The year is 1964. The airwaves are thick with the amiable swagger of the Mersey sound, a clean, propulsive tide washing over a generation. And then, a sound rips through the pleasant pop landscape, a jarring, exhilarating noise that suggests a riot breaking out on a wooden staircase. This is The Honeycombs with their debut single, “Have I The Right?”, and it’s less a song and more a carefully controlled sonic explosion. It’s an essential piece of music not just for its chart success—a UK No. 1 and US Top 5—but for the glimpse it offers into the brilliant, bizarre mind of its producer, Joe Meek.
My first encounter with this track wasn’t on a crackling AM dial, but late one night, years ago, through a pair of high-quality studio headphones. The effect was immediate and dizzying. It’s impossible to discuss this single without acknowledging the claustrophobic brilliance of Meek’s RGM Sound studio, which was, famously, his cramped London flat at 304 Holloway Road. Meek, the maverick engineer behind The Tornados’ “Telstar,” treated the recording space not as a neutral vessel but as an instrument itself. The sound is an artifact of his obsession.
The Beat That Launched a Band
The song’s foundation is its astonishing percussive attack. The Honeycombs’ name was a pun on their drummer, Anne ‘Honey’ Lantree, a notable figure at the time as one of the few prominent female drummers in a top-flight beat group. Her muscular, almost military beat provides the backbone. But Meek took it further, radically so. To achieve the track’s iconic, thundering effect, he reportedly had the band members stomp their feet on the wooden staircase outside his control room, recording the sound with an array of microphones fixed with bicycle clips. The result is a sound unlike anything else, a kind of primal, amplified heartbeat that drives the song relentlessly forward.
This thumping percussion is then layered with an immense amount of compression and speed, an unmistakable Meek signature. The whole track is rumored to have been sped up slightly, which contributes to the manic energy and the distinctive, slightly thin, almost anxious quality of Denis D’Ell’s lead vocal. D’Ell’s voice is a marvel of strained sincerity, perfectly conveying the song’s lyrical uncertainty: Have I the right to hold you, darling, when I know you want to leave?
Arrangement and Atmosphere
The arrangement of “Have I The Right?” is deceptively simple but executed with savage precision. Songwriters Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley penned the tune, providing a sturdy, catchy framework that Meek then gleefully deconstructed and reassembled. The rhythm section is everything. John Lantree’s bass guitar is a deep, warm anchor against the frantic beat.
Alan Ward’s lead guitar parts cut through the mix like shards of glass. They are bright, trebly, and aggressive, playing sharp, often dissonant fills. During the instrumental break, the guitar engages in a brief, almost tuneless duel with a sharp-sounding keyboard, creating a moment of sonic anarchy that prefigures post-punk by over a decade. It’s a shocking moment of modernist pop in the middle of a British Invasion stomper. This is not the clean chime of a Byrds jingle; it’s a metallic clang.
“This is the sound of pop music being recorded not in a studio, but in an eccentric scientist’s laboratory.”
The uncredited keyboard jabs—often described as electric piano or clavioline—stab into the verses, acting like punctuation marks to D’Ell’s pleadings. These bright, tinny chords create an eerie, almost sci-fi texture, a hallmark of Meek’s production style that makes this 1964 piece of music sound permanently futuristic. The whole atmosphere is drenched in his trademark echo and reverb, giving the impression that the band is playing in a massive, echoing cavern, or perhaps a small room that’s been stretched to its breaking point by sheer volume. It’s this sonic texture that makes it ideal for a music streaming subscription service, where its punchy, compressed sound retains its distinctiveness even at lower bitrates.
The Rise and Fall of the One-Hit Wonder
“Have I The Right?” was released on the Pye label and was The Honeycombs’ debut single. It quickly became their career defining moment. The self-titled debut album, The Honeycombs (released in the US as Here Are the Honeycombs), followed, featuring the hit and a range of other songs written by Howard/Blaikley and Meek. While the group scored a few further minor UK hits and gained significant popularity overseas, particularly in Japan and Sweden, the momentum generated by this blockbuster single never truly returned. Subsequent singles like “Is It Because” and “Eyes” lacked the same raw, percussive shock. The original lineup, featuring rhythm guitarist Martin Murray, saw a change late in 1964, and the group ultimately disbanded by 1967. They were briefly misdirected by an ill-timed international tour, losing ground in the fiercely competitive UK scene just as they should have been cementing their presence.
This track remains their legacy, a lightning-in-a-bottle moment where a band, a revolutionary producer, and a catchy song converged in a tiny flat to create a sound that was absolutely singular.
A Modern Resuscitation
The continued resonance of “Have I The Right?” lies in its immediacy. It captures the frantic energy of 1964 with an almost aggressive fidelity. Imagine driving down a rain-slicked highway at midnight. The city lights blur into streaks of neon. You need a song to match the speed, the tension, and the slight, cinematic desperation of the moment. This is that song. It’s pop music with a gritty underside, a feeling of being pressed right up against the speaker cone.
It also serves as a masterclass in texture for anyone interested in the technical side of the 60s British sound. For a teenager today taking guitar lessons, the simplicity of the main riff is accessible, yet the sound itself—that brittle, overdriven tone—is an education in studio manipulation. Meek’s genius was in making the technically impossible sound thrillingly real. His approach of heavily compressing the sound, pushing all the frequencies into a narrow, loud band, created a high-energy recording that simply jumps out of any playback system. This is why the track sounds so fantastic on a modern system; the dynamics are already maximized. The legacy isn’t just the beat, but the sheer, propulsive noise.
Listening Recommendations
- The Tornados – “Telstar” (1962): Produced by Joe Meek, it shares the same otherworldly, echo-drenched, futurist sonic signature.
- The Dave Clark Five – “Glad All Over” (1963): Features a similarly aggressive, thundering drum sound, though achieved with a cleaner, less compressed approach.
- The Troggs – “Wild Thing” (1966): Possesses the same kind of raw, primitive, and highly compressed energy, leaning into proto-punk aggression.
- The Equals – “Baby Come Back” (1966): Another high-energy, female-drummer-fronted beat group, delivering a relentless, driving pop feel.
- The Fortunes – “You’ve Got Your Troubles” (1965): A contemporary British Invasion group that highlights the contrast between the rough Meek sound and the more polished, harmony-driven pop of the era.
“Have I The Right?” is a reminder that innovation often emerges from constraint. A cramped flat, a few microphones clipped precariously, a group of dedicated players, and a producer who heard music in dimensions others couldn’t perceive. Put it on. Turn it up. Let that massive, stomping drum track pull you into the controlled chaos of Joe Meek’s universe.