First female drummer in band to top charts

2 January 2019 — 2:57 pm

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.

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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.
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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.
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The Telegraph, London.

Honey Lantree: August 28, 1943 - December 23, 2018

The Honeycombs



The Honeycombs in Rotterdam, 1964. Left to right: John Lantree, Martin Murray, Honey Lantree, Denis D'Ell and Alan Ward.

The Honeycombs were an English beat/pop group, founded in 1963 in North London, best known for their chart-topping 1964 hit, the million selling "Have I the Right?" The band was also notable for having Honey Lantree on drums, one of the few female drummers in bands at that time.