJ Feild, as Meek's peroxide darling Heinz, does a half-decent Alfie impression. Justin Hawkins, formerly of the Darkness, pops up as Screaming Lord Sutch; Carl Barât, Pete Doherty's ex-partner in the Libertines, is Gene Vincent; Jess Conrad plays impresario Larry Parnes.
The stream of cameos and cartoonish characters lends the film something of the 60s folly, a low-budget, north London version of a star-filled, stage-to-screen caper like It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. Richard Lester's work with the Beatles is also referenced in occasional comedy montages and Keystone-like sequences.
Moran mainly avoids flashy visuals for a more static approach. However, he keeps it bubbling along with an acute feel for the clothes and vernacular (I haven't heard anyone say "Bloody Nora" for ages) of a Seedy rather than Swinging 60s, like an ironic take on a Joe Orton farce, dressed in natty suits by Jeff Banks and full of memorable pop tunes you'd totally forgotten.
Ultimately, inexperience both behind and in front of the camera takes its toll and the thinness of both script and budget test the patience. Meek is an unsympathetic lead character and O'Neill drags you into his descent without quite earning the necessary pity or understanding. But the production, like Meek's records themselves, has a certain catchy, lo-fi charm. Any film in which a lad jaunts in and says: "Sorry I'm late, my mum was 'avin' her bad toe off" has to be worth a butcher's.