Authored by Darryl W. Bullock, the book documents the recording career of the notorious yet groundbreaking music-producer Joe Meek, whose life has often been presented in film and print retrospectives as troubled, tortured and turbulent, a talented creator of sound, behind some of the biggest hits of the 1960s, but blighted by drug addiction and a secret homosexual life at a time when to be a gay man in Britain was illegal and could lead to a prison sentence. His life was violently cut short in February 1967 aged just 37 when, it’s said, he shot his landlady with a single-barrelled shotgun before turning it on himself, although various rumours and allegations that he was murdered, perhaps in connection to London’s underworld, have persisted over the years.

During his short life he wrote and produced the first ever US Number 1 hit single by a British band, 1962’s ‘Telstar’ by the Tornados, as well producing the worldwide chart-topper ‘Have I the Right?’ by The Honeycombs in 1964, and all from a recording-studio he built himself in a flat above a leather-goods shop in London’s busy Holloway Road. Meek was a pioneer in this respect, marking himself down as one of the first ever independent producers, creating his own unique sound without the aid of the big recording companies, and within a home environment which, in today’s digital age, is a norm, but over sixty years ago was almost unheard of. He was also the producer of records by UK Pop artists Mike Berry, and John Leyton including his UK No. 1 single in 1961 ‘Johnny Remember Me.’ Others who recorded for Meek included Billy Fury, Jess Conrad, Screaming Lord Sutch, a pre-fame Tom Jones, and Peter Jay and The Jaywalkers who scored their biggest hit with Meek with the single ‘Can Can ’62,’ which was actually recorded at the studios of their label at the time, ‘Decca.’ Their follow-up single, also produced by Joe, was ‘Totem Pole’ backed up with the track ‘Jaywalker.’

In Bullock’s biography, Peter describes the sights and sounds of Meek’s home set-up. He recalls that, “trying to park outside Holloway Road was a nightmare, but you parked outside this little shop-front and then had to carry all the gear through… You had to go up the stairs to the studio. Once you got up there, there was a very small room, I’d put the drum-kit in there and we’d all squash round, and he had this like two-sided cupboard in the corner full of different things. The floor was knee-deep in tape, and there were wires going straight across. It was amazing when you consider the sound he got out of that… incredible. It was just a small living-room above the shop…” But there was another floor above that where, Peter says, he wasn’t allowed access to, it was where was stored “his secret echo-chamber. We were expecting some big kind of Tesla set-up, and I never actually saw it but it turned out that the echo-chamber, where he had all those fabulous sounds from was just a bathroom, with a speaker on one side and another speaker on the other side – that was it!”

He was witness to Joe’s notorious mood swings that would see the producer erupt into a mad, sometimes violent rage. “He was sort of volatile, I suppose,” Peter recalls. “He was okay when things were going alright, and then if it wasn’t, he would go into a very stroppy, kind of crazy mode… He might have been a bit crackers, but you’d go along with it because we all thought of him as the British Phil Spector really, a genius.”

Love and Fury: The Extraordinary Life, Death and Legacy of Joe Meek by Darryl W. Bullock is available at these outlets:

https://omnibuspress.com/products/love-and-fury?srsltid=AfmBOopkkr3JSDAA0FQa4yQYkPBzOUivnKlU6QlpZOUJwRdY_4jlV5GQ

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Love-Fury-Life-Death-Legacy/dp/1915841240

A new book from Paul McCartney takes the reader on a journey through his post-Beatles years with his band Wings, it’s told through first-hand accounts from family, friends, old associates, and the man himself, and features an appearance from a slow-moving yet colourful participant with very close links to Great Yarmouth.

‘Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run’ begins in 1969 as the Beatles are heading towards their eventual break-up in 1970. Towards the end of 1971, McCartney forms Wings and they set off on what becomes a decade of hit records, triumphant concerts across the world, but also a lot of critical derision from a music press that isn’t wholly excited by the band’s recorded output. For Paul, who, as a Beatle, was a member of the most famous, most critically-acclaimed music-act of all time, it was, perhaps, inevitable that no matter what shape or form he chose to pursue his musical path in its wake, it was going to be compared to that. Wings went through its fair share of personnel changes over the years too, but constant throughout was Denny Laine, formerly of The Moody Blues, and Paul’s wife Linda playing keyboards and singing backing vocals and who, with Paul, as parents with young children, wanted the Wings experience to be a family affair. So, when the group decided to embark on a European concert-tour during the summer of 1972 they went about looking for an open-top double-decker bus that would allow the kids and band-members to soak up the seasonal sun as they journeyed from venue to venue. Wings’ tour-manager John Salter eventually found such a vehicle available for hire in – according to reliable sources not mentioned in the book - Great Yarmouth.

