Drummer behind No 1 hit forever faced claims she was a gimmick, not a musician
In the male-dominated world of 1960s pop music, the boys got to play the instruments and the girls – if they were permitted a role at all – fluttered their eyelids and sang. Honey Lantree, who has died aged 75, was different. With her beehive hair-do and miniskirt, she sported a similar image to singers such as Dusty Springfield and Cilla Black. Yet unlike other female stars of the era, she was to be found not at the microphone but behind the drum kit.
Beating out a pounding rhythm on the Honeycombs’ 1964 hit Have I the Right?, Lantree became the first female drummer to top the charts, and the role model for what remains to this day a minuscule list of female drummers, from Karen Carpenter and Debbi Peterson of the Bangles to Meg White of the White Stripes.
Lantree took up the drums more by accident than design when there was no man available to wield the sticks. ‘‘The group had a male drummer but he was training to be an accountant at night school, which meant he kept missing gigs,’’ she recalled.
‘‘My brother John played bass guitar in the group and I sat down at the drums one day and said, ‘Can I have a go?’ I just took to it and everything went from there.’’
That she was a trailblazer, let alone that she was striking a blow for feminism and girl power, did not occur to her at the time. ‘‘I can look back and appreciate it now,’’ she said half a century later.
‘‘But I didn’t sit there thinking, ‘Gosh, I’m doing this and I’m a girl.’ I never thought about a girl drummer being anything unusual until my first gig. I went on stage and wondered why everybody was looking at me.’’
To her irritation, it was widely assumed that she couldn’t play, and the presence of a pretty girl behind the drum kit was dismissed as a publicity stunt. Most assumed that it wasn’t Lantree who was heard on Have I the Right?, but a session drummer.
‘‘In fact I played on every single track we ever recorded,’’ she recalled. ‘‘It wasn’t a gimmick, but people just wouldn’t believe it.’’
Her bandmates loyally defended her. ‘‘How can it be a gimmick just because we’ve got a girl on drums? Honey plays with us purely and simply because she’s the right drummer for the job,’’ Dennis D’ell, the lead singer, insisted in a 1965 interview.
His protestations were to little avail. Lantree’s gender remained the talking point and media attention concentrated obsessively on her clothes, her hair and her looks rather than her musical ability. ‘‘It was the 1960s and Carnaby Street and all that. You couldn’t help but be part of the look,’’ she reasoned. ‘‘But it was all they talked about.’’
The accusations of gimmickry took their toll. Have I the Right? went to No 1 in the UK in August 1964, two days before Lantree’s 21st birthday, and made the Top 5 in the US. Yet further singles struggled to chart. The Honeycombs were not quite a one-hit wonder, but there was only one further Top 20 entry with 1965’s modest hit That’s the Way.
By 1967 the group had broken up. Lantree attempted to form an all-female group, but was unable to find suitable recruits.
After marrying David Coxall, a pensions administrator, she disappeared from the music scene and spent the next two decades raising a family. Once her children had flown the nest she joined a reformed version of the Honeycombs and toured with the group until the death of D’ell in 2005.
Her husband died earlier last year after a 49-year marriage; she is survived by their two sons, Matthew and Simon.
She was born Anne Margot Lantree in Hayes, west London, to John Lantree, a signwriter, and Nora, a civil servant. Lantree grew up on the London-Essex border. By 1963 she was training as a hairdresser in an east London salon, owned by Martin Murray, who also played guitar in an amateur group called the Sheratons. Murray recruited Lantree’s brother John to the group and she ‘‘followed him around’’ until she too was invited to join.
She played her first gig with the Sheratons at the Mildmay Tavern on Balls Pond Rd in north London. There the group was spotted by Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley, aspiring young songwriters who offered the group their compositions, among them Have I the Right?
The record was produced by Joe Meek at his homemade studio in his flat above a leather-goods store on Holloway Rd, north London, where he had already created No 1 hits for John Leyton (Johnny Remember Me) and The Tornados (Telstar).
It was characteristic of his inventive Heath Robinson approach to record production that the heft of Lantree’s drums was enhanced by the rest of the group stamping out a 4/4 beat on the flat’s wooden stairs, recorded by microphones attached to the bannisters.
Have I the Right? was licensed to Pye Records, which renamed the group the Honeycombs, which may or may not have been an indirect reference to Lantree’s beehive hair. The song hit No 1 in the week of Lantree’s 21st birthday. TV appearances followed on Top of the Pops, Ready Steady Go! and Thank Your Lucky Stars. Inevitably, the cameras focused heavily on the drummer.
Meek produced eight more singles and two albums for the Honeycombs, before he turned a shotgun on himself in 1967, after he had used it to murder his landlady.
That year the Honeycombs called it a day. ‘‘It would have been nice if we could have gone on a little longer but I appreciate what we had,’’ Lantree said. ‘‘My only regret is that I wish I’d saved the money and been more sensible.’’ –