For better and worse, Joe Meek‘s biography sounds a lot like Phil Spector’s. Tone deaf but deeply ambitious, Meek was the maverick, experimental British record producer of the 1960s who used unique sounds to turn out a slew of successful singles, including the first Brit hit to reach number one on the U.S. charts (“Telstar,” by the Tornados). But he was more unhinged than unorthodox and when his career nosedived, depression and poverty were followed by violence. In 1967, Meek used a shotgun to take his landlady’s life and his own. The Documentarian posted the first part of a film called “The Strange Story of Joe Meek.” Watch parts 2-6 here.

An excerpt about Meek from Stoned: A Memoir of London in the 1960s: “Joe Meek was even crazier than Phil Spector. He would use a Ouija board to get in touch with Buddy Holly to find out whether the record was gonna be a hit. He felt the whole of the music industry was against him, that they were out to pinch his ideas–I think because when he used the sound of lightning to start up a record, EMI sent the record to their labs to try and analyse it. There was an evil about Joe. He was known to crawl around graveyards taping cats hissing, he was into the occult. He was a split personality. He believed he was possessed, but had another side that was very polite with a good sense of humor. He was very complicated; when he was young his mother used to dress him in girls’ clothes.”