In the world of popular music, there’s no better way to ensure immortality than by dying young. From Glenn Miller and Buddy Holly to Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain, pop’s young have always died good. Except for Joe Meek. Until recently, when a comedy based on his life opened in the West End, this innovative record producer was ignored by all but the musical cognoscenti.

A new four-CD set spans much of Meek’s creative life, from the mid-1950s to February 3, 1967, when he shot dead his landlady at his North London flat, then turned the shotgun on himself. No one knows why he did it, although some say it was the paranoid culmination of Meek’s Buddy Holly obsession. The day of the murder was the eighth anniversary of the American singer’s death.

The CD collection opens with a taped interview, Joe Remembers, which reveals that, far from being a backwater bumpkin, Meek was an assured and articulate young man. His early desire to beat a path to the bright lights was no different to that of any other provincial homosexual — Brian Epstein, say, or Joe Orton.

Had this record producer learnt his craft with Stockhausen or Pierre Boulez, instead of in a garden shed in a Gloucestershire village, he would surely be regarded as an avant-garde genius rather than a cult oddity. A technological innovator at a time when studio engineers were expected to stick to the manual, an independent record producer in an era when the majors ruled the roost, and gay when it was still illegal, Meek was British rock’n’roll’s first genuine iconoclast. It cost him his mental health, and arguably his life, but what a legacy he left behind.

The earliest indications of his eccentric talent can be heard on trad jazz records such as Humphrey Lyttelton’s Bad Penny Blues and Chris Barber’s Petite Fleur. At a time when trad’s die-hard purists regarded using electricity as a compromise, Meek tweaked and compressed these tracks to within an inch of their lives. Lyttelton initially hated what he heard but mellowed somewhat when Bad Penny Blues hit the Top 20. It presumably caught Paul McCartney’s ear, too, as 12 years later he borrowed its piano intro for the Beatles’ Lady Madonna.

Meek is best remembered for the brief period of chart success he enjoyed in the early 1960s, with songs such as the Tornadoes’ Telstar, Johnny Leyton’s Johnny Remember Me, Heinz’s Just Like Eddie, and the Honeycombs’ Have I the Right. All were produced in the studio that Meek built above a shop on Holloway Road, North London. Sadly, his hits to misses ratio was atrocious, as were many of the records he worked on. For every Telstar or Just Like Eddie there were ten turgid ballads sung by lantern-jawed Lotharios of no fixed talent. The received fan wisdom on Meek is that he made good records sound great. In fact, more often than not, he made crap records sound like they came from outer space. That was the essence of his genius. The raw material was often awful, but the end result was a beautifully crafted sonic sculpture.

Where he excelled was with instrumentals. Even though Beatlemania had wiped every instrumental group apart from the Shadows off the map, Meek, displaying the lack of commercial nous that characterised much of his career, retained a fondness for the form, dousing the efforts of the Moon Trekkers, the Outlaws and the Thunderbolts in his trademark eerie echo. There is a direct line from Meek’s warped masterpiece I Hear a New World to modern exponents of electronica such as Aphex Twin.

It’s a shame that the compilers couldn’t have found room for The Charades’ Dumbhead, a wonderfully gormless piece of girl pop, and a few more cuts from Meek’s final days might have dispelled the myth that he couldn’t move with the times. By 1967 he was no more of an anachronism than Phil Spector, who redeemed himself on solo projects for John Lennon and George Harrison. Had Meek lived, imagine what he might have done with T Rex or Roxy Music.

Joe Meek — Portrait of a Genius is released on Aug 29 on Sanctuary Records