eastlondonhistory.com

Dennis D’Ell was the son of a lorry driver and drew his first wage packet as a railway signalman. But the Stepney schoolboy became a pop star in an era when anyone and everyone could have a pop at the charts. All you needed was a catchy song, a producer and, ideally, a gimmick.

The Honeycombs had a catchy song all right. Forty years later anyone who ever heard it has no problem humming Have I the Right, though we’d challenge you to name a further hit by the London combo. Yet though the group seem archetypal one-hit wonders, they built a career on the distinctive disc which sustained them for 41 years … right up until Dennis’s untimely death on 6 July. They had a producer, the terminally eccentric Joe Meek, whose final act should provide a worrying warning to anyone who has ever asked the neighbours to turn the music down. And they had a gimmick. In the sexually unreconstructed early sixties, the presence of a female drummer, Honey Lantree, was enough to get them TV spots.

Dennis was born Dennis Dalziel (pronounced Dee Ell). After leaving the Sir John Cass Foundation and Redcoat school, Stepney, he took a job on the railways. ‘A couple of the lads thought I could sing,’ he remembered later. ‘They entered me into a local talent contest.’ Meanwhile, London hairdressers Martin Murray and Ann Lantree had formed The Sherabons, with Murray on lead guitar and Lantree on drums. Lantree’s brother John came in on rhythm guitar and Alan Ward on bass, and Dennis was recruited as lead vocalist, simplifying the spelling of his surname to avoid constantly having to correct people who pronounced it wrongly. The Sherabons name was ditched in favour of the more memorable Honeycombs (a mix of Ann Lantree’s nickname and a reference to the beehive hairstyles favoured by women of the day).

The new band began ploughing the live London circuit, and in the new year of 1964 were regularly playing at the Mildmay Tavern in Stoke Newington. In the audience were the songwriting team of Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley, who were looking for a vehicle for a song they had written, Have I the Right?.

The Honeycombs went into the Islington studio of the legendary and eccentric producer Joe Meek. While most producers were white-coated technicians, working in laboratory-like studios for the likes of EMI, Meek had built his own studio over three floors of his flat at 345 Holloway Road. Meek, who was dyslexic and tone deaf, had had a huge hit with the Tornadoes Telstar in 1962, and would go on to produce 245 singles, 45 of them making the Top 50. He was less interested in conventional melodies than unusual and new sounds. For John Leyton’s hit Johnny Remember Me he had the violinists on the stairs, the drummer in the bathroom, and the brass section on the floor below. Constantly experimenting with reverb, echo and electronically generated sounds, Meek made a noise like nobody else. Some of the tricks were lower tech of course. Overdubs on the stomping Have I the Right were accomplished by the Honeycombs stamping their feet in time on the stairs of Number 345.

D’Ell’s delivery was extraordinary, his clipped, staccato vocal perfectly matching the stomping backbeat. The disc was produced in three takes in spring 1964 and the Honeycombs crossed their fingers. The record looked to have missed rather than hit when it was swiftly dropped from the playlist of the Light Programme (which would be reinvented in 1967 as Radio One), but pirate Radio Caroline picked up on the song and it went to Number One in the UK, Australia, South Africa, Japan and Australia, making Number Four in the US.

If Joe Meek was an inspired producer he was less successful as a manager, sending the Honeycombs off to tour Australia just as the record hit the peak of the Hit Parade in Britain. The smiling band with the female drummer were needed to promote follow-ups such as Is It Because?, Eyes and Something Better Beginning but they were on the other side of the planet and the records sunk. A duet between Dennis and Honey, That’s the Way, made Number 12 in 1965.

In 1967, Joe Meek finally snapped. His landlady had been hammering on her ceiling (Meek’s floor) to get him to turn the noise down. Meeting on the stairs, the producer shot first her and then himself.

Dennis D’Ell was to spend the next 40 years as a jobbing musician, in bluesy acts such as the Shuffle Brothers and the Southside Blues Band, and recording a Northern Soul classic in Better Use Your Head (1967). And, right up to the present day, there were periodic appearances by The Honeycombs, at sixties revival nights: usually with Dennis as the sole surviving member. The record the BBC dropped as uncommercial was still drawing audiences four decades later.

