GUEST POST Joe Meek and an old case of misattribution

Everyone makes mistakes, says Matthew Lawrenson. Most are discovered fairly quickly and put right. But sometimes, they drag on for years and years with nobody bothering to correct them, despite all the evidence being available to do so.

Glenda Collins was a 1960s female singer with an ill-starred career. A contemporary of fellow London Jewish vocalist Helen Shapiro (though her recording career started a few months earlier), she released three singles on Decca in 1960-61 which flopped. Released from her contract, she had to find alternative arrangements.

Luckily, independent producer Joe Meek was on the lookout for new talent and signed her up in 1963. Every few months, Glenda would traipse up to Meek's studio on the Holloway Road in Islington to record a new track. Joe would work his famous magic and sell the master to a big label. When her new record was released, Glenda would be given a new haircut and a new outfit and be sent out on a promo tour. Sadly, all eight singles she made with Meek also flopped.

While the likes of HMV and Pye were happy to release Joe Meek's productions – Joe having paid for the recording and mastering himself – they concentrated their promotional efforts on their in-house artists and the likes of Glenda Collins got what was left.

As for why Glenda stayed with Meek for so long, well, apparently her father/manager was very protective. And whatever has been said about Joe’s proclivities, your attractive young daughter was always going to be safe with him. Glenda’s recording career died with Joe, on that infamous day in February 1967 when Meek shot his landlady and then himself.

All this is well-documented music history, so what’s the problem here? Well, Glenda’s penultimate single on HMV was Johnny Loves Me, a cover of the Shelley Fabares hit written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil in 1962. Or was it? The credits on the label said it was.

That’s not the song Glenda recorded, so what gives? What we seem to have here is an example of record company laziness and inattention. As the Meek-made single wasn’t produced in-house, whomever did the admin at HMV in 1965 simply assumed it was Fabares's hit (no. 21 in the USA Cashbox charts). And on every compilation since, Johnny Loves Me by Glenda Collins has been credited to Mann/Weil. 

So, who really did the original version? Here it is.

This was released in 1963 in Sweden by Suzie, a Dutch/Swedish singer produced by songwriter John L. Finneran, an American who’d moved to Scandinavia after his USA music career faltered. And, as you can hear, despite Joe Meek’s much-vaunted innovation, he pretty much copied it for Glenda’s track. 

How he got hold of a song that was probably never released in the UK is not known, but my guess is that another of his artists, Michael Cox (who was huge in Sweden), brought a copy back after touring there with his song Stand Up.

John L. Finneran died in 1973. So if he ever found out his songwriting royalties were being diverted to Mann and Weil, there's not much he could have done about it after that. The small amount of money generated by Glenda’s track would have been dwarfed in 1965 by other, more successful Mann/Weil songs such as, say, You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.

Me, I discovered this by accident a few weeks ago. I contacted the Joe Meek Society about it on the off-chance and they hadn’t realised either. Discogs and 45cat have been contacted and corrections made, and the Performing Rights Society will be informed and all future royalties diverted to the proper channels. 

We'll just have to wait to see if Barry Mann himself gets a letter delivered to his home in Los Angeles informing him that Glenda won’t be making him any more money in the future.

Matthew Lawrenson has been an amateur writer for over 30 years, in the sense that though he has produced hundreds of thousands of words, he has never been paid for a single one.