Kathe Green

TrackAlbum
Where Is Love? (uncredited) Oliver! OST
Primrose HillRun The Length Of Your Wildness
Run The Length
Of Your Wildness
Run The Length Of Your Wildness
Only A FoolRun The Length Of Your Wildness
Tears In My EyesRun The Length Of Your Wildness
If I Thought You’d Ever
Change Your Mind
Run The Length Of Your Wildness
Part Of YesterdayRun The Length Of Your Wildness
I Love You (Though
You Are Not Here)
Run the Length of Your Wildness
MarianneDie Screaming, Marianne OST
Alone Again And FreeKathe Green

Kathe Green photo 1
Inner sleeve album photo by David Wedgbury

 

Kathe Green Run The Length Of Your Wildness 2

 

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Kathe Green playlist

 

Kathe Green ad 2

 

Contributor: Robert Webb

If you don’t know the name, the chances are you’ll know the voice. Kathe Green provided Mark Lester’s title-character vocals in the 1968 movie Oliver!. Lester, it seems, was unable to hit those high notes. The 24-year-old Californian daughter of the film’s musical director, John Green, could though. Kathe’s father heard her humming the melody to Where Is Love? and asked if she could lip-synch. She had no idea what he meant, but confirmed that, indeed, she could.

“I knew nothing about lip synching,” she told the Mail in the 2000s. “But I did the lot in a week-and-a-half. I got paid about £400.” It wasn’t until the fifth anniversary of the movie, in the early 70s, that Kathe Green was revealed to be Oliver’s singer on celluloid.

But I’m jumping ahead a bit here. Why does Kathe Green deserve a Toppermost post? To be honest, much as I enjoy the Lionel Bart-composed numbers for Oliver!, it is really for an album she made with the help of actor Richard Harris in 1969, Run The Length Of Your Wildness. In a Daily Mirror feature a year earlier, just after Oliver! hit the screens, Harris explained to journalist Don Short how he was promoting a new recording company, Limbridge, and introduced his first discovery, whom he claimed he had spotted in a Vegas nightclub. “Kathe has great talent and she’s going to rocket to the top,” Harris assured Mirror readers. “I hope Richard is right,” his discovery replied.

Kathe moved into a London address shared with Harris’s daughter. She set about writing material for an album and was soon noticed by the right people and signed to Deram records. During the Mirror encounter, Kathe and Harris apparently played their interviewer a song on the guitar they had written together, I Won’t Go Back. It sounded promising, although there is no evidence that it ever made it to the studio. The songs that were recorded which made it onto Run The Length Of Your Wildness include the lush Primrose Hill, with its almost tongue-in-cheek refrain of See you on Tuesday, that’s when I’ll be home again …

… and the magnificent, whirlwind title track, Run The Length Of Your Wildness, which gushes with life-affirming gusto, leaving the listener breathless. The album’s title was provided by Harris, who is quoted in one biography as saying “In life, you have to run the length of your own wildness, testing and examining every foot of the way”. Grab life, in other words; it doesn’t last forever.

Elsewhere on the album is John Cameron’s baroque, reflective If I Thought You’d Ever Change Your Mind – a song covered by others, such as Edwards Hand, Cilla Black and, much later, Agnetha Fältskog – and the sole UK single from Kathe’s album. Tears In My Eyes was also covered by Dana Gillespie the same year – I’m not sure which version came first. Other highlights of this extraordinary record include Only A Fool and Part Of Yesterday.

Backed by a £250,000 advance, Run The Length Of Your Wildness appeared in November 1969 on the Deram label in the UK, with beautiful string arrangements by John Cameron and complete with puffs from the likes of Peter Sellers and Rex Harrison. Billboard reckoned she would go places and warned readers not to ignore “this exciting young singer … not because she has been around the entertainment world for a while. But because she is good!” The NME called her a “brilliant composer”. Melody Maker too gave it the thumbs up. The Daily Record praised her “rich repertoire of unusually haunting songs”.

Despite the heavy praise, Run The Length Of Your Wildness failed to sell and quickly vanished, becoming much sought-after by collectors in the vinyl revival era. Even the CD edition, issued in the early 2000s and also long out of print, now changes hands for more than a pretty penny.

To help promote the LP, Kathe played the London clubs, such as the Pickwick in Great Newport Street, a hangout for the film and music business in the 60s and 70s. With only one album to pull material from, she fleshed out the set with covers of songs like Both Sides Now, Without Him (presumably Nilsson’s Without Her) and Windmills Of Your Mind, all accompanied by pianist John Cameron. What a shame no live recordings were made.

In 1971 she sang Marianne, the theme to the Brit-horror flick Die Screaming, Marianne. It’s a delicate folk ditty written by Hal Shaper and Cyril Ornadel, perfect for the low-budget movie in question but, as far as I know, has never been released on record. It can be found on YouTube.

One more album followed, in 1976, an (in my opinion) uninspired soft-rock collection titled just Kathe Green. But it was misplaced on a Motown subsidiary and it too quickly became core stock in the thrift stores and bargain bins. I’ve included one track here though, the rather nice Alone Again And Free, which was also issued as a single.

Kathe Green is an example of unfulfilled promise. Although these days it sounds very 1969 – and I mean that in a good way – her first album signalled a burgeoning talent from whom more great things could be expected. Sadly, that didn’t happen and Kathe has done little in the way of music since the mid-70s. Still, Run The Length Of Your Wildness, with its soaring strings, crystalline vocals and slightly mad cover art, stands as one of the great lost records of the period.

 

Kathe Green photo 2
From the Daily Mirror feature referred to above

 

Kathe Green ad 1

 

 

Kathe Green biography (Wikipedia)

Robert Webb is a freelance writer and editor. His writing has appeared in The Independent and BBC Online. He is the author of The 100 Greatest Cover Versions and a biography of John Lennon.

Some of Robert’s other topper-posts: Colin Blunstone, Alan Hull, Harry Nilsson, Laura Nyro, Van Dyke Parks, Todd Rundgren, Television, Scott Walker, Bobby Womack

TopperPost #1,138

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