And This Is Me: Britain's Finest Thespians Sing

With And This Is Me, Bob Stanley didn’t quite create the UK equivalent of the famed late 1980s Rhino compilation Golden Throats. That effort focused on jaw-dropping 1960s reinterpretations of standards new and old by US actors not up to (or too up to) the task; there’s a bit of that here in turn from the same general era, but it’s more of an amusing sample of novelty cuts, easy listening dollops and one or two moments of ‘huh, this is pretty good,’ as ever presented with Stanley’s informative liner notes with an eye for the bemusing detail, especially helpful for non-UK audiences. There’s plenty of broad non-Received Pronunciation deliveries throughout from figures like Bernard Cribbins and Norman Wisdom, along with a lot of unexpected smoothness like Ian McShane’s loungey country song “Harry Brown” and, in a truly headspinning turn, Oliver Reed with “Lonely For A Girl.” Wild moments happen, but wonderfully so: Max Bygraves doing a jazzy nursery rhyme revamp with “Three Nice Mice”? Stanley Unwin demonstrating his legendary chewing up of English with “Goldilocks”? You know, why not.