Joe Meek first tasted success as a record producer when he created the eerie backdrop for John Leyton’s gothic teen melodrama, Johnny Remember Me, which reached No 1 in the British pop charts in the summer of 1961. A mere six years later, on 3 February 1967, Meek’s name entered the mainstream consciousness in the most darkly dramatic way imaginable, when the news broke that he had killed his landlady, the elderly Violet Shenton, before turning the shotgun on himself.

In the time between, as Darryl Bullock notes with characteristic understatement in his richly detailed biography Love and Fury, the producer’s chaotic, but hugely creative, life was “directed by his passions and obsessions”.

Alongside music, they included spiritualism – he was convinced that he had once communed with his hero, the late Buddy Holly, using a Ouija board – and an abiding fascination with the extraterrestrial. His most famous single, the echoey, atmospheric Telstar by the Tornados, was inspired by the launch of the American satellite of the same name in 1962. It sold more than 5m copies, topping the charts in the UK and the US, and remains the record most associated with his often eccentric sonic signature. He also created one of the first electronic concept albums, I Hear a New World (1960), about life in outer space.

Like many musical outliers, Meek was a misfit who somehow channelled his otherness into commercial success. In a TV interview conducted in 1974, his older brothers, Arthur and Eric, recalled his childhood oddness. Aged 12, he strung microphones across the walls of the family house to record the dawn chorus and assembled his own library of ambient sound effects such as glass being smashed against a wall, a skidding bicycle and his own approximations of the ghostly creaks and howls that punctuated the schlocky horror movies he loved.

Meek’s fondness for what Eric called “weird sounds” carried over into his musical career, which took off in the early 1960s, when he began his ascendancy as Britain’s first successful independent record producer. His studio-cum-sound laboratory was a converted room in a two-storey rented flat above a leather goods shop in north London’s Holloway Road. There, musicians had to negotiate their way across a floor strewn with electric cables and littered with stacked boxes of recording tape. Out of the chaos came a rare gift: the ability to balance experimentation and mainstream acceptance. Meek’s use of overdubbing, sampling, sound effects, echo and distortion was often derided as mere gimmickry by his peers, but is now lauded as visionary. It manifested itself in different ways on songs that ranged in tone from the futuristic pulse of Telstar to the upfront percussive thrust of Have I the Right? by the Honeycombs, which in 1964 became his third No 1 hit.

The creation of that song and several other Meek productions, from the well known to the obscure, is described in some detail in Love and Fury, a work of deep pop cultural archaeology for which the term “exhaustive” barely does justice. Bullock, who died in December 2024, had previously written several authoritative books on the LGBTQ+ community’s influence on popular music, one of which, The Velvet Mafia: The Gay Men Who Ran the Swinging Sixties, provides a fascinating contextual backdrop to this one.

In contrast to several other influential, but closeted, gay music business figures of the time, including the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, Meek was remarkably open about his homosexuality at a stage when it was still prohibited by law. In this book, several musicians recall their surprise at his tentative advances, which tended towards the hopeful rather than the harassing.

Throughout his career, Meek was dogged by depression and often dramatic mood swings, his chummy affability giving way to volcanic explosions of rage when his methods, or his cavalier attitude to royalties, were questioned. In the lengthy index to Love and Fury, there are 39 references to Meek’s “temper”, one of which relates to a recording session that came to an abrupt halt when he fired a starting pistol at an astonished singer who had disobeyed his instruction not to stand so close to the microphone.

In 1963, his life took a darker turn after he was arrested for “importuning for immoral purposes” in a public toilet and he was subsequently the target of several blackmail demands. The psychological fallout, writes Bullock, “saw him thrust back into the closet, a move that would have a disastrous effect on his already fragile psyche”.

By the mid-60s, when the Beatles had dramatically redrawn the parameters of pop, Meek suddenly found himself no longer in demand. His behaviour became increasingly extreme, exacerbated by his use of amphetamines, which soon spiralled into dependence.

The killing rage that led to the death of his landlady, and the taking of his own life seconds afterwards, was precipitated, it later emerged, by an argument over his missing rent book. Bullock acknowledges, but gives scant credence, to the conspiracy theories that ensued, the most enduring being a belief that their deaths were the result of a botched gangland hit ordered by the Krays, with whom he sometimes kept company. Instead, he cites the pathologist’s report, which concluded that the amount of amphetamines in Meek’s system could have produced “symptoms of delusion” that caused him to perceive even those closest to him as potential threats.

The following year, the contents of Meek’s home studio were sold at auction, including the clavioline synthesiser that featured on Telstar. With his characteristic eye for detail, Bullock notes that “most of the electrical items up for grabs, the amplifiers and mixers and tape decks he had created his life’s work with, had their power cables cut”. The dense tangle of wires and cables that covered the upper floors of his Holloway Road flat had defeated the removal men, who had “simply sawed though them”. It seems an oddly fitting metaphor for the brutal severance of a singular life, one touched by genius, but ultimately undone by the explosive volatility that attended it every step of the way. Read it and weep for the doomed Meek. And for Shenton.

• Love and Fury: The Extraordinary Life, Death and Legacy of Joe Meek
by Darryl W Bullock is published by Omnibus Press (£25) To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply