Joe Meek is the forgotten pioneer of popular music. During the early 1960s he revolutionised pop sounds with a string of chart hits produced independently from a hi-tech studio in an otherwise modest flat above a leather handbag shop in north London. Meek's biggest hit, the otherworldly instrumental Telstar, cut by The Tornados in 1962, was the first British record to go to number one in America.

Poised on the brink of fame and fortune, however, a combination of bad luck, depression and heartbreak caused Meek to shoot and kill his landlady with a shotgun before turning the weapon on himself. Long revered in muso circles, Meek has remained a cult figure since his untimely death on February 3, 1967, aged just 37.

But the tragic-comic story of this gifted, passionate, eccentric and troubled man is about to reach the wider audience it deserves through a biopic, titled Telstar and made by Nick Moran, the British actor best known for playing an East End wide boy in Guy Richie's gangster caper Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

"It all started one drunken night in north London," says Moran, who's looking chipper in his dark suit and black Fred Perry shirt, sitting in an office above Soho's Berwick Street market.

"Me and James (Hicks, Moran's writing partner) were staggering into a taxi on the Holloway Road and we saw the blue plaque at No. 304, which read: Joe Meek Lived, Worked and Died Here'. I've always been a Sixties buff, but I was quite shocked I'd never heard of Joe Meek. I knew nothing about him until James said, Yeah, that mad old poof who lived over that shop, who wrote all those hits and then killed himself.' I thought, that's a good story."

"It was," Moran says, "like being armed with the ultimate cult figure. Just like a lot of people wouldn't know who Joe Orton was, people didn't know who Joe Meek was. It's amazing that there was this whole life-story of a man that only a few people seemed to know about, and they tended to be the musical snobs or the people in the Joe Meek Society, people with a lot of green pens in their breast pockets, if you know what I mean. So that," Moran says, "sowed the seed for the whole thing."

That was in 1995, three years before Lock, Stock, when Moran and Hicks were a pair of under-employed actors. Following their inauspicious introduction to Meek, they spent a year researching and writing a play based on his life that celebrated his achievements but also addressed his closeted homosexuality (then still illegal in Britain), amphetamine addiction, mental health issues and interest in the occult.

Moran recalls, "At the time, I thought, if I write a play and then go and earn three grand doing a Lilt advert I'll be able to put it on in a room over a pub in Earl's Court, like a fringe show."

It ended up being staged as a read-through in a disused pub in Stockwell in south London with the Irish actor Con O'Neill playing Meek and other roles filled by famous faces Moran knew: Jude Law, Kathy Burke and Samantha Morton among them.

Finally, in 2000, Telstar debuted on the West End stage, with O'Neill playing Meek and Moran directing the production financed in its entirety by English entrepreneur and Crystal Palace FC owner Simon Jordan. It was a huge critical and commercial success that saw O'Neill nominated for an Olivier Award and Moran and Hicks securing Best New Play nods from the critics.

Cut to 2007, and Moran, who'd been lured to Hollywood after his star-making turn in Lock, Stock, was sitting in a bar in Los Angeles. Although he'd completed a film script for Telstar a few years before, he was currently on a hiatus from the Joe Meek story. He picks up the story: "My phone rang and it was Simon. He asked me what I was doing.

"I'm about to about to cover myself in latex and prat about as an alien in some American TV sci-fi thing,"

"**** all that,' Simon says, I've spoken to a few people and I've read your Telstar film script. Come home and we'll make the movie.' So I did."

As with the play, Moran once again wrote and directed, Jordan stumped up the financing and O'Neill reprised the lead role. Kevin Spacey signed on to play Meek's straight-laced business partner, with James Corden, Ralf Little, Carl Barat and Justin Hawkins in support.

The film version of the Meek story is an enormously enjoyable knockabout romp that revels in its subject's cheek and chutzpah and recreates the early Sixties in all its camp pop glory, not least with a superb soundtrack featuring a good slice of the Meek back catalogue.

"The best aspects of the play - Con's performance, the rise and fall dramatic structure and some of the dialogue scenes - are all there in the film,"Moran says, "but there's more ambition in the film, because there's more scope for that. Being independently financed we were able to make a fully rounded film that isn't restricted by genre and was made by people who wanted to make a film, as opposed to people who wanted to make a few quid.

" I loved the era of Billy Liar, Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, A Kind of Loving and Whistle Down the Wind. The early John Schlesinger and Karel Reisz movies - that's the best British cinema's ever been. I loved the look and the sound and the manner of the period. So the idea was: "What would Billy Liar's house look like if it was in colour?" Because we've never seen colour in films from that period.

I think it's a cool film,' Moran says. That's a commodity that's difficult to concoct. It's ****ing cool and cool people will want to see it.' The former Lock, Stock star has got good reason to boast. He's done right by Meek. Joe would be proud.

Telstar opens on June 19.