Answer ballads

"A nice but risky idea (...) for Paul Rotheray - best known as Paul Heaton's chief henchman in The Beautiful South - to write a whole suite of songs on behalf of those wronged or vilified in classic song history ... Rotheray's imagination does (...) occasionally evoke some genuinely intriguing responses - Mary Coughlan gives us a wonderfully indignant justification for her appalling behaviour as Kenny Rogers' heartless Lucille, and Dr Hook's Sylvia's Mother develops into a mini soap opera with Jackie Oates as an unrepentant Mrs Avery - much to the rebllious fury of her daughter emotionally and convincingly depicted by Bella Hardy. For this alone it's great fun and for Rotheray - who previously dipped his toe in the British folk maelstrom with the fascinating, if flawed, The Life Of Birds - the saving grace is a succession of decent, ably constructed songs which mostly stand up in their own right, certainly in the hands of his chosen artists given pleasinglysympatheticarrangements".