Sam Wolman used to scoff when the young tailor’s assistant came into his chemist shop on Brick Lane to buy throat sweets, talking about his dreams of making it big in the music business.
“That was when he was nothing,” remembers the proprietor of Wolman’s with a laugh.
“He worked for a feller, a tailor or presser, off of Brick Lane, and he used to come in here and say he wanted to write songs, to sing songs, and I used to pull his leg and tease him something rotten.
“And then the next thing I knew he was having hit records, he was on Top of the Pops. Well it just goes to show, doesn’t it?”
The young no-hoper was one Leslie Sebastian Charles, but he would become better known to fans of pop music and the movies as Billy Ocean.
Leslie was born on January 21, 1950, in Trinidad. Like many other West Indian families in the Fifties, the Charles’ emigrated to England, in search of work, and their son became an East Ender.
He had his dreams of making it in the music business but, like many others, had to find a day job while working on his performing career. That’s how he ended up working in the Spitalfields rag trade, and supplementing his income with work as a session singer.
But all that changed forever when he scored a brace of hits on the GTO label as a solo artist.
Love Really Hurts Without You charted in 1976 and Red Light Spells Danger followed it into the Top 10 in 1977.
A successful career seemed to beckon but, like so often in the fickle world of the pop charts, the momentum was hard to maintain.
Billy’s subsequent releases struggled for radio play and, between 1980 and 1984, Ocean was absent from the UK charts.
But, with the kind of determination that powers pop longevity, he turned his attention to a bigger target the US charts.
Ocean decamped to America at the turn of the Eighties and had a string of successes in the US R&B chart. Then he broke into the mainstream US charts and the hits crossed the Atlantic to make it big in Britain too.

Caribbean Queen (No More Love On The Run) was Ocean’s first national US pop Number 1, and it swiftly became an enormous hit in Britain.
He followed the million-selling 1984 single with There’ll Be Sad Songs (To Make You Cry) in 1986 and Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car two years after that.
It was a dazzling period of chart success, with both records going to Number 1 in the States as well as being huge hits over here.
Suddenly continued the astonishing run of successes, but Billy hit his UK high point in 1986 with another huge Number 1 hit. When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going was the theme song to the smash-hit film The Jewel Of The Nile, starring Michael Douglas.
The video featured Douglas and co-stars Kathleen Turner and Danny de Vito dancing with Ocean, with the quartet dressed in white tuxedos.
Chart success in the UK started to wane once more but Billy, with the canny business sense that had seen him kick-start his career in the States, was one step ahead.
He had released Caribbean Queen in Africa as African Queen and on the Continent as European Queen, each version having specially-rewritten lyrics tailored to its new market!
Just like the old days in the Brick Lane tailors, he was cutting his material to fit. Both versions were just as successful as the original, and it was to the European dance market that the singer now turned his attentions.
Today, Billy is much more a force on the European music scene, though When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going was covered by Boyzone and became a Number 1 for the second time around.
As sceptical Spitalfields pharmacist Sam said: “It just goes to show…”
With thanks to This Bright Field by William Taylor. £15.99, Methuen Books.

Pop careers have always been fleeting and all too often the stars find themselves out of the limelight without a penny to show for their brief taste of fame.
But there can’t be too many people who find themselves labelled a has-been at 18, after many successful years in the music business.
East End girl Helen Shapiro was always a precocious talent. It was March 1961 when the 14-year-old schoolgirl went straight to the top of the charts with the appropriately titled Don’t Treat Me Like A Child.
It was the beginning of a crazy career that saw her topping the bill at the London Palladium before getting home to bed in time to be at her school desk the next morning.
Most people couldn’t believe that the astonishingly deep and full voice was that of a schoolgirl – indeed many disc jockeys thought that it was actually a man singing!
Helen, the daughter of a Jewish tailor, swiftly followed that hit with two Number One singles, including her best known song Walking Back To Happiness.
Brief career
It was probably inevitable that Helen’s career would be as short as it was. She occupied that brief period between the late-1950s invasion of the British charts by American rockers Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochrane and the rest, and the UK response of Beat Music in the early 1960s.
It was a time when Billy Fury, Cliff Richard and Rory Storm ruled the charts. But most were swept away by the boom in guitar groups which lay just around the corner.
Shapiro appeared on a bill with an unknown Mersey band called The Beatles in 1963 and could already see the writing on the wall.
“That was the point when I thought: ‘Uh oh, something is changing,’” remembered Helen.
“The novelty thing was wearing off. The thing that really did it was the whole idea of groups. The majority of demonstrative record buyers were girls, and they went for the fellas. The Beatles upsurge was down to them.”

