Joe Meek: The Alchemist of Pop: Home Made Hits & Rarities 1959-1966

I might get accused of having cloth ears for saying this, but would Joe Meek's 'legend' be what it is if it weren't for his tragic foibles: the persecution for homosexuality, the paranoia and the messy murder and suicide that ended his life?

What I'm saying is that the Tornados Telstar and John Leyton's Johnny, Remember Me are groundbreaking works, but most of the other tracks (all 54 of them) on this compilation are mostly footnotes to these. The Screaming Lord Sutch songs are memorable for their screamingness, and The Honeycombs are catchy '60s pop, but there's quite a lot of undistinguished material that no amount of innovative production can lift out of the ordinary.

That said, the songs by Glenda Collins do stand out, and two of them were written by Meek himself. Perhaps he was a genius, and he just had to do a lot of jobbing work for the record labels to pay the bills. Two CDs of this is about one and a half too many for me.

MusicBrainz entry for this album Disc 2