It was the third of February 1967, and Joe Meek was set up for a final mix. Up all night on his diet pills, his Preludin, splicing and editing, Joe felt that it still needed something, some extraordinary sound.

The morning light was blinding, coming through the Holloway Road window, sloped across the mess of cables on the studio floor, and Joe was thinking about Heinz again.

Around the walls were pale rectangles, afterimages, where Joe had taken down the paintings that he'd done, and tried to burn them on his two-bar heater. They were evidence, incriminating imagery. The crying woman, and, Joe's favourite, the little black boys, dancing naked in the dreamy voodoo firelight.

Heinz had been standing with his back against the window. Kneeling in the wires, Joe kissed the singer's cock. The sun through Heinz' white hair was like a halo.

Downstairs, his studio assistant, Patrick Pink, was calling him for breakfast. Joe stamped down and drank the coffee, didn't touch the toast. Knocked back the bitter dregs then went into the kitchen to cremate his personal papers in a dustbin. All he'd say was, "They're not getting these." Eyes filling, he started doggedly into the smoke.

Given a choice of reincarnations, the most perfect thing Joe could imagine was to be the final organ riff of Telstar, rising up into celestial blue, and never coming down.

Joe went upstairs again, and thought about life after death, all of the séances, the magic. Buddy Holly's end predicted, and the iron key placed in a bible, twisted by no earthly hand. The cat in Highgate cemetery that spoke in human tongue. He'd heard a new world.

Sighing, he retrieved the shotgun from beneath the bed.

If he could only find that sound, that ultimate Joe Meek effect, he could wrap up his mortal session, finally get it down, with all the clarity of—of shattering glass.

His landlady arrived at just the wrong time. Mrs Shenton stumbled down the stairs, with threads of woollen smoke still trailing from the distribution pattern in her back. The blast rang in the air. Joe tried imagining it with echo, maybe more compression. Leaned his forehead on the still-warm muzzle, tipped the trigger.

There was the most perfect sound.