“Help me”: Joe Meek and his strange encounter with a possessed cat
Just as the 1960s revolutionized what pop music was capable of, it also revolutionized what a producer of pop music was capable of. As the decade went on, the idea of the producer as little more than a record label’s eye on the inside of a recording studio, a babysitter making sure the group turned up on time and recorded everything they were meant to, was dying a slow and very public death. All thanks to the work of a mercurial audio engineer turned producer and songwriter called Joe Meek.
Having worked his way up from an audio engineer in his youth, by 1960, Meek was starting a revolution. He arguably began the very concept of the bedroom producer, starting his own record label, Triumph Records, and recording the label’s output in his home studio, built into his three-bedroom flat above a leather goods store on Holloway Road. However, he wasn’t just recording hits here, he was also writing them to.
Beginning with 1962’s number one hit ‘Telstar’, Meek’s work began to have a huge chart impact, its blend of absurdly catchy melodies with a futuristic sheen going down like catnip to a British public looking for the next hot thing. However, all this creativity, as it so often did, came with a downside. In Meek’s case, a desire to confound and confuse others, whether they were strangers or his own friends and loved ones.
This confounding streak was what (possibly) drew him to obsessively try to document and record paranormal activity. Under the guise of recording “field sounds” for his upcoming music, Meek would take recording equipment to notoriously haunted locations and start recording their every moment. This led to an encounter that, if it were not recorded to tape, would be too baffling to believe.
At the Warley Lea Farm in Essex on the night of August 31st, 1966, Meek set up his portable tape recorder and had an encounter, and by all accounts, Meek genuinely believed it was this, with a possessed cat. A BBC Four documentary titled The Strange Story of Joe Meek played the whole thing in its entirety, with a deadly serious Meek believing with all his heart that a random stray is saying “hello” to him and then repeatedly beseeching the young producer to “help me”.
It would all be hilarious 1960s nonsense powered by industrial amounts of drugs if it wasn’t for what we know about Meek’s personal life today. His eccentricities weren’t quirks, they were signs of his worsening bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Days like these, during the final years of his life, were spent living in desperate, genuine fear of his own flat, convinced as he was that it was crawling with poltergeists and being monitored by aliens.
Meek was nothing if not a complicated fellow, One whose illness would drive him to do unconscionable things. While it’s often easy to take the “wackier” stories out of context and use them for fun, finding the humanity in them is often more constructive. Sometimes, the stories that are easiest to point out and laugh at are the clearest cries for help we’ll ever get from people who need genuine care more than most.
