JOE MEEK: I HEAR A NEW WORLD (1960)

1.I Hear A New World
2.Orbit Around The Moon
3.Entry Of The Globbots
4.The Bublight
5.March Of The Dribcots
6.Love Dance Of The Saroos
7.Glob Waterfall
8.Magnetic Field
9.Valley Of The Saroos
10.Dribcot’s Space Boat
11.Disc Dance Of The Globbots
12.Valley Of No Return

All hail the godfather of Space Rock! Joe Meek was a Marching Dribcot embracing the Valley Of No Return. What does that make the rest of us? Bloody useless I’d say. He was also a deranged speed-freak toilet trader with a penchant for svelte young men, who when not adding a dash of strangeness to early 60s pop mediocrity, decided in 1959 to invent the Space Rock Concept Album.

I struggle to describe the sonic terrain of this platter; but perversely, I imagine Pink Floyd’s Saucerful of Secrets being recorded, not by nice sons of Cambridge doctors in posh Abbey Road Studios, but by the odd-looking and wayward son of a West Country farmer in homemade transistorised silver Wellington boots in a muddy 1950s formica kitchen, where all sound effects are produced by the echo-effect of a bath in a cowshed next door (nearly true!).

If Joe Meek had been the product of a later generation and inculcated himself into the tuned-in dayglow 1960s zeitgeist, instead of emerging self-denied into a cheerless, shabby and provincial 1950s, he might have made Syd Barrett look like Herman Hermit. In fact he’d probably disown the rest of humanity because he’d be just too good. Joe Meek holds his hand out across the decades to all sonic renegades, but then pulls it away and blows a big raspberry because actually he knows we’re all a bunch of squirming wannabees. 

If you like primitive ambient soundscapes mixed with melodic Egyptian space trance (Glob Waterfall and Love Dance of the Sarros respectively), and would like to hear what Brian Eno or Lee Perry might have sounded like if they’d had more imagination and time-travelled back to 1959, then buy this cd pronto.