Kathe Green: Primrose Hill

There's an irony to Kathe Green's musical career. Everyone knows her voice, but her first album - Run the Length of Your Wildness - is notoriously hard to find.

You know her voice because her father Johnny Green composed and conducted the score for the film of Lionel Bart's Oliver! It turned out that Mark Lester, their Oliver Twist, couldn't sing a note and had to be dubbed. Kathe, already in her mid-twenties, showed her father she could produce a convincing voice for him and got the job.

And if you do come across a copy of her rare first album, the critics agree it's not that good a listen.

Here's Richie Unterburger on All Music:

Strangely scattershot, if fitfully entertaining LP, Run the Length of Your Wildness can't quite make up its mind whether to be pop-folk, Swinging London pop/rock, or middle of the road pop. 

In that respect, as well as in its Baroque orchestral arrangements (which verge on the fruity at times), it's reminiscent of another late-'60s record, Dana Gillespie's Foolish Seasons - not surprising, as Wayne Bickerton produced both albums. 

You can throw in some similarities to a few other British female vocalists of the time straddling the lines between pop and folk, like Marianne Faithfull and (much more distantly) Judith Durham of the Seekers ...

Green did write or co-write much of the material on Run the Length of Your Wildness, and some of it's above average for this orchestrated British pop-folk-rock genre, particularly 'Primrose Hill' and the slightly Donovan-ish 'Promise of Something New.''

Overall, however, it's a little too mushy, and recommended only to serious fans of this particular niche genre.

But it couldn't be more of its era. The title comes from a poem by Green's friend Richard Harris, and the album sleeve has notes by Peter Sellers, Rex Harrison and Simon Dee.

It's so Sixties, there's a song named for a fashionable part of London. So here's Primrose Hill.

And for proof a boy can sing Where is Love?, try Keith Hamshere from the original London production of Oliver!. He even manages to sound angry about things towards the end.