There are, would you believe, websites that focus in on the history of this very bus (registration: WNO 481). The consensus is that it harks back to 1953, beginning its life in Chelmsford with the Eastern National Omnibus Company as a standard, close-topped bus. In 1968 it was acquired by Eastern Counties Omnibus Company which ran services in East Anglia and Essex and, it’s surmised, would have served Great Yarmouth seafront during the summer months as an open-top. In the winter months it was placed undercover at the old bus-station on Wellington Road. When Wings acquired it for hire, it had been sold to the company, Halls Coaches.

Before the bus started off on its European journey it underwent a transformation – Magical Mystery Tour-style – into a vehicle painted up with a psychedelic finish:

According to McCartney’s new book, the interior of the bus was given a refurb, in keeping with a touring music-band and accompanying kids. Airplane seats were fitted on the ground floor, and “a really good sound system,” recalls John Salter. Meanwhile all the seats on the top floor were taken out and replaced with mattresses and cushions. “It was like a hippie heaven,” he says. Wings guitarist Henry McCullough thought it was “really amazing… there was a couple of gas fridges built into it, stuffed full of cheese and beer…” He also remembered that it only “had a top speed of 38 mph.” And this became a bit of a problem for the band, as Wings’ then-drummer, Denny Seiwell, recalls. “If we had to go 150 miles between concerts, sometimes it would take all day to get there. There were a couple of times in Germany where we’d be on the motorway, and all of a sudden we were realising that we’re not going to make it. The promoter would send us five BMWs… and we just all had to jump in the cars and do 130 miles an hour.”

Once the tour was over, the bus was returned to its owners and its psychedelic exterior was erased for excursions that were much less Rock and Roll.

For Linda, the bus was a highpoint of the concert-tour. “The best bit was the bus, getting the sun on top of the bus.”

‘Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run’ is available now.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/469568/wings-by-mccartney-paul/9780241758571

You know that phrase, ‘a dog is for life not just for Christmas?’ Well, consider the ever-ivy green popularity of Slade’s ‘Merry Christmas Everybody,’ a guaranteed playlist fixture every twelve months or so. It’s ingrained in our collective psyche, so, it might be hard for many to learn, or be reminded, that there was more, much more to this band than what’s now regarded as a Pop Christmas standard. Check out the stats:

Between 1971 and 1974 they enjoyed 12 consecutive Top Ten UK hit singles – six of which went to Number 1. That’s unprecedented for its time.

The first of those hits in that uninterrupted run, a chart-topper, was ‘Coz I Luv U,’ reaching the coveted top slot in November ’71, staying there for a month in total. In the first week of December it slipped down to Number 3 and that’s where it was on the 9^th of that month when they appeared at Great Yarmouth’s Tower Ballroom. The town got to taste the band at the starting blocks of what was to be that winning run, when their fame was about to go stratospheric, complete with fan mania akin to the early years of The Beatles you might say.

When Slade drummer Don Powell was asked whether he remembered this appearance during an interview for Great Yarmouth’s radio-station ‘Harbour Radio’ in 2016, he said he most certainly did:

“There were queues round the block for that night. We didn’t expect that at all, just an amazing night. And we’d just driven down from Wolverhampton because we were still living with our parents, and it took us like about six hours to get down there, and there was a crowd, crowds like queueing all round the block, and we thought, ‘this is going to be incredible.’ And it was just an amazing evening. Amazing night it was. It was, if I remember rightly, the floor was actually shaking… it was getting quite a bit hairy… it was getting a bit frightening it was…”

What Don didn’t know prior to this interview was, according to local accounts, the bouncing up and down of the fans had damaged the ballroom’s sprung wooden dancefloor, and so Slade were never invited back!

There’s one word that’s often echoed by those who knew Richard Routledge who passed away in July of this year aged 69, and that’s “legend.” Thanks to ‘Richard’s Parties,’ his wildly successful Soul/Jazz/Funk events, he helped to highlight Great Yarmouth as one of the premier clubbing locations in Great Britain during the 1980s. It featured in ‘best of’ polls in the long-respected ‘Blues & Soul’ magazine (the Soul music “bible” as Richard referred to it), and, alongside the twice-yearly Caister Soul Weekenders that originally began life in 1979 at the old Caister Holiday Camp before moving to the Vauxhall, Great Yarmouth was, in the ‘80s, a must-go-to town for top quality Soul and Funk, and played by some of the biggest and best-known DJs in their field.

There was a dramatic change of direction for Richard in the late 1980s into the early Nineties. This period saw a gradual decline in the UK of the Soul music boom that had been all-conquering in Britain during the late ‘70s and into the next decade. It was shunted aside by the advent and the rise of the Acid House and then Rave era, a new movement that changed culture in many ways. Seeing the writing on the wall, Richard moved with it, successfully staging House-music nights at venues across Great Yarmouth, from the once-weekly ‘Cell Block H’ nights at the Tiffany’s complex on the seafront to the massive party ‘Boom!’ at the Winter Gardens (a.k.a. Biergarten), headlined by none other than world-famous DJ and music-producer/artist Carl Cox.

