the honeycombs

On This Day… 28th August

/ UK #1s blog / 12 Comments

Welcome one and all to our fourth ‘On This Day’ feature, in which we take a look back at chart-topping history through the records which have made #1. (Please feel free to check out the previous dates that we have covered here, here, and here.)

What, then, were the stories atop the UK singles chart on August 28th through the years…?

Well, way back in 1953 Frankie Laine’s ‘I Believe’ was starting its seventeenth of eighteen weeks at number one. That’s a lot of weeks. Amazingly, no other record in the intervening seventy-two years has managed to equal it. The record set by just the 9th number one single – the charts having begun less than a year earlier – still stands! Interestingly, two of the records that came closest – ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It for You’ (16 weeks, and the record holder for consecutive weeks) and ‘Love Is All Around’ (15 weeks) – were also both at number one on this date. The only other 15-weeker, Drake’s ‘One Dance’, was sadly not at #1 on the 28th August. ‘I Believe’ returned to #1 in the nineties ‘thanks’ to Robson & Jerome, but I won’t bother linking to that.

Eleven years later, and sitting at #1 was the Honeycomb’s stomping ‘Have I the Right?’ It was the third and final chart-topper produced by the visionary Joe Meek. Of the three, this is probably the most traditionally ‘pop’ sounding, though it is still crammed with wacky techniques – such as having the band stomping on the staircase outside his studio – and instruments, such as the slicing synths. It hit the charts in that glorious autumn of ’64, one of the most fertile times for British pop with ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’, ‘You Really Got Me’, ‘I’m Into Something Good’, and this, taking turns on top.

28th August is also the birthday of The Honeycombs’ female drummer, Honey Lantree. One of few women to take up the sticks – I can only think of Karen Carpenter and Meg White – she had been discovered while working as a hairdresser. Her salon manager was in a band, let her try out, and was so impressed that he incorporated Lantree and her brother into his group. She retired from music when the Honeycombs split in 1967 following Meek’s death, but she rejoined them every so often for tours right up until 2005.

August 28th has seen not one, but two versions of ‘I Got You Babe’ sitting at number one in the singles chart. The original was, of course, by Sonny and Cher in 1965…

It was their only #1 as a duo, and Cher’s first of four, spanning thirty-three years. Exactly twenty years later, and a cover by UB40 and Chrissie Hynde was spending its solitary week on top. I gave this record a ‘Meh’ award, and my opinions on it haven’t changed much. It’s still a bit of a slog…

On this day in 1977, and the world still coming to terms with his death aged just forty-two, Elvis Presley’s current single climbed to #1, the first of his record five posthumous chart-toppers. ‘Way Down’ had spent its first two weeks on chart climbing from #46 to #42, so its safe to assume that it wouldn’t have been a massive hit without tragedy striking. However, it would also be wrong to suggest that The King was a spent force at this point in his career, as his previous single ‘Moody Blue’ had made it to #6. In my original post on it, I rejoiced in the fact that fate ensured Elvis’s final single was a rocker, given that he’d spent much of the ’70s releasing schmaltzy ballads. Lyrically, it’s also fitting for the recently deceased star, given that it’s called ‘Way Down’, and compares a woman’s love to prescription drugs… However, fun as the song is, and as lively as Elvis’s perfomance is, the show is stolen by JD Sumner’s astonishingly low closing note.

Finally, on this day in 1993, Culture Beat’s ‘Mr. Vain’ was enjoying its first of four weeks at #1. I bring this to your attention not just because it’s a banger – and it is – but because it was the first chart-topper in forty years not to be released as a 7″ single. Vinyl was on its way out after a century as the medium of choice, to be replaced in the space of twenty years by CDs, then digital downloads, then streaming…

Thanks for joining this delve back through the decades. Next up, we continue our journey through 2001 with a similarly retro reboot…

Behind the #1s – Joe Meek

/ UK #1s blog / 7 Comments

Our last entry in this mini-series takes us from the middle of the road hit-machine that was Norrie Paramor, to somebody slightly more niche.

