The Tornados

LOVE AND FURY: TEA CHEST TAPES

Joe Meek’s Tea Chest Tapes show little sign of drying up any time soon and this 5CD boxset presents a wildly varying collection of recordings captured at 304 Holloway Road between 1962-68. Of the 131 tracks featured, 119 are previously unreleased and the hefty, well-illustrated 24-page booklet (written by The Joe Meek Society’s Craig Newton) explains the story behind these audio rarities in detail.

Telstar obviously features heavily and the first three songs on disc one offer an alternate edit of this smash hit alongside a backing track and a pre-overdub original speed version. Kicking off like this should let you know immediately that these

Tea Chest compilations are far more than just a random selection of tracks and actually offer an almost forensic opportunity to explore Joe Meek’s unique creative process.

Disc two focuses on the work that went into The Tornados’ 1963 album Away From It All, while discs three and four document the studio process behind their single recordings. The real nuggets can be found on the final CD, Demos, Unreleased And

Curios, which offers more recordings of Meek’s oddly transfixing vocalising of instrumentals alongside demos, backing tracks and overdubs.

Digging deep into this release unearths a wealth of gems including a quartet of tastily raw tracks with Billy Fury, spaced-out versions of the band’s fourth single Robot and the classically-inclined Pop Art Goes Mozart in various stages of its creation.

A further four variants of Telstar appear across the collection and Ragunboneman, Globetrotter,

Life On Venus and the truly wonderful TV theme

The Scales Of Justice are just a few of the other songs that appear in multiple guises. Each different cut mostly has something new to offer and the legendary producer’s readiness to speed things up at the mastering stage is also addressed once again as songs such as Chasing Moonbeams, Monte Carlo, Swinging Beefeater and many more all now get an airing at their original speed.

While this collection is not really for the casual listener, who may be bamboozled by the duplication of many songs in different forms, it does function as a window into a particularly important period in British pop culture. This is a musical history lesson worthy of sustained study. Craig Brackenridge

CHERRY RED

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