Grrrrr, come right back – I just can’t bear it.
I’ve got some love and I long to share it!
(0:32-0:40)

Some things just shouldn’t work – for example, the aerodynamics of a bumble bee; OJ Simpson’s defences; Patrick Kielty.

A record with slightly-out-of-tune guitars, vocals that sound like they were recorded with a bucket over the singer’s head and drums that somehow manage to be simultaneously both a yard in front of and a metre behind the beat recorded by a band whose members included a professional hairdresser and produced by an emotionally unstable megalomaniac should definitely be one such thing.

And yet, and yet…  The sum is so extraordinarily greater than its parts – the very thing that makes pop music so wonderful – that we have our second Sublime Moment In Pop.

Have I The Right? was an August 1964 number one for The Honeycombs: beginning life as The Sheratons, the band comprised drummer Ann “Honey” Lantree, lead guitarist Martin Murray (day job – coiffeur), Honey’s older brother John on bass, Alan Ward on rhythm guitar and lead vocalist Dennis D’Ell (born Denis Dalziel).

They were spotted playing in a London pub by the pioneering and unconventional independent producer Joe Meek, who became their manager.  At a later gig as part of their residency at the Mild May Tavern in the East End, they were seen by songwriting team Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley – the closest thing to Stock Aitken Waterman early 60s Britain could offer, the duo wrote hits for Lulu, Petula Clark, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich and their song I’ve Lost You was recorded by someone called Elvis Presley – who sent them back off to Meek with their new song Have I The Right?

The words “troubled” and “genius” might have been struck for Joe Meek, whose life and death have been the source for at least three biographies, a stage play (now being turned into a movie) and a raft of documentaries.  The Tornados were the first British band to top the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in 1962 with the Meek produced and composed Telstar (a record inexplicably chosen by That Bloody Woman as one of her Desert Island Discs).  Meek wrote or produced for artists as diverse as Lonnie Donegan, John Leyton (the number one Johnny Remember Me) and Humphrey Lyttelton while harbouring an unhealthy obsession with Buddy Holly and repressing a gay lifestyle that would not be decriminisalised until 1967 and accepted until much later.

Unable to read or write music, Meek nevertheless produced and/or wrote 40 UK chart hits between 1957 and 1964 creating a style as distinctive as Phil Spector’s Wall Of Sound but via the use of overdubbing, echo, reverb and intense compression rather than the cavalcade of musicians Spector favoured.  Installing The Honeycombs into his three-floor flat/recording studio complex at 304 Holloway Road, Islington (above a “leather goods shop” – it must be a euphemism, though I’m not sure for what), Meek set about crafting what would transpire to be his last big hit.

The band’s USP was its female drummer, so Meek – naturally – set out about burying Honey’s drumming beneath a wall of percussion, handclaps and thumping “bass drums” that were actually a recording of the band members stamping their feet on the staircase of 304 Holloway Road while Meek stood at the same time with one foot in his bath and the other banging out the rhythm on his bathroom’s floorboards, microphone wires trailing the height of the flat to a two-track recorder in a top-floor bedroom.  Compressing the “drums” track to within an inch of its life created a sound that remains unique and beguiling, despite not all band members being quite as adept at keeping steady time as the fragrant Ms. Lantree.  How Honey felt about her drumming going virtually unheard on her band’s number one single is unrecorded.

D’Ell’s vocal technique reminds the listener of Gene Pitney on amphetamines, a double-tracked tremulous vibrato, straining – not always entirely successfully – for some of the chorus’s higher notes.  Murray’s guitar (almost certainly manipulated electronically by Meek during the recording) forever teeters precariously on the brinks of flat and sharp.  The keyboard runs in the verses (played by Ward) represent Meek’s only obvious nod towards his beloved electronica.

Individually, there remains relatively little to commend this recording – the final sound as the track fades out (2:54) is of fingers lifting from a fretboard – but its collective vibrancy stands as a headlong rush through the sort of lyric that simply couldn’t be written today.  If read as a plain love song, long gone are the days when one might first stop to consider whether or not one’s advances might be welcomed; if read as the coded gay rights anthem many believe it to be, that fight has thankfully been won.

But that victory came too late for Meek.  Having been charged with “importuning for immoral purposes” in 1963, Meek was subsequently blackmailed.  In January 1967, police in Suffolk discovered a suitcase containing the mutilated body of Bernard Oliver, an alleged rent boy who was known to have associated with Meek.

His musical career all but over and his mind affected by drugs and the stress of the police investigation, on 3 February 1967 – eight years to the day after Buddy Holly died in a plane crash – Meek murdered his landlady Violet Shenton before turning the shotgun on himself.

Surfing the wave of the British Invasion that overwhelmed America in 1964, The Honeycombs took Have I The Right? to number five in the Billboard chart, lasted a couple more years and managed a handful of further, minor hits on both sides of the Atlantic before disbanding.  Dennis D’Ell died in 2005 but a new version of The Honeycombs, led by Martin Murray as the only original member, still performs in cabaret.  Have I The Right? and D’Ell’s growled introduction to its chorus resonates to this day.

Legend has it that Joe Meek turned down, at various times, the chance to produce Rod Stewart, David Bowie and The Beatles, but the list of those with whom he did work is almost as impressive – Tom Jones, Gene Vincent, Billy Fury, Frankie Vaughan (for whom he produced the legendary lesbian-chic chart-topper Green Door), Shirley Bassey, Tommy Steele…  Today, a blue plaque rightly hangs on the wall of 304 Holloway Road and Meek is recognised for having developed recording techniques that would soon propel The Beach Boys and The Beatles to artistic heights that could not have been reached without his pioneering genius.

This footage of The Honeycombs miming to Have I The Right? is taken from the 1965 film Pop Gear: