Honey Lantree, who has died aged 75, achieved the unique feat of being the first woman drummer in a pop group to top the British charts as a member of the group the Honeycombs, whose single Have I the Right, a classic of the beat group era, produced by Joe Meek, reached Number One in 1964.
While there were any number of young female singers flourishing in the early 1960s, among them Dusty Springfield and Lulu, beat groups of the day were a strictly a male preserve, and the novelty of the attractive, smiling figure of Honey Lantree, in fashionable beehive hairdo, seated behind a drum kit, was a potent tool for promoting the group in television appearances and newspaper and magazine articles.
Such were the chauvinist attitudes of the day that many queried whether Honey Lantree had actually played on the record at all. “People looked on it as a gimmick,” she once recalled, “but I played on every single track we recorded.”
She was born Anne Margot Lantree on August 28 1943 in Hayes, Middlesex, to Nora (née Gould), a civil servant, and her husband John Lantree, a signwriter, but grew up in Highams Park. Leaving school young Anne worked as an assistant in a hairdressing salon. Her boss, Martin Murray, was the leader of a pop group called the Sheratons that also included Anne Lantree’s brother John, playing bass.
When the band’s drummer suddenly announced that he was quitting, Murray was faced with the problem of replacing him. Anne “Honey” Lantree, as she was soon known, asked if she could have a go on the drum kit, and, proving to be a natural, was immediately drafted into the band.
At the time, the Sheratons had a residency at the Mildmay Tavern in Stoke Newington, where the presence of a female drummer made the group a talking point, resulting in a full house whenever they played.
“When I used to sit there and rehearse I didn’t think, ‘Gosh I’m doing this and I’m a girl’.” Honey Lantree later recalled. “It was only when I went to play in the Mildmay Tavern with the band that it dawned on me, gosh everyone’s looking at me. And that’s when I thought, ‘This hasn’t been done before’.”
Standing in the audience one night were two aspiring songwriters, Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley, who were working as trainees for the BBC. The pair had unusual qualifications for a career in pop music; Howard had studied Social Anthropology at Edinburgh University; Blaikley had studied classics at Wadham College, Oxford.
Taken by the group’s sound, and the novelty of Honey Lantree behind the drum kit, Howard and Blaikley pitched them a handful of their songs, among them Have I the Right.
Murray had arranged an audition with the producer Joe Meek, and in need of original material, the group included the song when they performed for Meek at the tiny flat-cum-recording studio above a leather goods shop in the Holloway Road, where had recorded hits for artists including John Leyton, Heinz and Mike Berry.
Meek was so impressed that he recorded the group on the spot, completing Have I the Right in just three takes. In order to accentuate the jackhammer drumbeat of the song, Meek had the band members stamping their feet in unison on the wooden stairs leading up to the studio, recording the sound with five microphones he had fixed to the banisters with bicycle clips. In addition, a tambourine was beaten directly onto a microphone.
In keeping with his usual practice, Meek also speeded up the recording – to the subsequent chagrin of Dennis D’Ell, the group’s singer, who complained that he was never able to properly reproduce the sound of his voice on stage.
Have I the Right was released in June 1964 on the Pye record label. At the suggestion of Louis Benjamin, the general manager and later chairman, of Pye, the group had by now changed their name from the Sheratons to the catchier Honeycombs, a pun on the drummer’s nickname and beehive hair-do, and Honey Lantree’s and Murray’s tools of the trade.
The record was slow to start selling, until it was picked up by Tony Blackburn on the pirate station Radio Caroline who played it continuously. “Joe Meek told us that the song was ‘a certain Number One’,” Ken Howard later recalled, “but for weeks after its release it was only selling in pathetically small numbers, five or six a day. Then suddenly when I phoned for the day’s figures there was great excitement. ‘It’s done 20,’ we were told. That still didn’t seem very impressive. ‘No,’ they said, ‘20 thousand’.”
The song reached Number One in the UK charts on August 26, two days before Honey Lantree’s 21st birthday, and would remain in the Top 30 for 15 weeks. In America, it peaked at Number Five in the Billboard charts.
It would go on to sell some two million copies around the world, proving fortuitous for all concerned, giving Meek his third, and final, Number One (the other two were Johnny Remember Me by John Leyton and Telstar by The Tornados), and launching Howard and Blaikley, who acted as the group’s managers, on a songwriting career that would include hits for Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich, the Herd, and Lulu, among many others.
The Honeycombs enjoyed further hits produced by Meek with That’s the Way, Is It Because and Something Better Beginning (written by the Kinks’ Ray Davies), and toured extensively in Australia and the Far East, gaining a particularly loyal following in Japan, but disagreements within the group resulted in a split in 1966, and the suicide of Meek the following year ended their recording career.
Honey Lantree married David Coxall, a pensions administrator, and retired from music to raise a family, briefly returning to the stage in the 1980s with a reconstituted version of the Honeycombs, and in 1999 performing Live and Let Die on a compilation album of James Bond themes.
Once, reflecting on her career in music, and asked if she would have done anything differently, Honey Lantree replied: “I wish I’d saved the money …”
She was predeceased by her husband in 2018, and leaves two sons, Matthew and Simon.
Honey Lantree, born August 28 1943, died December 23 2018
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbHLnp6rmaCde6S7ja6iaKeSnsG2rdGinKxnYmV%2BenuPamZpaV%2BdvK%2Bx2Gajmqakp7KmedOrmKKkkqGuu7XNoGSwp52Wu268zqlkqaSRrrKlecOrrKarXZ28r7HYnKammqNk