The irony was that Helen was still younger than the teenagers who were taking her place and had grown up being inspired by just the same artists.
“When I was 10, Elvis Presley was the coming thing, followed by Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers, then Paul Anka and Neil Sedaka,” she said.
But Britain’s initial answer to rock and roll was very different to Elvis’ and Eddie Cochrane’s take on Black Rhythm and Blues. Like John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Helen’s first musical efforts were in the skiffle music taken into the charts by the likes of Lonnie Donegan.
Skiffle stars
At the age of just 10, Helen and her brother Ron formed a band with another East End star of the future.
“Our group included Marc Bolan, who was nine and lived down the road,” she remembered.
“He was called Mark Feld then and was very chubby and very into Cliff.”
Helen’s break came when she caught the attention of legendary Columbia A&R man Norrie Paramor, who had already worked with The Shadows and Adam Faith.
It started a fantastic, but brief, run of success for the East End girl.
Like so many others, when it was over, she was left with nothing and in the Nineties embarked on a fight with EMI, which was still paying her a derisory farthing-per-record royalty.
Today, still only in her early fifties, Helen is in the middle of a successful second career, touring as a singer with Cliff Richard and jazz stalwart Humphrey Lyttelton, releasing religious and devotional records and acting in the theatre.
“I’ve finally come of age,” she said.
“I’m more contented than I’ve ever been and would never swap the life I have now for the pressures of my teens.”
For East End schoolgirl Helen, it has been a long,
but satisfying, walk back to happiness.

THE East End has play-ed its part in the history of rock and roll.
From the Small Faces and Helen Shapiro, to enigmatic Fleetwood Mac guitar virtuoso Peter Green, The The main man Matt Johnson and bass guitar guru Jah Wobble, cockney talent has spanned five decades of pop music.
But of all the larger than life figures emanating from Tower Hamlets none was larger, or more infamous, than the manager who made Led Zeppelin the biggest band on the planet – Peter Grant.
Born into a broken – and painfully poor – Bethnal Green home on 5 April 1935, Grant had to provide for himself from an early age.
He left school at 14 to work in a sheet metal factory, swiftly moving on to become a runner for the newspapers on Fleet Street. It was the start of a series of colourful jobs.
After National Service in the Army, Grant returned to the East End, turning his enormous 250lb bulk to his advantage by fighting as a professional wrestler and appearing in a film as a double for king-size actor Robert Morley.
It was the late 50s and dance halls were giving way to rock and roll. Grant began arranging concerts for visiting rockers such as Gene Vincent, the Everly Brothers and Chuck Berry, and honed his organisational skills as one of Britain’s first real tour managers.
Until now, the bookers had sat in their London offices while the bands hiked up and down the A1 in tatty old vans. Grant broke the mould by travelling with them, making sure they arrived on time, arranging their itineraries and, vitally, ensuring they got paid.
Native talent
As the 1960s drew on, native talent was supplanting the American bands and Grant was superbly placed to manage the up-and-coming talent. Working with top producer Mickie Most, Grant took the Animals to America, then came home to manage the Yardbirds and the New Vaudeville Band.
By the late 60s, the hard-nosed cockney had the knowledge and contacts to create the first supergroup. Led Zeppelin started off as an unsuccessful spin-off, the tired dregs of the New Yardbirds. That they became as big as they did was as much down to Grant as to their own musical excellence.

Grant’s power and menace became legendary. At a time when most bands were managed by ex-public schoolboys like the Stones’ Andrew Oldham or the Yardbirds’ Simon Napier-Bell, he brought a streetwise style honed in his tough teenage years in Bethnal Green.
That style consisted of, first and last, looking after his lads. In an era when promoters
took 90 per cent of the gate giving 10 per cent to the band, Grant reversed the odds, making Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page and John Bonham – and himself – rich in the process.
Bootleggers were his pet hate. He was often seen prowling outside gigs in the early seventies with a baseball bat,
confiscating and destroying
the wares of hapless merchandisers outside.
His friend, Mark St John, manager of the Pretty Things, reckoned Grant changed the playing field for groups.
Verbal violence
“He would intimidate the living hell out of people, but only if necessary,” said St John.
“He went in for verbal violence, an explosion of sheer power that stopped just short of physical aggression. That did the trick.”
Grant’s heart went out of the business when his pal John Bonham, the band’s giant drummer, died in 1980.
He decided it was time to retire, but for the boy who had been born into East End poverty, things had certainly changed.
The man who was part manager, part accountant, part fixer, part father and part minder to Led Zeppelin retreated to his Sussex estate to look after his two children and his collection of classic cars.
He died of a heart attack on November 21, 1995.

Lionel Bart’s music ranged from his greatest success, Oliver!, and musicals like Lock Up Your Daughters and Blitz. His songs such as Living Doll, Rock With The Cavemen and Little White Bull gave chart hits to British rock’n’roll stars like Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele. It was a curious hybrid – but it had its roots in East End soil.

