Reluctant Tornados star Heinz

It was composed and produced by a pioneering electronics genius, Joe Meek.

Like its namesake, Joe’s musical satellite also orbited the planet, selling five million copies, and remains to this day one of the best-selling singles of all time.

The twangy instrumental number, Margaret Thatcher’s favourite tune, is intended to evoke the optimism and excitement of a new world based on space travel and mass communications.

Musically, it is a sort of bridge between 1950s Tin Pan Alley, the decade of Doris Day and Mantovani, and the world of the Beatles and Rolling Stones, who erupted into the world’s consciousness later in the Telstar year.

It proved to be an introductory fanfare for the Swinging Sixties.

Maybe the sense comes from hindsight, but there are moments when Telstar, the music version, seems to be screeching off the rails, as though the satellite station was veering out of its trajectory and into anarchy.

If so, then Telstar is indeed prophetic, accurately foretelling not just the way that staid and stuffy old Britain of the 1950s was about to fragment into the decade of free love, drugs and flower power, but also the fate of its creator.

For him, Telstar in the end proved to be a star of ill omen.

The film Telstar, released this week, tells Joe Meek’s story, and it is giving nothing away to say it all ends in tears – specifically bankruptcy, madness, murder, and suicide.

It was almost a price worth paying for the moments of triumph along the way, as Telstar became the first British band number ever to top the US charts.

Nobody will ever be able to repeat that euphoric, epoch-making moment, and Joe Meek was the man who bestrode it.

The great traditions of sex, drugs and rock were also more or less invented in Joe’s makeshift studio in London’s Holloway Road.

Most of the film takes place in this increasingly claustrophobic setting, as the exuberant highs of 1962 degenerate into a more sinister form of mayhem.

There is, though, another strand to the Telstar story, one with strong links to south Essex.

The career of the slightly baffled Heinz Burt counterpoints the madcap destiny of his friend and mentor Joe Meek.

In the film Heinz is played, complete with trademark blonde mop, by JJ Field.

Joe Meek saw himself as a combination of impresario and recording engineer, a sort of British answer to Phil Specter.

He had a burning ambition to lead British pop, then still a backwater, on a quest of world conquest.

He reckoned he had found his ticket when he happened to walk into a grocer’s shop in Southampton and saw the 19 year old with blonde hair slicing bacon at the end of the counter.

Heinz Burt played the bass guitar in an offhand way, but had no real notions of a musical career. There was, however, no refusing Joe Meek, who immediately took Heinz under his wing.

Heinz was installed as a member of Joe’s newly-formed band the Tornados. The band didn’t exactly live up to its name. Their impact was more hiccup than tornado. But somehow, Joe managed to wrangle them a booking on a late-spring tour of seaside resorts led by Billy Fury and John Leyton.

The itinerary included a week at the Odeon Southend, then the town’s leading venue for live entertainment. The Tornados got to appear on stage as a backing group, but weren’t judged strong enough to be given their own slot.

The Tornados were appearing in Great Yarmouth when they received a summons from Joe Meek to head back to London.

He needed their services to record a new number he had just penned. The Tornados raced back from Norfolk, and spent 90 minutes among the mess of cables, blinking lights and mysterious steel boxes that lined Joe’s flat.

Having laid down the basic track, they headed back to Yarmouth in time for the next show.

It was Joe Meek, fiddling and experimenting with his home-made electronics systems, who turned the raw chords of the Tornados into the sound of Telstar, the track that conquered the world.

Overnight, Heinz and the other Tornados found themselves transformed from a bunch of musicians that might as well have been called the Nobodies, to the most listened-to band in the world.

Joe Meek could have exploited the unique sound he created on Telstar by marketing similar tracks with the Tornados. Instead, though, he chose to pour his energies into developing Heinz’s solo career.

Joe saw Heinz as Britain’s answer to Buddy Holly and Elvis rolled into one.

Others were puzzled by his commitment to Heinz, who didn’t seem overly gifted either as an instrumentalist or vocalist.

Only a few people, in those more innocent days, cottoned on to the fact that Joe, a closet homosexual, was in love with Heinz.

Despite the hurdles, Joe did manage to fabricate one hit from Heinz, the Eddie Cochran tribute Just Like Eddie. But Joe and Heinz’s style was already beginning to sound a bit old fashioned as the world tuned to the Beatles, Rolling Stones and the Who.

Heinz, never wholly committed to a musical career, had another distraction, he had fallen in love, with a woman.

Spurned, Joe’s world disintegrated into reclusiveness and madness. Heinz, by contrast, started to take control of his own life.

To start with, he simply walked away from the music business.

He married, set up home in Mayland, on the Blackwater estuary, near Maldon, and found a job at Ford in Dagenham.

Then, as the Sixties came to an end, he took a job at the Echo’s Basildon office as an ad rep. His charm and vestiges of fame ensured that he sold lots of column inches. After four years, he was promoted to advertising manager at the Echo’s sister paper, the Thurrock Gazette.

By now, he had two sons and seemed to be happily settled into anonymity – and Joe Meek was dead. Joe had killed his landlady Violet Shenton and then himself with a shotgun he had confiscated from Heinz.

Joe had flown into a rage and taken the gun from Heinz when he learned he used it to shoot birds. Joe had kept the gun under his bed, along with some cartridges.

As the shotgun had been registered to Heinz, he was questioned by police, before being eliminated from their enquiries. With this all behind him, Heinz seemed in control of his own destiny.

But the years with Joe had bitten him more deeply than he wanted to believe. Already, rock nostalgia was a booming business, and the offers started to come in.

In September 1974, Heinz announced he was returning to the music business. “I came out of show business because there wasn’t the demand for rock, but now it’s well and truly back,” he told an Echo reporter.

But the comeback does not seem to have gone too well. He played a few clubs, and did some provincial panto, sometimes playing on his famous pretty boy looks by acting as the principal boy.

Somewhere along the way, Heinz’s marriage failed. Then in the 1990s, he contracted the debilitating condition motor neurone disease.

Alone and broke he returned to spend the last few months of his life with his mother, Martha, in Hampshire.

When he died on April 7, 2000, he had just £18 to his name.

About 150 mourners attended his funeral at Eastleigh crematorium.

As his coffin slid through the curtains, a familiar tune sounded through the speakers by way of a musical farewell.

Telstar, of course.

That song just got everywhere. Meanwhile, satellite Telstar, oblivious to the extraordinary human and musical drama it had unleashed, continues to circle the Earth in the calm, and silence, of space.