Not that Robert George ‘Joe’ Meek didn’t have his moments in the spotlight; but his was a chart-career that favoured quantity over quality. The bold over the bland. Crazy over sane. Would one expect anything less from a man whose mother supposedly dressed him as a girl for the first four years of his life…?

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The achievements in his short career are many and varied – he recorded what was potentially the first ever rock opera, and pioneered the idea of independent record distribution – as well as making music that simply didn’t sound like anything else around at the time… There was overdubbing, distortion and sampling (more on which later…) He worked with big acts like Frankie Vaughan, Lonnie Donegan, Chris Barber’s Jazz Band, and a young Tom Jones. But this is the UK #1s blog and we are here, primarily, for the chart-toppers.

And what a trio of chart-toppers. First came the gothic ludicrousness of John Leyton’s ‘Johnny Remember Me’, in which a dead lover calls across the moors to her still-living beau, daring him to even think about forgetting her. Up last came ‘Have I The Right?’, by The Honeycombs, in which Merseybeat was fed through an electronic blender. And sandwiched in between, the perfect weird filling in a bizarre sandwich, sits The Tornado’s ‘Telstar’. I don’t have the time or space to give that record another write-up – just follow the link here for my original post or press play on the video below. Suffice to say that it is one of the very best chart-toppers that we’ve covered so far. Top five? Definitely. Top three? Probably.

‘Telstar’ sold five million copies around the world, topped the UK charts for five weeks and became only the second British chart-topper on the Billboard 100, a full year before the British Invasion truly kicked off. And it, like most of his hits, was recorded above a shop on the Holloway Road in North London. He used something called a Clavioline on the recording – a sort of proto-synthesiser – to create that alien-craft-hovering-right-above-you sound. But Meek wasn’t fussy, or a slave to technology; the ‘drums’ on ‘Have I the Right?’, for example, came from the band stamping on his stairs.

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And as mad, zany and out-there as his hit records were, they can’t compare to Meek’s life story. This is a man who took recording equipment into graveyards to capture the voices of the dead, who held seances with Buddy Holly, who talked to cats, who thought that the photographs in his studio were trying to communicate with him… It’s perhaps not surprising that some found him a little difficult to work with… Meek was a man, it seems, who knew what he liked. He turned down the chance to work with a young David Bowie, and tried to persuade Brian Epstein not to sign The Beatles. He allegedly ran screaming, with his fingers in his ears, from a 16-year old Rod Stewart the second he began to sing…

Which all sounds perfectly absurd and entertaining; but it’s probably not fair to make light of it. Meek had serious troubles with addiction and paranoia in the later years of his life, stemming largely from the fact that he was gay and feared being outed. He was arrested for ‘immoral acts’ in a public toilet in 1963, which signalled the start of his downward spiral. Somewhat touchingly, it seems that he feared being outed to his mother much more than the general public…

On top of this, he faced lawsuits from one his main collaborators over exactly who wrote ‘Have I The Right?’, and from a French composer for the melody from ‘Telstar’ (which meant he never received a single royalty cheque for his biggest hit.) Meek was, in all honesty, a bit of a musical magpie, and seems not to have had much regard for licensing and copyright. He was above all those prosaic concerns – a true artiste. A one-off. No constraints, no boundaries. Which is why he could create a record as ahead of the curve as ‘Telstar’.

But it’s also why, when he heard rumours that every ‘known homosexual’ in London was going to be interviewed over the murder of a young man, a paranoid and desperate Meek shot himself and his innocent landlady. It was 1967 – he was just thirty-seven. He had had nothing to do with the murder, he simple feared the notoriety and possible prison sentence that came with being gay in the sixties. It’s tragic, given that five years later Bowie was dressing up as Ziggy Stardust on Top of The Pops, and that barely fifteen years later Frankie were saying ‘Relax’. Meek was born just that little bit too early.

