Joe Meek

I was reading one of the C20 Society magazines a while ago, and they were campaigning to save a top sixties office block from the bulldozers. They spoke to the architect who said something to the effect that he didn’t mind what they did to the building, he’d just rather they waited until he was no longer around…

I must admit to understanding what he meant when I found one of my old sleeve designs totally ruined recently. I worked on Joe Meek / I Hear A New World in the early 1990s. It was a fascinating project. Meek had put together this bizarre mostly instrumental space fantasy in stereo (before anyone really knew what stereo was) and trailed it via an EP (one of the rarest records ever) but then never got the rest released (which if you’ve ever heard it you’ll appreciate why). Via a broken twelve inch acetate, and mint EP, RPM were attempting to reconstruct it for CD. For the cover I wanted to get as close to the original EP sleeve as possible. After a lot of work, through an astronomy specialist I tracked down the actual archive shot of the moon they’d used for the EP. I had a print made up and scanned this for the front. The planet in the distance was deliberately offset on the EP, so I did the same, and copied the colours and matched the typography as closely as possible. There had to be some information on the cover and I used a cool Meek logo which I’d devised to run across all the label’s Meek CDs to help collectors know these were high quality reissues.

Recently I was searching for a couple of my sleeves to illustrate something so thought I’d look online and there saw what the current owners of the label had done to all that careful work. It has ended up looking like some cheap budget album. Clearly nobody there cares and it just reinforces what I’ve come to realise, that apart from other designers most people haven’t got a clue, so make sure you enjoy the challenges of each project at the time (and keep a couple of samples back!).