Bart was born Lionel Begleiter in Whitechapel in 1930, the 11th child of a Jewish tailor, and it was his childhood that formed his songs. “Oliver! was a strange marriage of the Jewish music of my barmitzvah and the street cries of my childhood,” he recalled. “Fagin’s music was like a Jewish mother hen clucking away!”

It was a colourful background, but one Bart was fond of embellishing still further. Many of his friends talked of his constant rewriting of his childhood, a habit which drove the ghostwriters of his biography to despair.
Certainly, although he never learned to read or write music, there were early signs of musical ability. Aged six, one of the young Lionel’s teachers told his father that the lad was a musical genius, and his proud dad bought him a violin. Lionel soon got bored with the discipline required and dropped his lessons.

Expelled from St Martin’s

At 16, he decided his artistic future lay with painting, and won a scholarship to St Martin’s School of Art. That didn’t last either, though. He was expelled for “mischievousness”, but didn’t regret leaving the lonely life of the artist in his garret. “I like a good mob working around me,” he explained, an esprit de corps that would be fulfilled in the huge musical productions that were to make his name.

One thing he did acquire during his studies was that name. His bus journey from Whitechapel to the West End every day took him past Barts Hospital, and Begleiter reinvented himself as Bart.

After National Service, Bart set up in business with his RAF pal, John Gorman. With a borrowed £50, they started a printing firm in Hackney. But business was never Bart’s forte – this was the man who later sold the million-spinning smash hit Oliver! for a paltry £15,000, and poured in £80,000 of his own cash in 1965 in a vain bid to save the flop musical Twang!!

Tommy Steele and Soho’s 2 I’s

Anyway, music was changing, with big bands giving way to rock’n’roll, and Bart was spending time up West, mixing with young hopefuls like Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard in Soho’s 2 I’s coffee bar. At the same time as he was producing his first stage show, Wally Pone of Soho, which debuted at the Theatre Workshop in Stratford, he was banging out the hits for Britain’s answers to Elvis. It came easily. He claimed to have written Living Doll in six minutes on a Sunday morning – about twice as long as Cliff took to sing it!

But what came easy, went easy too. Bart was hugely generous with his cash, a legacy, he reckoned, of his gambling father. “There were endless arguments about money,” he said. “I hated money and had no respect for it. My attitude was to spend it as I got it.”

By 1972, Bart was bankrupt, with debts of £73,000, and a huge drink problem. What cash hadn’t been ripped off by casual acquaintances had been poured into unsuccessful stage shows. Often, his pals saw the warning signs in his shows long before he could. His friend Noel Coward, on reading the script of his Quasimodo, remarked: “Brilliant dear boy. But were you on drugs when you wrote it?”

But towards the end of his life, attending Alcoholics Anonymous, and with a percentage of the profits from the stage revival of Oliver!, Bart was reconstructing his life. And Cameron Mackintosh, the producer of that revival, made one of the most telling quotes on Bart’s death. “Of all the people in this business who have had ups and downs, Lionel is the least bitter man I’ve ever come across. He regrets it, but he’s never been sour, never vindictive.”

As Fleetwood Mac release their new album The Dance, it is likely to write another multi-million selling chapter in the story of one of the world’s bigg-est bands.
Meanwhile, the musical genius who started the band – and penned their earliest hits – may be settling down to practice the guitar, and reflecting on the millionaire lifestyle he rejected.
Fleetwood Mac founder Peter Green was born Peter Greenbaum in Bethnal Green in October, 1946. One day, one of his brothers bought home a cheap Spanish guitar and – when he tired of it – it was passed on to ten-year-old Peter.
“My brother showed me a few chords and I took off,” he remembered.
His influences were varied – the twanging style of Hank Marvin from the Shadows and some old Jewish songs he learned from his family. But it was the American blues of Muddy Waters and BB King which would have a lasting influence, and turn him into one of the greatest rock guitarists of the Sixties.
Green’s big break
Peter played bass in a variety of East End amateur bands before joining Peter B’s Looners, as lead guitarist, in 1966. There he met Mick Fleetwood, the drummer in Fleetwood Mac till this day.
His big break came just three months later when he joined John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. The band had been favourites for years in the top West End music clubs and such stars as Rod Stewart and Long John Baldry were former members.
Peter’s task was to fill the shoes of the departing lead guitarist – Eric Clapton.
Mayall had already got a replacement but, as he recalled later: “This cocky cockney kid kept coming down and saying: ‘I’m much better than he is!’ He was, so we gave him a go.”
The graffiti round London at the time read “Clapton is God” and the fans took a lot of winning over. But Green’s melancholy voice and haunting blues guitar style got them hooked. He also fitted in well with the rhythm section – Fleetwood and John McVie.