He died on 3rd February, the same day as his idol, Buddy Holly, and his ghost can still be heard banging about in his old recording studio every year on that date, if you believe in that sort of thing. I’m including the videos for his three chart-toppers below – knock yourselves out – and would recommend Darryl W. Bullock’s book ‘David Bowie Made Me Gay’, in which I first read about unhinged genius of Joe Meek.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuUpOerfT2I

176. ‘Have I the Right?’, by The Honeycombs

/ UK #1s blog / 11 Comments

What’s that? What’s this? Why, it’s the sound of Merseybeat being fed through an electronic blender…

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Have I the Right?, by The Honeycombs (their 1st and only #1)

2 weeks, from 27th August – 10th September 1964

This is a Beat-pop song, with everything in the right place: verses, choruses, a solo. Lyrics about love. Have I the right to hold you, You know I’ve always told you, That we must never, ever part… Some whoah-oahs. But… Something doesn’t sound quite right. And by ‘not quite right’ I don’t mean it sounds ‘wrong’ – far from it. I mean it sounds… completely unique.

Take the drums for a start. They are deep and bouncy, and echoey. The drummer might well be in a completely different room from the rest of the band. In the chorus, as they pound out on every note, they sound like one of those huge Japanese drums, echoing across a misty forest.

Then there are the jabs of electronic keyboard that pierce the end of every line in the verses, like a ray-gun in a cheapo fifties ‘B’-movie. The guitar too is sharp, and clean as a knife; but again there’s something kooky about it, as if you were listening to pop music from a different but not too distant dimension. These two instruments combine on the solo and then, perhaps midway through, you realise what this song reminds you of: the one and only, the era-defining, blast from the future that was ‘Telstar’.

That particular #1 was produced by the legendarily maverick Joe Meek, and so was this. All three of his chart-toppers – this, ‘Telstar’ and John Leyton’s ‘Johnny Remember Me’ – were recorded in his apartment in Islington. All three are unique songs; but all contain recognisable characteristics. They’re drenched in overdubbing, they’re tweaked and tucked, they twang with reverb, and they are just all a little bit weird.

Here, for instance, is just one of the tales from the recording of ‘Have I the Right?’ Those drums I mentioned earlier? They were enhanced, not digitally, but by members of The Honeycombs stamping their feet on the stairs outside the studio. A tambourine was thumped against a microphone. And then, for the finishing touch, the tape was sped up. So much for the misty Japanese forest…

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This record isn’t quite ‘Telstar’ – how could you recreate one of the most innovative and forward-gazing pop songs ever recorded? But it is still a brilliant #1. And in some ways, maybe, this is actually the more impressive feat. Here, Meek had to use his powers in the confines of a ‘regular’ mid-sixties pop song; while on ‘Telstar’ he was allowed to completely let loose… When we get to the chorus – Come right back, I just can’t bear it, I got some love and I need to share it… The lyrics look normal on paper – a little basic even. It’s the sound, and the propulsive, endearingly home-made feel of this song that makes it what it is.

Joe Meek, while never actually featuring in any of his chart-topping hits, was the main star of all three. From the gothic melodrama of ‘Johnny…’, to the space-age transmission of ‘Telstar’, to this piece of electronically blended Merseybeat. And, as is befitting one of pop music’s greatest innovators, he was an extremely eccentric character. His Wikipedia entry ranges from the bizarre (his belief that he could communicate with the dead, including through the meows of a cat), to the sad (he struggled through long-term drug addiction), to the downright tragic (he shot his landlady, and then himself, in 1967 after a depression brought on by the drugs, impending plagiarism lawsuits and the fear that he was about to be outed as gay.)

Under all this, The Honeycombs – understandably – have to play second fiddle. This was their debut hit and, although Meek produced several of their follow-ups, they struggled to match the success of ‘Have I the Right?’ Their second most successful single could only hit #12, and they broke up in 1967 after several line-up changes. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about them is that their drummer and founding member – Honey Lantree – was a woman.

Let us celebrate, then, this progressive sounding chart-topper, ‘Have I the Right?’, with a progressive bunch of people at the helm: a gay producer, a female-drummer, and a bunch of guys stamping on the stairs…

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