Richard was always the first to admit though that Rave/House/Techno wasn’t ‘his thing.’ It was Soul, Jazz and Funk that was in his heart. Eventually, this is what he returned to organising: Soul parties in Great Yarmouth, Gorleston and elsewhere in the East Anglia region.

I knew Richard most of my life. I first met him in 1986 when I was a teenager, not that long out of school and dreaming of becoming a fully fledged professional DJ. At the time, he was DJing every Tuesday night at Great Yarmouth’s Two Necked Swan pub, just across the road from the market-place. It’s no longer there of course, along with other once popular venues. By day he was working at Thomas Traddles in Market Row, a men’s clothes shop. Fashion, aside from music, was his other lifelong passion. In more recent years he was proprietor of the Gorleston store ‘What is Hip,’ now run by his son, Mark.

Richard and I worked alongside each other during the mid-2000s when I covered for him from time to time behind the decks in the back-room at Caesar’s Bars on the seafront. After having been a professional DJ for some twenty years I’d stepped back for a while and it was thanks to Richard and these stints at Caesar’s that I slowly got back into it again, eventually becoming resident DJ there, in the main room, and where I remained for the next ten years or so. Richard and I were all set to work together again this year, on an event, that is until his sad passing. Until the last, from what I knew of the man, all he wanted to do was organise parties and make people happy. He wasn’t in it for a quick buck or to boost his own self-importance. I might be seeing this wrong, but I’m of the view that he was in it for the buzz of it, the pleasure it gave him and his audience.

Back in 2017, when I was a presenter on Great Yarmouth’s ‘Harbour Radio,’ I interviewed Richard, looking back at parts of his life and career, and you can hear excerpts of that interview below, specially edited for a tribute to Richard that was broadcast on Harbour Radio on the weekend of August 30^th/31^st 2025, just days after his funeral had taken place, attended by huge crowds.

Formed in 1960 at Norwich City College and enjoying a UK Top 40 hit in 1962 with 'Can Can '62,' which was a Popped-up version of the 'Can Can,' Terry was asked to join Peter's Jaywalkers in 1965 after the band he was in at the time, The Redbeats, supported them at a concert. “My parents were very supportive,” said Terry of the offer to join The Jaywalkers, in spite of his age at the time. “Dad just asked Peter to ensure an eye was kept on me.” According to the newspaper report below, Terry's first live engagement with The Jaywalkers was at Great Yarmouth's ABC theatre.

In 1966, Terry and The Jaywalkers supported The Rolling Stones on a UK tour including a show at London's Royal Albert Hall. Also on the bill were Ike & Tina Turner, and The Yardbirds, this was when guitarist Jimmy Page was in the line-up and who remembers the first time he heard Terry during that Stones tour: "The Yardbirds played at the Ipswich Gaumont Theatre on The Rolling Stones tour. This was the first time I got to hear Terry Reid who was singing with Peter Jay and the... Jaywalkers. He had an impressive gutsy delivery for a 16-year-old and he made a marked impression on me." Graham Nash, then of The Hollies, was also impressed with Reid's talents, and, it's reported, it's thanks to him that Terry and Peter Jay and The Jaywalkers got a record deal with the label 'Columbia,' culminating in the 1967 single 'The Hand Don't Fit the Glove' featuring Terry on lead vocals. It failed to set the charts alight and the band split not long after.

Reid set about establishing himself as a solo act, being managed by impresario and music-producer Mickie Most, but got an offer from Jimmy Page to become the lead singer in a band he wanted to form. When Reid informed Page that he had a support slot to honour for The Stones on their 1969 tour of the US but would make himself available after that, Page said he couldn't wait. So, Reid recommended Page go check out a kick-ass singer by the name of Robert Plant. And that was that. Also turning down lead singer positions in Deep Purple, and The Spencer Davis Group following Steve Winwood's departure from the band, Reid forged ahead with his solo career including the 1973 album 'Seed of Memory' produced by his old pal Graham Nash.

In 2009, prior to an appearance at the Glastonbury Festival, Reid stopped over in Great Yarmouth to check in on his old bandmate Peter Jay who'd returned to the town in the late Sixties/early Seventies to join the family business as a theatre producer, including, in 1979, the purchase of the Hippodrome Circus, which he now runs with his sons Ben and Jack. During his brief stay in Great Yarmouth, Reid put in a performance at one of Peter's venues, 'The Residence' (now known as 'Fallen Angels').

Terry recalled of his reunion with Peter:

"When we went to Yarmouth... saw him, I spent the night, stayed at his house - he had a club at this time that he was running... and we went to see the circus there, that was a lot of fun, and I played a gig at his club for him, and I said, 'come on Pete, get up on the drums. Oh no, no I don't... Well play congas then.’ He played congas."