Bees Make Honey

Although the pub rock explosion is remembered as a distinctly U.K. -- and, more specifically, London -- based phenomenon, more than a handful of its greatest practitioners actually hailed from considerably further afield. Eggs over Easy and Roogalator's Danny Adler were Americans, the Winkies' Phil Rambow was Canadian, Little Bob Story was French, while Bees Make Honey, one of the most fondly regarded of the genre's originators, was founded on the remains of one of Ireland's most popular showbands, the Alpine Seven. That band's leader, string bassist Barry Richardson, moved to London in the late '60s, performing with both the jazz act the Brian Lemon Trio and a country-rock group Jan & the Southerners. Fellow Alpine Seven members Ruan O'Lochlainn, Deke O'Brien, and Mick Molloy soon joined him in England and, with the lineup completed by American-born drummer Bob Cee, the unnamed quintet settled into a residency alongside Eggs over Easy at the Tally Ho pub in north London. They officially became Bees Make Honey in January 1972, the name was suggested by O'Lochlainn's wife, Jackie. Under the inventive aegis of manager Dave Robinson, whom they shared with both Brinsley Schwarz and, informally, Kilburn & the High Roads, the band graduated to other venues on the fast exploding pub rock circuit; Robinson also oversaw their first recordings, cut at Rockfield Studios in Monmouthshire during 1972. By 1973, Bees Make Honey was widely regarded as the most likely band on the entire scene to make the transition into the big time; they attracted enthusiastic press coverage across the media spectrum and, by summer, the group had signed with EMI. Their first single, "Knee Trembler," followed, but even as the band prepared their debut album, fall's superlative Music Every Night, the...