Just a year later, the trio were ready to go it alone but, though Green was the undoubted star, his shyness came to the fore with the choice of band name – Fleetwood Mac.
They made their debut at the Windsor Jazz and Blues Festival in 1967 and just months later in early 1968 were recording their first album.
By now Green was not just a blues hero, he was a pop star too, writing huge hits like Albatross and Black Magic Woman. But even as he first tasted stardom, Green seemed unhappy, uncomfortable with the fame and fortune he was swiftly acquiring.
He began experimenting with LSD and became interested in religion, suggesting to the other band members that they keep the bare minimum of their earnings and give the rest to charity. The others were none too impressed.
With Green seemingly losing his sanity, he left the band in 1970 and became a hermit, rarely seeing his old friends.
McVie recalled: “I prefer to remember before he left. Seeing him upset me too much.”
As the reborn Fleetwood Mac became one of the supergroups of the 70s and 80s, Green kept a low profile.
But after years of silence, he has resummoned the confidence to get back on stage and is, to the relief of his old pals, working on a new album.
“He’s back in the studio,” said Fleetwood. “He’s actually playing again, which is why he’s here on this planet. I do seriously believe he has a magic touch.

It was the early hours of 20 April, 1991 and the people of the picturesque Essex village of Arkesden were woken by flames.
The firefighters fought their way through the charred wreckage of the thatched cottage but it was too late for the occupant.
As Essex firefighter Keith Dunatis told the papers the next day. “As soon as we found him we knew it was Steve Marriott. We all felt sad, we had been fans.”
Thirty years before the Britpop of Oasis and Blur, East End mod band the Small Faces had been the hottest thing in British pop music.
Lead singer Steve Marriott was born in Stepney in 1947, the son of Bill and Kathleen, and he grew up listening to music, as he later related.
“My dad was a pub pianist, which meant he got his drinks free, which was the point. Everybody was singing, everybody was drunk and everyone was happy.”
Music was in his blood and the young Steve started to earn cash by busking around the bus queues of Stepney with his ukelele.
But mum had bigger things in mind for her lad and put him forward for auditions in the stage musical Oliver!, penned by another musical cockney, Lionel Bart.
Steve wasn’t too keen but mum had her way, and he auditioned with a skiffle version of the Buddy Holly hit Oh Boy. Bart recognised the 11-year-old from his routine at East End bus stops and he got the job.
Ambitions
Just a year later Steve made his recording debut, on the Oliver! soundtrack album, singing lead vocals on Consider Yourself, I’d Do Anything and Be Back Soon.
But despite a spell at the Italia Conti stage school in Islington – “I didn’t really act, just played cockney kids, which is what I was anyway,” remembered Steve – his ambitions lay elsewhere. And it all started to fall into place when he bumped into Ronnie Lane in a music store in Manor Park.
Ronnie was a Plaistow boy and was in a band called the Outcasts, with drummer Kenney Jones, from Stepney. But the Outcasts were going nowhere and, with a shared interest in the music of James Brown, Smokey Robinson and Otis Redding, the trio knew they belonged together.
And they had a name when a girlfriend of early band member Jimmy Winston saw the three together and blurted out “Cor, ain’t you got small faces!” The final piece of the jigsaw fitted when keyboard player Ian McLagan joined the band.
Like the rest of the band, he was a diminutive Londoner with a cheeky sense of humour. Like four Artful Dodgers the Small Faces set forth to conquer the charts.
Between 1965 and 1969 the band were rarely out of the charts with hits like Sha La La La Lee, Itchycoo Park and All Or Nothing. The only mod band who were mods themselves, Marriott believes their distinctive sound could only have come from the East End.
“We were a mix of rhythm and blues and music hall. The R&B came from Detroit but the music hall came from Stepney. That’s what Itchycoo Park is about and all that sense of having a drink and having a party.”
But the party had to end. Like so many Sixties bands, the Small Faces didn’t read the small print when they signed their contract and spent most of their careers as megastars on £20 a week.
Steve spent the Seventies and Eighties playing in a variety of pub bands, but on that day in 1991 he had just returned from recording a new album with old musical cohort Peter Frampton. It was going to put them back in the big-time, but a jetlagged Marriott, befuddled by a mix of alcohol and valium, fell asleep with a cigarette burning – and the story of Stepney’s Artful Dodger was over.