Pieces of their Hearts
THE FIRST MUSIC press conference I ever went to, as a teenage cadet reporter, was in 1965 when three British bands – the Kinks, Manfred Mann and the Honeycombs – flew into Auckland for what was promoted as a beat boom concert.
While the Kinks had the hits and would become rock legends, the only person more senior journalists than me wanted to talk to was Honey Lantree. She was a former Essex hairdresser, and what was considered newsworthy at the time was that she was a female playing in a band, in her case the Honeycombs.
After she’d been asked several times, in only very slightly different ways, how she felt about being
